Kayfabe, Cruelty, Sanewashing, Hierarchy, Musk, Bannon, & Trump

Plus the "New York Times" demonstrates once again that money spent on it is wasted. It is going to be a long, sad, and damaging four years, isn't it?

Plus the "New York Times" demonstrates once again that money spent on it is wasted. It is going to be a long, sad, and damaging four years, isn't it?…

Incompetent “sanewashing” journalistic narratives portraying the incoming Trump II administration as even semi-normal hide the ball from their audiences. Trump’s “populism” is a calculated performance overlaying a chaotic mess, with, right now, the chaos-monkey chaos starting with a first-round fight between Original Trumpists and Trump-Aligned TechBros about whether the hierarchies it will try to reinforce will be those of ethnicity or of wealth…

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Right now we are seeing things like this over on Twitter:

Autism Capital: ‘So basically the right split into two factions, tech right and right right, and the tech right is like "hey we need h-1b visa people to do the jobs," and the right right was like "no you need to hire americans," and the tech right is like "but you guys are retarded," and the right right is like "well you don't train us," and the tech right is like "you can't outtrain being retarded," and while all this was going on we learned some people really don't like Indians…

Elon Musk: ‘That pretty much sums it up. This was eye-opening…

And:

Elon Musk: ‘The reason I'm in America along with so many critical people who built SpaceX, Tesla and hundreds of other companies that made America strong is because of H1B. Take a big step back and FUCK YOURSELF in the face. I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend…

Steve Bannon: ‘Someone please notify “child protective services”—need to do a “wellness check” on this toddler…

And the New York Times is DEFINITELY NOT ON IT. And so I find myself annoyed at its incompetence again. For we have Nate Cohn, earnestly and misleadingly writing:

Nate Cohn: Trump’s Re-election Defines a New Era of American Politics: ‘The Obama-Romney race in 2012 was the last in a familiar pattern in U.S. politics, which has since become defined by Donald Trump’s conservative populism…. Today, Mr. Trump champions the working class, rails against elites, strives to protect American jobs and criticizes traditional U.S. foreign policy…. Many former Obama supporters, from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to Elon Musk, suddenly find themselves near the center of Trump world…. Right-wing parties now embrace the welfare state… argue that elites have used democratic and transnational institutions to advance their own interests and causes…. Their critique has nonetheless been the most potent message in politics…. Trump… seized the mantles of populism, change and the working class, by campaigning on… trade and China, immigration, energy and the excesses of a newly dominant college-educated, liberal, “politically correct” or “woke” left…. Mr. Trump’s conservative populism won the policy debate… <https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/25/upshot/trump-era-republicans-democrats.html>

As if it is not the case that Trump and his people are as eager to cut Medicaid and repeal ObamaCare as they ever were; that Trump’s attachment to Social Security and Medicare is very much a Reaganite fear of touching the “third rail” while Bessent and Musk are as eager as Paul Ryan or George W. Bush ever was to take chunks out of it to finance more tax cuts for the rich; and that Trump’s speeches and remarks do not set out policies, but rather tell lies pleasing to the immediate audience so cans can be kicked down the road until something else—look! Halley’s Comet!—turns up. None of those are mentioned. Instead, the fiction is that this is an incoming president with policy views supported by analysis, rather than a troop of chaos monkeys doing the chaos-monkey thing.

“Sanewashing” is not just a hell of a drug. It’s unprofessional.

So what is really going on with the forthcoming second presidency of Donald Trump? Here is my take this morning.

The best way I find into TrumpWorld this weekend is, I think, to look at Twitter and take it seriously: to note the flame-war verbal fight between two groups: the Original Trumpists and the Trump-Aligned TechBros.

What is the fight about?