Creating an Empire of Graveyards? At the Circus With Donald Trump

By Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch

25 January 18

 

ecently, a memory of my son as a small boy came back to me. He was, in those days, terrified of clowns. Something about their strange, mask-like, painted faces unnerved him utterly, chilled him to the bone. To the rest of us, they were comic, but to him -- or so I came to imagine anyway -- they were emanations from hell. 

Those circus memories of long ago seem relevant to me today because, in November 2016, the American electorate, or a near majority of them anyway, chose to send in the clowns.  They voted willingly, knowingly, for the man with that strange orange thing on his head, the result -- we now know, thanks to his daughter -- of voluntary “scalp reduction surgery.”  They voted for the man with the eerily red face, an unearthly shade seldom seen since the perfection of Technicolor.  They voted for the overweight man who reputedly ate little but Big Macs (for fear of being poisoned), while swinging one-handed from a political trapeze with fingers of a particularly contestable size.  They voted for the man who never came across a superlative he couldn’t apply to himself.  Of his first presidential moment, he claimed “the largest audience ever to witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe”; he declared himself “the greatest jobs president that God ever created”; he swore to reporters that he was “the least racist person you have ever interviewed”; he offered his version of modesty by insisting that, “with the exception of the late, great Abraham Lincoln, I can be more presidential than any president that’s ever held this office”; and when his mental state was challenged, he responded that his “two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart,” adding, “I think that [I] would qualify as not smart, but genius... and a very stable genius at that!”

Of course, none of this is news to you, not if you have a screen in your life (or more likely your hand) -- the very definition of twenty-first-century modernity.  In fact, by the time this piece comes out, you’ll undoubtedly have a new set of examples to cite.  After all, these days that essentially is the news: him and any outrageous thing he wants to say and not much else, which means that he is indisputably the greatest, possibly in the history of the universe, when it comes to yanking just about anybody’s chain. 

And you certainly don’t need me to go on about that strange skill of his, since every time he says or tweets anything over the top or grotesque beyond belief, the media’s all over it 24/7. No one, for instance, could doubt that never in our history has the word “shithole” (or, in some cases, “s--hole”) or even “shithouse” been used more frequently than in the wake of the president’s recent wielding of it (or them or one or the other) for unnamed African countries and Haiti in a White House meeting on immigration. That meeting proved an ambush and a half, only spiraling further out of control when, in its wake, the president denied ever using the word “shithole” and was backed by Republican attendees evidently so desperate to curry favor that they pretended they hadn’t heard the word, which, by now, just about everyone on Earth has heard or seen in English or some translation thereof.

Since he rode down that Trump Tower escalator into our political lives in June 2015, this sort of thing and more or less nothing else has largely been “the news.”  It goes without saying -- which won’t stop me from saying it -- that not since Nebuchadnezzar’s words were first scratched onto a cuneiform tablet has more focus been put on the passing words, gestures, and expressions of a single human being. And that's the truest news about the news of this era.  It’s been consumed by a single news hog.  Which means that Donald Trump has already won, no matter what happens, since he continues to be treated as if he were the only three-ring circus in town, as if he were in himself that classic big-top Volkswagen filled to the brim with clowns.

The Imperial Presidency Exposed

Who could deny that much of the attention he’s received has been based on the absurdity, exaggeration, unsettling clownishness of it all, right down to the zany crew of subsidiary clowns who have helped keep him pumped up and cable newsed in the Oval Office?

In early October 2016, I suggested that a certain segment of voters in the white heartland, feeling their backs against the economic wall and the nation in decline -- Donald Trump being our first true declinist candidate (hence that “again” in MAGA) -- was prepared to send a “suicide bomber” into the White House.  And I suggested as well that they were willing to do so even if the ceiling collapsed on them.  (Had I thought of it at the time, I would have added that much of the mainstream media also had its back to the wall with its status and finances in decline, staffs shrinking, and fears rising that it might be eaten alive by social media.  As a result, some of its key players were similarly inclined to escort that suicide bomber Washington-wards, no matter what fell or whom it hit.)

In retrospect, that has, I think, proven an accurate assessment, but like all authors I reserve the right to change my imagery in midstream, which brings me back to my son’s childhood fear of clowns.  At least for me, that now catches the most essential aspect of the age of Trump: its clownishness.  And despite the fact that The Donald is often treated by his opponents as a laughing matter, an absurdity, a jokester (and a joke) in the Oval Office, I don’t mean those clowns, the ones that leave you rolling in the aisles.  I mean my son’s clowns, the death’s-head ones whose absurd versions of the gestures of everyday life leave you chilled to the bone, genuinely afraid.

Donald Trump fits that image exactly because -- though you wouldn’t know it from the usual coverage of him -- he isn’t at all unique (except in the details, except in the exaggeration of it all).  What makes him so clownish, in the sense I’m describing, is that he offers a chillingly exaggerated, wildly fiery-and-furious version of the very imperial American presidency we’ve come to know over these last seven decades: the one that has long ridden herd on a nuclear apocalypse; that killed millions on its journey to nowhere in Southeast Asia in the previous century; that hasn’t been able to stop itself from overseeing more than a quarter-century of war-making -- two wars, to be exact -- in Afghanistan of all places; that, in its pursuit of its never-ending “war” on terror, has made war on so much else as well, turning significant parts of the planet into zones of increasing chaos, failed states, fleeing populations, and wholesale destruction; the one whose “precision” military -- the battle against ISIS in Iraq and Syria has been termed the “most precise campaign in history” -- has helped transform cities from Ramadi and Fallujah to Mosul and Raqqa into landscapes that, in their indiscriminate wreckage, look like Stalingrad after the battle in World War II (and that now is threatening to develop a “precision” version of nuclear war as well); and that has, in this century, overseen the creation of “Saudi America” on a planet in which it was already easy enough to grasp that fossil fuels were doing the kinds of damage to the human environment that nothing short of a giant asteroid or nuclear war might otherwise do.

From his America First policies to his reported desire to see (and make use of) terrorist attacks on this country, the man who has declared climate change a Chinese hoax, threatened to loose “fire and fury like the world has never seen,” described other countries in language once considered unpresidential by presidents who nonetheless treated the very same countries like “shitholes,” and given “his” generals a remarkably free hand to “win” the war on terror is but an eerily clownish version of all that has gone before.  He has, in a sense, ripped away the façade of dignity from the imperial presidency and let us glimpse just what is truly imperial (and imperious) about it.  He continues to show us in new ways quite an old reality: how terrifying a force for destruction, possibly even on a planetary level, U.S. power can be.

And just in case you don’t think that Volkswagen of Trump’s (or maybe I mean that private plane with the golden bathroom fixtures) is filled with other clowns whose acts should similarly chill you to the bone, let’s skip Scott Pruitt as he secretly dismantles the Environmental Protection Agency and so many protections for our health, the Energy Department’s Rick Perry as he embraces the CEOs of Big Energy, that future oil-spill king, the Interior Department’s Ryan Zinke, and the rest of the domestic wrecking crew, and turn instead to “his” generals -- the ones from America’s losing wars -- that President Trump has made ascendant in Washington.

And even then, let’s skip their urge to create smaller, more “usable” nuclear weapons (a process started in the Obama years), or hike the nuclear budget, or redefine ever more situations, including cyber attacks on the U.S., as potential nuclear ones; and let’s skip as well their eagerness, from Niger to Yemen, Libya to Somalia, to expand and heighten the war on terror in an exaggerated version of exactly what we’ve been living through these past 16 years. Let’s concentrate instead on just one place, the ur-location for that war, the country about which those in the Pentagon are no longer speaking of war at all but of “generational struggle”: Afghanistan.

The Graveyard of Empires

Think of it: 28 years after the Soviet army limped out of that infamous “graveyard of empires” at the end of a decade-long struggle in which the U.S. had backed the most extreme groups of Islamic fundamentalists (including a rich young Saudi by the name of Osama bin Laden), 16 years after the U.S. returned to invade and “liberate” Afghanistan, they’re still at it. In December, with Donald Trump lifting various constraints on U.S. military commanders there, the generals were, for instance, sending in the planes.  That month there were more U.S. air strikes -- 455 in a winter period of minimal fighting -- than not just the previous December (65) but December 2012 (about 200) when 100,000 U.S. troops were still in-country.  The phrase of this moment among U.S. military officers in Afghanistan, according to Max Bearak of the Washington Post: “We’re at a turning point.”  Another: “The gloves are off.”  (Admittedly, no U.S. commander has as yet reported seeing “the light at the end of the tunnel,” but don’t rule it out.)

In the meantime, drones of both the armed and unarmed surveillance variety are being reassigned to Afghanistan in rising numbers (as well as more helicopters, ground vehicles, and artillery). With the recent announcement that 1,000 more personnel will soon head for that country, U.S. troop strength continues to grow, bringing the numbers of American advisers, trainers, and Special Operations forces there up to perhaps 15,000 or more (as opposed to the 11,000 or so when Donald Trump entered the Oval Office).

In addition, the military has plans to double the size of Afghanistan’s own special ops forces and triple the size of its air force, while the head of U.S. Central Command, General Joseph Votel, is calling for far more aggressive actions by those American-advised Afghan security forces in the upcoming spring fighting season.  (To put this in perspective, a 2008 U.S. military plan to spend billions of dollars ensuring that the Afghan air force was fully staffed, supplied, trained, and “self-sufficient” by 2015 ended seven years later with it in a “woeful state” of disrepair and near ruin.)  Meanwhile, as part of this ramp-up of operations, the Navy is planning to hire drone-maker General Atomics to fly that company's surveillance drones in Afghanistan in what’s being termed “a ‘surge’ of intelligence, reconnaissance, and surveillance capabilities.”

If all of this sounds faintly familiar to you, I’m not surprised. In fact, if you’ve already stopped paying attention -- as most Americans on the nonexistent “home front” seem to have done when it comes to most of America’s wars of this era -- I just want you to know that I completely understand.  Sixteen repetitive years later, with the Taliban again in control of something close to half of Afghanistan, your response couldn’t be more all-American.  Surges, turning points, more aggressive actions, you’ve heard it all before -- and when it comes to Afghanistan, the odds are that you’ll hear it all again.

And don’t for a moment think that this doesn’t add up to another version of sending in the clowns.

If you don’t believe that retired General James Mattis, Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster, and retired General James Kelly, aka the secretary of defense, the national security adviser, and the White House chief of staff, respectively, are clowns, if you’re still convinced that they’re the “adults” in the Trumpian playroom, check out Afghanistan and think again.  But don’t blame them either.  What else can a clown do, once those giant floppy shoes are on their feet, their faces are painted, and the bulbous red nose is in place, but act the part?  So many years later, they simply can’t imagine another way to think about the world of American war.  They only know what they know.  Give them a horn and they’ll honk it; give them Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” soliloquy and they’ll still honk that horn.

For the last decade and a half, through invasions and occupations, surges and counterinsurgency operations, bombing runs and drone strikes, commando raids and training missions, they and their colleagues in the U.S. high command have helped spread terror movements across significant parts of the planet, while playing a major role in creating a series of failing or failed states across the Greater Middle East and Africa.  They’ve helped uproot whole populations and transform major cities into spectacles of ruin.  Think of this as their twenty-first-century destiny.  They’ve proven to be key actors in what has become an American empire of chaos or perhaps simply an empire of graveyards.

They can’t help themselves.  Forgive them, Father, for they are clowns led by the greatest clownster-in-chief in the history of this country.  Yes, he makes even them uncomfortable because no one can pull the curtains back from the reality of the imperial presidency in quite the way he can.  No one can showcase our grim American world, tweet by outrageous tweet, in quite his fashion.

And yes, it can all look ludicrous as hell, but don’t laugh.  Don’t even think about it.  Not now, not when we’re all at the circus watching those emanations from hell perform. Instead, be chilled -- chilled to the bone.  Absurd as every pratfall may be, it’s distinctly a vision from hell, an all-American vision for the ages.

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Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He is a fellow of the Nation Institute and runs TomDispatch.com. His latest book is Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World. 

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, as well as John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, John Feffer's dystopian novel Splinterlands, Nick Turse's Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead, and Tom Engelhardt's Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.

Washington Gets to Indulge Its Bipartisan Fantasies for 3 More Weeks

By Frank Rich, New York Magazine

25 January 18

Most weeks, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich speaks with contributor Alex Carp about the biggest stories in politics and culture. Today: the fallout from the government shutdown, the possibility that Robert Mueller will question the president, and the politics of the Oscars.

he government shutdown lasted for just under three days, producing CHIP funding, a promise from Mitch McConnell to allow a vote on immigration and DACA, and a resolution reopening the government for three more weeks. What did the shutdown change for each party, and will they make enough progress to avoid the same impasse in February?

Saturday Night Live perfectly encapsulated the state of Trump-era political culture last weekend in a sketch casting Jessica Chastain as the host of a game show titled What Even Matters Anymore? Such is Donald Trump’s skill for upending any national narrative every day or so with some new outrage that no individual incident has any lasting weight or matters long. Of course there was a ton of apocalyptic 24/7 cable coverage of the shutdown and its potential political impact on the November midterms, but, sure enough, Trump’s nuclear-button madness, shitholes, and Stormy Daniels started slipping into our national memory hole as a consequence. Soon the shutdown will be forgotten as well, not least because it didn’t change anything — for either political party, for the Dreamers, for the broad public, or for the 2018 elections.

We are back to Go, and no one is collecting $200. McConnell didn’t actually promise anything on immigration, merely an “intention” to take the matter up in some vaguely evenhanded way. In the unlikely event any immigration bill gets through the Senate, it will surely die in the House anyway. The fast-retreating Chuck Schumer, having been widely panned by his party’s base for taking on a battle he couldn’t win (or didn’t have the will to win), will not make that political mistake again; he has already rescinded the offer to fund a border wall, the big gimme of his ill-fated last-ditch negotiation with Trump. Meanwhile, we must endure endless pieces about Susan Collins, her African “talking stick,” and the moderate Gang of 25 that ostensibly saved the day. (Who really saved the day is whoever convinced Trump to shut up and curb his disruptive tweets while negotiations for the Democrats’ surrender played out over the weekend.) Washington loves the fantasy of bipartisan cooperation, and it will love this one right up until it all falls apart in three weeks, thereby ending the West Virginia senator Joe Manchin’s 15 minutes of camera-hogging fame as the soul of legislative compromise. Never mind that none of this accomplished anything.

According to the most recent Washington Post–ABC News poll, some 86 percent of Americans don’t want the Dreamers thrown out of the country. The date of real interest from a political point of view is not the next shutdown deadline of February 8 but March 5, the last day to renew expiring DACA permits. Already there is a daily stream of immigration deportations percolating just beneath the surface of the daily news torrent.

If 690,000 young immigrants are ripped out of their schools, homes, communities, and workplaces, it is not going to be pretty. Does anyone remember the widespread American outrage when the young boy Elián González was forcibly returned to his father’s custody, and then Cuba, by federal agents in 2000? Multiply that incident by the thousands, and maybe we might have a story that matters, at least for a full week.

After interviewing James Comey and Jeff Sessions, the Mueller investigation reportedly seeks to question Donald Trump — an interview that Roger Stone likens to a “suicide mission.” Do you agree?

Stone is right. Trump is incapable of telling the truth on any subject — he even lied about the rainfall on his Inauguration Day. Even if he listens to his lawyers and tries to be on his best behavior, he will still lie and incriminate himself on the big topics being investigated by Mueller. Already the White House is hedging about his willingness (if any) to be interviewed. I think he’s no more likely to voluntarily appear before Mueller than he is to release his tax returns.

That standoff will be preceded by plenty of other drama. Clearly panic is setting in about Mueller’s pursuit of his obstruction-of-justice inquiry. The news that not only Sessions but the CIA chief Mike Pompeo (among other eyewitnesses to the firings of Comey and Michael Flynn) have been interviewed is not good for the White House.

As always when threatened with legal jeopardy, Trump’s major move is to attack the rule of law and its institutions. That’s why he besmirched the “Mexican heritage” of the U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel during the campaign. So now Trump, Republicans in Congress, and his right-wing press cohort are stepping up their efforts to make the case that the FBI is hopelessly corrupt and engaged in a conspiracy to usurp his presidency. Where this will lead is anyone’s guess; it’s the first time a president has opened fire on the FBI as an institution.

Adding to this effort is Sessions, who lied to Congress about his Russian contacts and, perhaps facing legal battles of his own, is highly motivated to shut down Mueller’s investigation from the inside — as evidenced by the Washington Post report that he wanted to pressure the new FBI director, Chris Wray, to purge top agency officials on the grounds that those jobs should be held by Trump loyalists. One way or another a constitutional showdown will arrive before the Mueller investigation concludes its business, with or without the firing of Mueller himself.

The nominees have been announced for the first Oscars of the post-Weinstein era. How will that play out at the awards?

The big win for the Oscars, many seem to feel, is that James Franco was not nominated for The Disaster Artist, thereby removing the awards-night story line of how he and/or the broadcast would deal with what the Los Angeles Times has characterized as multiple accusations of “inappropriate or sexually exploitative behavior.” What remains unknown is how the Oscars will handle Casey Affleck’s role as Best Actress presenter given his sexual-harassment settlements. That promises greater drama than the announcement of Best Picture.

That said, the focus on what Hollywood celebrities will or will not say about politics during an awards ceremony, or how they may or may not dress in protest mode for the red carpet, is becoming tiresome. We overdosed on that at the Golden Globes. If anyone has something smart or fresh or impassioned to say, say it. Otherwise, it’s all so much dutiful white noise that has no effect on the many serious injustices, whether involving gender or race, that blight the industry.

In the same vein, it might be worthwhile to wean ourselves away from the current Oscars-season obsession of judging films by whether they are politically relevant to this highly charged moment in our history. In my view, Get Out is brilliant, but not every film taking on race deserves extra points for doing so. It would require considerable stretching to say that two of the other better movies of the year, Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread and Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird, score any political points whatsoever. Maybe Wonder Woman was stiffed on its merits — or, more specifically, for what Oscar voters, hardly known for their impeccable taste, consider its merits — rather than as a snub of women filmmakers. In a culture where so little matters, the Oscars, at least, have the luxury of having no obligation to.