Our Very Weird Political Moment

From Josh Marshall:

[there] is a feeling of repetition. Everything I see in our politics right now — or at least at the pinnacle where Donald Trump dominates all the visuals and attention — has a feeling of drift, spectacle and fragmentation. 

Trump’s ballroom epitomizes it — crass, stupid, vulgar, unacceptable and yet ultimately meaningless. It’s the full-size version of having his stacked Kennedy Center board, of which he is the chairman, rename the institution after him. ... 

Then there’s his new hall of presidents, a sick-burn tweet storm embedded on a wall of what remains of the White House. 

These all have the feeling of a man who is bored, tapped out, losing coherence and energy and who others are trying to keep distracted. 

The economy continues to reel and lurch under a weight-vest of tariffs and trade wars. 

Immigrants and brown people of all sorts are still menaced by ICE. The innocent are harassed; the guilty are pardoned. Alleged drug runners, but perhaps mere fishermen and boaters, are blown out of the water from a distance by U.S. Navy drones. 

All of it continues, and the country remains in the throes of a battle for the survival of civic democracy. 

In many ways, the predation remains at its highest point — because much of it has happened, has been consolidated, and people now react on the basis of those things having happened. 

Indeed, we may now be careening toward a war with Venezuela because one of Stephen Miller’s fiendish gambits directed at Mexico has metastasized in the general chaos into a regime change war against Venezuela. 

What is uncanny about this though is that it’s incomplete and in key ways faltering. It’s also terribly unpopular. I cannot think of a single facet of the Trumpism of Practice circa 2025 that has not been rejected by the public at large. Many have been decisively, by overwhelming majorities. And yet there is neither any effort to bring these policies even somewhat into line with public opinion, even center-right public opinion, or move aggressively to take the steps that would make public opinion less immediately relevant. On the contrary, we see the administration taking all these actions that one would expect if Trump had fully consolidated control over the state’s so-called “power ministries” and secured full or fullish control over the state, eliminated real sources of opposition power and so forth. Only he hasn’t. 

You might be saying, well, that’s what you think, Josh. He’s already done X, Y and Z. But it is what I think. And I’m pretty sure I’m right. 

I’m not saying he’s toast or that everything is going to be fine. But he’s far from effectively locking everything down. 

And yet we’re rolling at full speed into what we what we might call North Korean aesthetics of power with triumphal arches that will soon enough be dusty, half-broken relics, renaming everything after the Maximum Leader. It’s all weird. And it is all of this very particular moment. 

In a way, the Susie Wiles drama is part of it. The person at the center of the White House power structure talked openly and disparagingly about the president. And the immediate reaction was for Wiles to issue what can only be called an intentionally absurd denial and for every Cabinet secretary to tweet out a post-struggle session-like emphatic defense of Wiles and pledge of fealty to Trump. 

In fact, by the end of the day Trump said in response to a question about Wiles that he agreed with what she said. This is all deeply weird. But I think it tends to confirm everything I said above, as I noted in the post earlier this week about Wiles. It’s a sign of her power; it is a sign of the government’s weakness and unpopularity. (You don’t say the president is a weirdo who’s done a bunch of terrible things if everyone thinks things are awesome and the present is the future.) 

Finally, it is a sign of an emerging vacuum at the top — at the top of Trump’s body in his head, and at the top of the government in Trump. I’m not saying Trump is sick or dying or declining in cognitive terms. Those things are very possible. He may simply be bored and in need of distractions, which is of a piece with the sense enervation and fragmentation.