Another Day Ending in Y

Our President is lying or fantasizing, probably both. We’ve known that all along, since at least 2015, but now it’s being spoken of more openly. We can believe our adversaries more than we can believe him.

The best explanation for the words that drop from Trump’s mouth is that he tries things out to see what the marks will pick up. It’s not lying or fantasizing, but there’s not a simple word for it. I know that “bullshit” has been suggested in a specialized meaning, but the normal use interferes. It’s complicated by his need to always win, always humiliate his opponents. There is probably an element of fantasizing, but how he is perceived by others is also an important factor.

And then there’s the grift. We now have betting markets to help monetize the flip-flops for his acolytes and family.

It’s a disgusting place to be in, especially when he is in a position to do the damage he’s doing to the world economy.

And to our poor brains. I am so tired. He manufactures a crisis on Friday night and pulls back but leaves the underlying uncertainty on Monday morning, ready for the next weekend cycle.

Then there’s the ongoing depravity. Morning sessions with “Kill them all” Hegseth to tell us that death is good, as is hitting people when they’re down. Phil Klay has an excellent op-ed in the New York Times that summarizes much of it.

What these men don’t seem to realize, or care about, is that their language of brute force represents a fundamental break with American traditions around war going back to the Revolution.

In his addresses to the troops, George Washington would bring up the imagery of violence not as a spectacle to be enjoyed but as horrors to be endured — from “mercenary hirelings fighting in the cause of lawless ambition, rapine and devastation” to those who wished to keep revolutionary America in “bondage and misery.” And when news of British atrocities reached him, Washington wrote that “their wanton cruelty injures rather than benefits their cause; that, with our forbearance, justly secures to us the attachment of all good men.”

This isn’t simply about rhetoric, but about a fundamental view of power and its relationship to violence

That is precisely the kind of world that Franklin Delano Roosevelt told Americans we must arm our allies in Europe to prevent: “A new and terrible era in which the whole world, our hemisphere included, would be run by threats of brute force.”

Without a clear moral or political purpose, we’re left with what the military analyst Franz-Stefan Gady calls the “strike-as-strategy” paradox, in which we substitute tactical prowess for comprehensive strategic design. This tendency, he writes, “is reinforced by a political culture that demands televised displays of military prowess.”

And that seems to be where we’re at. Klay’s op-ed is a nice example of using gender in analyzing the administration. And of the ways the administration is twisting our minds. Read the whole thing.