Triumph of the Will directed by Homer Simpson

I had heard Trump’s Big Beautiful Birthday Parade was a flop, but omigod watch this two minute clip:

Playing Fortunate Son in this context is . . . the mind reels in search for analogies. Fuck the Police at a cop funeral? White Man in Hammersmith Palais at Stephen Miller’s wedding? No, this can’t even be parodied.

Neither can the “marching” of Our Valiant Troops, who very much to their credit look for all the world like the stoners I went to high school with would have looked like in 1976 if you had tried to hold a precision display of military might with them. Dazed and confused baby!

And all this raises a happy thought: What might save this nation after all is that America is, in the Year of our Lord 2025, just SO fucking lazy. Don’t let those pickup truck commercials fool you: Americans are mailing it in left and right. You know those hardcore “evangelical Christians” who show up for Trump rallies? None of them ever go to church! That’s the extent of their passionate commitment to their personal lord and savior . . . they can’t even be bothered to show up, which as has been noted is 90% of life.

America is getting a failing grade in Giving a Fuck 101, which btw is exactly WHY there are 12 million Mexicans here who Stephen Miller is so desperate to kick out. Who do you think does all the actual work in this country? Cletus at the monster truck rally? Maddie and Connor planning their futures as film critics on TikTok? I thinks not.

Yeah several million people showed up at the No Kings rallies yesterday and that’s great and everything, but showing up at a rally is the I asked ChatGPT to write my term paper of political activism. [ETA: The struck out phrase was just stupid. Showing up to a rally is a good small thing to do, from which bigger things might possibly arise.] But this applies to Trump’s “fanatical” supporters as well: Their passionate devotion to the cult extends to showing up at a rally that’s basically a heavy metal concert for morons (redundant obvi). The revolution will not be televised because people are too busy scrolling their phones to show up.

Commenter Brandunaware sums up the theme here more straightforwardly:

For a long time I have thought that the seeds of Trumpism’s destruction were sown by the fact that nobody competent wants to get anywhere near someone like Donald Trump. He can only attract losers and degenerates, and the only reason he gets the necessary normie support is that a lot of institutions cover for him. The story of Trumpism is the degenerate wing of the Republican party being grown and coddled for years, gaining enough momentum to win the primary, and then our broken media system insisting on treating Trump as if he were normal and covering for/sanewashing him ever since then.

That works for people who barely pay attention to politics but the people who had to work with Trump soon learned what he’s really like, and all of them who were not degenerates turned on him (and he on them in turn.) That leaves Trumpism a movement that at its top is led by the worst. A true kakistocracy. And kakistocracies are bad at things. They can do a lot of damage, but they can’t provide any positive goods for their supporters.

As things unravel and failures mount there will be more opportunities for effective resistance, and more organic resistance by people who may not be put off by Trumpism like we are but still want things to work and want to live in a “normal” country. The inability to put on something as simple as a parade, to plan around weaknesses and work things out in advance, is a very good sign.

This mattered to Trump and he utterly failed. Here’s to more failures to come.

What got Trump elected in large part was a kind of lazy failure to take politics seriously on the part of everyone, including his supporters, his opponents, our political institutions, the media, etc. But this is what may well end up undermining all his chaotic destructive efforts as well. It’s a cult, but it’s a very half-assed at best cult, which is kind of one of those Hegelian contradiction things as Zizek would probably say.

And to be clear, I think it’s a perfectly fine and good thing to show up at an anti-Trump rally. It’s something, and something is better than nothing. It’s like blogging in other words.

. . . this video really nails it: