Gaping at the Cult of Trump
Trump’s address to Congress was a reminder that the school bullies are now in charge.
Hamilton Nolan
In the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, you can learn that the first animals with backbones evolved during the early Cambrian Period, 525 million years ago. Outside of that museum, few backbones can be found in Washington, DC. As you wonder why, muse on the fact that all of the information on life’s history is contained in the museum’s David H. Koch Hall of Fossils. When Koch died in 2019, he had amassed a fortune of $50 billion. There was a time when that was considered real money. Not any more.
Downtown D.C. has an ambient glow at night, the light from omnipresent office windows suffusing the dark, bland streets. Yesterday evening, after dinnertime, the lights were still on in many of the cheerless, rectangular government office buildings below Independence Avenue, buildings that the new administration just announced are for sale. In an empty first floor office at the Voice of America headquarters, a television pointed towards the empty sidewalk played Fox News. Laura Ingraham’s mute face narrated our demise.
A couple of hours before Trump’s speech to Congress was scheduled to begin, the Mall was deserted. Police had sealed off everything a half mile west of the Capitol Building. They stood in knots every hundred yards, leaning on metal barriers, heavily armed with nothing to do. From that distance, the glowing white Capitol looked like a big mansion, your richest friend’s palace, which you were never allowed to go and play in. You don’t have the door code. You aren’t on the list. You weren’t invited.
A hundred or so protesters huddled on the corner of Constitution Avenue and Third Street, positioned so they could yell at the periodic motorcades of police cars and buses ferrying VIPs to the Capitol. Mostly there were Ukrainians with blue and yellow flags wrapped around their shoulders chanting “Thank you USA/ For standing with Ukraine,” chants that sometimes overlapped with chants of “Donald Is Not King!” from angry locals waving signs about Elon Musk. Their relationship to the members of Congress gathered inside the building was like that of someone trapped at the bottom of a well to the passersby above. A small physical distance, but a vast one for all practical purposes
Another, more formal protest had been organized by the League of Women Voters and other groups on 16th Street, just above Lafayette Square and the White House. The area was named Black Lives Matter Plaza in 2020, when the local government painted BLACK LIVES MATTER in enormous yellow letters down a two-block length of the street. That was less than a week after President Trump had had protesters in the same spot teargassed so that he could stride out there from the White House and pose in front of St. John’s Church holding a Bible that he has never read. Yesterday, the mayor of DC announced that the plaza is going to be painted over, because Republicans in Congress have threatened to withhold funding for the city otherwise. The podium at last night’s protest was placed atop the R in MATTER, a word that will soon be gone.
The speakers at the protest — leaders of respected activist groups, civil rights lawyers, the avatars of pre-2025 liberal normalcy — said all the right things about bolstering democracy and resisting dictatorship and continuing the battle for diversity and equity and inclusion. As they spoke I looked across the street at the nine story facade of the Hay-Adams, the city’s most opulent hotel. Next door is the Chamber of Commerce headquarters, which itself looks like a government building with a far more plush interior. These symbols of capital towered silently over the proceedings. Immovable, unperturbed. Money will wait you out. It has all the time in the world.
As the president of the American Association for People With Disabilities gave an earnest speech about the need to protect disabled people of color in prison, it was hard not to think: Oh boy, everyone here is about to get fucked. The protest checked every “what we should be doing now” box — bringing community members into the streets, speaking out, remaining unswayed in our beliefs, taking action — but it was all playing out in an America where the mood to push the the kid in the wheelchair into the mud and laugh has taken hold. The mean spirit of nihilistic vengeance is momentarily unleashed. We will stuff it back in its box, sooner or later. But not yet.
The cackling little toadies of the school bully had all assembled on one side of the Congressional chambers. The Republican Party has acquired a very Stalinesque vibe. As Trump gave his speech, his swollen head was framed on one side by JD Vance, the stereotypical sniveling ass kisser who laughs too hard at all of the boss’s joke, and on the other side by Mike Johnson, a man who looks like he should have been Hitler’s accountant, nodding along in an exaggerated manner to every idiotic line as if he feared being executed for insufficient enthusiasm at any moment.
The cult of Trump has captured his own speechwriters, who are now clearly incorporating his own bizarre mannerisms into the text of state speeches, so that even when he is reading off of the Teleprompter he is saying that everything he has done Has Never Been Done Before — and May Never Be Done Again! Under Biden, Trump said, inflation was the worst “perhaps in the history of our country. They’re not sure.” This stuff goes into official White House speeches now. Check nothing. Say anything. Lean into dear leader’s fantasies. Make all bad things worse. The Republicans in attendance competed to roar loudest in laughter, to clap hardest as Trump cocked his eyebrow and paused at applause lines, to bare their teeth widest at the most despicable sentences. Those who are not legitimate lunatics were effectively yanking at their collars the whole night through, letting the flop sweat pour down their bodies, hoping they would not be noticed and purged for lack of genuine affinity for Blood and Soil and Death. You say you withdrew from the UN Human Rights Council! Brilliant, sir! Well done, indeed! Please, allow us to hiss and jeer as you read off a list of recently eliminated humanitarian aid programs to Africa! The ridiculousness of America providing modest aid to black people speaks for itself! We all “get it,” sir!
Did you know that there is a Tomahawk missile on display in the National Museum of the American Indian? It’s true. This is America’s power at work — the power to wipe out a population and then repurpose their culture to name weapons to wipe out the next population. We are the world’s greatest machine for building wealth at the expense of everyone else and now we are leaning into that tendency with more naked immodesty than ever before. We want the machine to run in the background with no interruption. In the foreground we have placed a television clown to live in the White House and entertain us all. Folks, look at this ten year old child with brain cancer — we’re making him a Secret Service agent, tonight, with a genuine badge and everything! America loves you, young man, and we dislike your brain cancer although we are eliminating all of the environmental regulations that might have prevented it. And over here, folks — this young man wants to go to West Point. Well guess what, young man: You’re in! Everyone cheer! We are handing out rewards, like a game show, for the rubes! You get a tax cut, and you get a tax cut, and you get a tax cut! And all of the sex criminals and evangelical zealots and money launderers who used their car dealership revenue to get themselves elected stand and cheer.
In response, our unfortunate opposition party harrumphed. Its elderly leaders gripped their canes and slouched on their benches and tried to shape their wrinkles into an expression of disapproval. Some waved signs, and some walked out, and one Congressman was brave enough to get himself ejected, but as a group, as a unified force, there was nothing. For their official response to a two-hour celebration of Fascist Pomp and Circumstance, the Democrats had a former CIA agent decry the fact that Trump is not living up to the hallowed standards of Ronald Reagan, a man deserving of great respect. The Democratic Party is an exhausted and empty shell, a corpse sucked to the very edge of death by moneyed donors, a pale jumble of consulting firms trying to sell unflavored broth at the Gumbo Festival. The president dons a neon suit and prepares for Live Televised Executions of EVIL GANG MEMBERS and the Democrats knit their eyebrows and issue press releases saying “While we all agree that crime is an important issue, the president’s methods are simply out of the mainstream.” One party is out to kill, and the other is waiting for its leaders to die.
I should not say that the Democrats offer nothing. One attendee last night sent me a picture of the Democratic Policy and Communications Committee-branded cookies that were being handed out last night. The facts show that the Democrats are, in fact, taking action. And that action is delicious.
“The power of the people is stronger than the people in power,” read one sign at the protest last night. This sentiment is true. It offers little salvation, however, until we have the people. The people in the streets must outnumber the people watching the TV show called America’s Colorful Journey to Hell, and then, the show will be over. The protests must swell until they rise up to the top floor of the Hay-Adams and wash away the people with money who are sipping drinks in comfort and waiting patiently for all of this to settle down. They can wait for a long, long time. The wave of the people isn’t even getting their shoes wet yet.
This story was first posted at How Things Work.
Hamilton Nolan is a labor writer for In These Times. He has spent the past decade writing about labor and politics for Gawker, Splinter, The Guardian, and elsewhere. More of his work is on Substack.
