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?

It is about how serious to take Trump’s embrace of xenophobia and blood-and-soil white American ethnicism. About how much it will matter in shaping the policies of the forthcoming administration.

The second group, Trump-Aligned TechBros, say that they love Trump. But they love immigrants here on H1B visas more. They claim it is because they need foreigners with engineering degrees and experience to do the Silicon Valley jobs. In reality, the key to Trump-Aligned TechBros’ love of H1B visas is not that foreigners with engineering degrees and experience are more competent than native-born engineers but that they offer a better value proposition because they are cheaper. First, they by and large come from places with a lower standard of living than here, and hence a reasonable salary for the native-born looks like an extravagant salary for immigrants. Second, the legal structure of their visa makes them feudal serfs of their employers—they cannot quit and seek a better job in the U.S. without running at least some risk of deportation.

Yes, H1B visa recipients are an enormous boon not just to their immediate employers but to the whole of American society because of the skills they bring and the work they do. But the salivation part comes as much from the fact that they are docile and (relatively) cheap as from their productivity. Without them, Trump-Aligned TechBros would find their spreadsheet projections showing more red numbers, and they might have to invest in training people rather than relying on the taxpayers of India who fund the Indian Institutes of Technology to pay for the training for them.

The first group, the Original Trumpists, approve of Trump because they think his forthcoming solidification of America’s ethnic hierarchy would enable them to dominate and terrorize poor nonwhite immigrants. The second group, Trump-Aligned TechBros, approve of Trump because they thought it would enable them to dominate and extract value from immigrant engineers—plus continue to run their crypto grifts without government interference. Thus they are both interested in hierarchy and domination, but in different ways.

However, there was always a potential conflict. The second group—Trump-Aligned TechBros—had assumed that the steps Trump took to please the first group would be “kayfabe”. (What is “kayfabe”? Extract the vowels to get KFB; reverse the consonants to get BFK; add vowels to get “Be Fake”—it’s internal professional-wrestling code-speak for “don’t tell those we are conning that we are just pretending). That is, the anti-immigrant stuff would be professional-wrestling media theatre. There would be some transsexuals hunted down on the streets (with ample media coverage) (and, yes, that is not kayfabe—that is very real, and a human disaster). There would be some immigrant families broken up (with ample media coverage) (and, yes, that is not kayfabe—that is very real, and a human disaster) as parents were deported and separated in the chaos from their citizen children. The New York Times news reporters would interview people in diners, who would say that it served them right for sneaking in here to have their anchor babies to get status and opportunity that they do not deserve. The op-ed page would talk about how we have to recognize the justified anger of the people in the diners.

But those would be relatively isolated anecdotes of performative cruelty for media purposes. It would not be mass indulgence by the president-elect and his fans in civilization-shaking pervasive sadism. It would not change things to make your VC firm have to mark down the values it promised because the startups it funded would have to give more of the upside surplus to early citizen rather than H1B hires. And for a third-group still on the sidelines—the low-wage labor-employing high-status gentry of the non-cosmopolitan parts of America—it was inconceivable that a new Trump administration might actually change things to make it difficult to run a groundskeeping or a manufacturing business in America without massively raising the prices you charge. The point would be to cow your workers by making them fear the INS so that they would not dare think about unionizing. The point would not be to load your workers in trucks and take them away.

But now the activists in the first group—Original Trump—are trying to establish the principle that it will be more than largely kayfabe media performance theatre. They are trying to establish the principle that mass deportation will be a thing, and that immigration will be reversed on as large a scale as they can manage.

Now we see 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…

Paul Krugman has smart views:

Paul Krugman: MAGA Is Already Eating Its Own. Pass the Popcorn: ‘The two most important factions — what we might call original MAGA, motivated largely by hostility to immigrants, and tech bro MAGA, seeking a free hand for scams low taxes and deregulation — have gone to war, each apparently fearing that they may themselves have been marks rather than in on the con…. News reports… [largely] get the facts… but you don’t get a proper sense of the emotions and the character of the participants unless you read some of the posts on Elon Musk’s X, formerly Twitter….

The benefits from immigration don’t come from immigrants being smarter or having a better work ethic… [but because] immigrants bring skills… relatively scarce among native-born workers. And I mean skills of any kind, including the skills required in many kinds of manual work…. Native-born workers who do have similar skills face increased competition—but their losses, while real, are outweighed by the gains to the much larger number of Americans who aren’t [directly] competing... [because] immigrants… concentrate in very different industries and occupations than native-born workers…. For the most part, immigrants are complements, not substitutes, for native-born workers….

So where is Trump coming down on all this? It has always been clear that he shares the tech bros’ contempt for ordinary Americans, but is he willing to openly sell out his MAGA base? Why, yes…. After Elon Musk told Trump loyalists to fuck themselves in the face, Trump sided with[—] Musk… <https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/maga-is-already-eating-its-own-pass>

It is important, I think, to understand just how Trump is siding with Musk here. And I think a good clue as to how can be found in vice president-elect Elon Musk’s speech about how, when he proposed to his now-wife Usha Chilikuri, he made it clear that she could only be a second-class American:

JD Vance: ‘When we allow newcomers into our American family, we allow them on our terms…. Let me illustrate this…. When I proposed to my wife… I said, “Honey, I come with $120,000 worth of law school debt, and a cemetery plot on a mountainside in Eastern Kentucky.”… Now that cemetery plot in Eastern Kentucky is near my family’s ancestral home…. if, as I hope, my wife and I are eventually laid to rest there, and our kids follow us, there will be seven generations just in that small mountain cemetery plot in eastern Kentucky. Seven generations of people who have fought for this country. Who have built this country. Who have made things in this country. And who would fight and die to protect this country if they were asked to…. That is our homeland…. If this country is going to thrive, our leaders have to remember that America is a nation, and its citizens deserve leaders who put its interests first… <https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/17/us/politics/read-the-transcript-of-jd-vances-convention-speech.html>

One of the key questions about American immigration and assimilation has always been about just how much of the cultural and social markers of Massachusetts Puritanism and Virginia Gentryism you had to acquire in order to become not just an American but a first-class American. I have long been struck by the exchange from the movie The Good Shepherd:

The Good Shepherd: “Let me ask you something... we Italians, we got our families, and we got the church; the Irish, they have the homeland, Jews their tradition; even the ni----s, they got their music. What about you people, Mr. Wilson, what do you have?” “The United States of America. The rest of you are just visiting”… <https://archive.org/details/TheGoodShepherd_201312>.

There is a strong sense in which America has always been the land not of equality, but of liberty tied to hierarchy. The question is, rather, what kind of status hierarchy will there be? In The Good Shepherd, it is one in which the WASP Ascendancy is, in fact, ascendant.

More generally, the question has long been what kind of hierarchy: one of spirituality (whatever current kind of Puritanism is in cultural vogue), one of wealth (on the idea since that opportunity is of course equal here in America, of course wealth = virtue), or one of ethnicity? Trumpism is a negation of the first of these, and is strongly split between the second and a third.

To the extent that it will be any sort of thing—rather than four years of chaos-monkey feces-flinging—it will have to sort that out.

That is, I think, the key to understanding what is about to happen. And that is what the earnest and incompetent sanewashing of a Nate Cohn actively works to keep his readers from recognizing.

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References:

• Cohn, Nate. 2024. "Trump's Re-election Defines a New Era of American Politics." New York Times, December 25. <https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/25/upshot/trump-era-republicans-democrats.html>.

• Krugman, Paul. 2024. "MAGA Is Already Eating Its Own." Krugman Wonks Out, December 29. <https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/maga-is-already-eating-its-own-pass>

• de Niro, Robert. 2006. The Good Shepherd. Universal Pictures. <https://archive.org/details/TheGoodShepherd_201312>.

• Vance, JD. 2024. “Vice Presidential Acceptance Speech at Republican National Convention.” July 18.<https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/17/us/politics/read-the-transcript-of-jd-vances-convention-speech.html>.

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