Get the hook

Trump’s bullshit is ominous, but it’s also Polit-boring

The other day I saw, quite by accident, a few minutes of one of Trump’s increasingly bizarre press conferences. In this appearance, Trump was hoarse and (as he would say) low-energy — limp, soft of voice, distracted. He was pulling “worst of the worst” rap sheets from a pile someone gave him as a prop. The idea was obviously to demonstrate that the violent and sometimes murderous rampages of his ICE and Border Patrol were something the public should appreciate rather than excoriate (as polls showed they were doing), because they were in pursuit of dangerous criminals and they had to seize, imprison, deport and kill a lot of innocent people to get hold of them.

The old tub-o-guts performed his task feebly, flipping through the pile, occasionally holding up a flyer for the press to look at, and muttering things like “international murderer... boy these are rough characters... worst of the worst.” He resembled a run-down old mobster or B-movie Southern sheriff, half in a dream or in the bag.

He’s increasingly like this, I’ve observed — even when he’s being purposefully offensive he looks out of it, like he doesn’t give a shit.

It reminded me that there’s a flip side to the administration’s uniquely brazen lawlessness and disregard for what I guess we still call norms. We’re all aware, and are appalled and worried by, the capacity this shows for criminality and tyranny. And that heedlessness gives the illusion of energy, as does the scope, scale, and insanity of their projects — like the sudden, unannounced wrecking of the East Wing of the White House for Tubby’s tribute to himself, and all the other wreckage their mission of vengeance demands.

But just as they don’t give a shit whether what they’re doing is legal or ethical, they’re also observably past caring whether or not they’re actually getting it over on the rest of us. And for me that creates, despite the frantic energy of their projects, a feeling of drift and desuetude. It’s not like the Pervitin mania of the Nazi soldiers and high command — it’s more like the sloppy heil-Hitler salutes that came into vogue as the war began to go wrong for them.

In a way it’s unnerving, but in another way it’s encouraging.

The listlessness of Tubby’s performances is not how the drift manifests among the rest of the senior staff. Karoline Leavitt still perkily prevaricates; Howard Lutnick still pumps out high-octane optimism; Kevin Hassett still shits out shit-eating grins. When they get together at cabinet meetings that are broadcast to the public, they raven like dogs pushing for a place at their master’s hand; as I have joked, they seem to try and outdo one another in the fulsomeness of their praise.

But it’s all very Kim Jong-un, isn’t it? Does that seem like a high-energy administration to you? And, despite my jokes, their outrageous effusions aren’t really creative — merely desperate. Sometimes this produces absurdities that are piquant or startling, as when Noem lauded Trump for preventing earthquakes with his magnificence. More often than not, though, it’s just tedious. Like get a load of this:

MUNGA? Jesus Christ. It’s like they held a Leader-fluffing contest for developmentally disabled children. Even if you accept that these guys are doing the best they can, the results are absurd, and most of the time not in an amusing way.

Also, everyone can see it. We are constantly assured that low-info voters don’t get how dangerous Trump is to our way of life, and only respond to his show and spectacle. OK. But what does his show and spectacle tell them? My novel theory is that Trump’s plummeting approval ratings come not from popular outrage at his actions, of the sort us nervous nellies constantly feel, but from tedium and contempt.

Who among ordinary voters believes, by now, that Trump will ever deliver anything he has promised “upon taking office” or “in two weeks”? When he says something will be “the greatest” or “the biggest” or “the hottest,” how many still believe it’s so, and how many just remember they’ve heard that bullshit before?

Even his mob’s threats must by now be tedious to normies. When, for example, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York recently reported that more than 90% of the impact of Trump’s tariffs was, contrary to his assertions, borne by American consumers — a finding no one who has visited a supermarket or Amazon.com since January 2025 would find controversial — and Kevin Hassett growled they should be “disciplined, because what they’ve done is they’ve put out a conclusion which has created a lot of news that’s highly partisan,” what’s the impact? Sure, it’s terrible and ominous for democracy that we’ve become so accustomed to this kind of bullying. But it’s also remarkable that your average news consumer will almost certainly see this and, rather than feel anything like alarm at the obvious overreach, simply roll their eyes.

In part, that’s because courts continue to thwart many of Trump’s outrages — and good for them! And even allowing, as we do, that the outrages that judges do allow to slip through are, well, outrageous, the public — which, again, has less sensitivity to the stakes or the damage to democracy than do you or I — has got to have figured out by now that Trump is like an angry drunk trying to fight his way past the bouncers to get back inside the joint that he’s already been thrown out of multiple times. And that is not display of strength.

Maybe I’m wrong, but though I think it’s essential that we keep the threat of Trump’s fascism in front of the voters, I also believe they are more likely to be animated to oppose him and remove his fellow Republicans by disgust than by righteous indignation.