The sorcerer’s apprentice

This is a snippet from a conversation between Jamelle Bouie, Michelle Cottle, and Steven Rattner about Trump firing the head of the BLS for reporting bad economic numbers, and ordering the Texas legislature to gerrymander an extra five seats in the House for Republicans. I note for the sake of both posterity and sanity that either one of these things would by themselves have been the single biggest scandal of almost all previous presidencies. In Trump’s case, it was Thursday.

Bouie:

I think that the perception of economic growth and prosperity is basically the thing that holds up Trump’s public standing. People don’t actually like Trump that much, and you see this in the polling whenever he gets back into power. People really do not like his general thing. But what they accept in this trade-off is Trump may be terrible in X, Y, or Z way, but he brings prosperity. He’s like this totem for wealth, right?

If it turns out that under Trump there is a significant economic slowdown, if there is a recession even, I think that is a moment where the bottom could really fall out from under his administration, his political standing. In the absence of any other compelling thing outside of his particular cult of personality, to keep him buoyed up with the rest of the public, he just doesn’t have that much.

I think this is probably right, and that in the effort to combat the 24/7 gaslighting that is the essence of Trumpism, it’s worth noting that:

(1) Almost surely the single biggest reason why persuadable voters and potential voters voted for Trump last fall was because they believed a Trump presidency would be “good for the economy.”

(2) This belief is pretty much totally irrational, for reasons that require no elaboration to people who are capable of following any sort of even slightly complex argument. . . . An important addendum here is that there seems to be a vague belief among the wretched refuse of our teeming shores that Biden was president during the great economic/pandemic crisis of 2020. This is an example of the widespread tendency to attribute events in a presidential election year to the president who was elected that year.

(3) In re (2), I note that it’s currently estimated that 54% of American adults read below a 6th grade level.

(4) In re (1), perhaps the single biggest reason why marginal voters and potential voters believe Trump is good for the economy is Mark Burnett’s re-invention of this washed up bit of 1980s cultural flotsam via the utter unreality presented as “reality TV,” yclept The Apprentice. This has been remarked on many times, but it’s the kind of fact that should continue to astound and appall us, no matter how often we’re reminded of it. (If I were limited to recommending one article to read about the Trump era, it would be Patrick Radden Keefe’s portrait of Burnett in the New Yorker a few years ago)

The greatest of sorcerers would be the one who would cast a spell on himself to the degree of taking his own phantasmagoria for autonomous apparitions. Might that not be our case?

Novalis, anticipating Baudrillard