Bluesky

In 2015, my editors at the Nation first set me on the task of covering Donald Trump by asking me to write about his coarse, mobster-like use of the English language. In the years since, Trump-speak has continued to fascinate—and horrify—me.

On Wednesday, two weeks into the renewed hostilities between the United States and Iran, Trump announced on Fox News that “we’re going to beat the fucking shit out of them. We’ll be hitting them hard. They’re going to get a beating.” In the past, such a tirade would have at least been termed “unpresidential”; quite likely, it would have triggered calls for the president’s resignation. Of course, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon and countless other senior political figures swore like sailors, but they did so in private, understanding that democratic political systems are sustained, in part, by the illusion of civility. Trump deliberately dispenses with that illusion. There’s a swagger to how he communicates that is intended to project a murderous, unstoppable intent. His speech is similar to how the erstwhile Filipino strongman leader Rodrigo Duterte talked of meting out violence to his enemies and to street criminals while in office or to how Jair Bolsonaro addressed his supporters in Brazil.

In the Oval Office, on the same day that Trump pledged to beat the fucking shit out of the Iranians, the madman-in-chief told a gathering of journalists who were questioning him about Iran’s latest attacks on US military facilities in the region, “They’ve already apologized, but you know we gotta smack them a little bit.”

This isn’t the language of high-stakes foreign-policy decision-making; it is a crude, brutal way of talking that Trump thinkswill convey toughness. It’s a simulacrum of the strong man, a fantasy woven in Trump’s brain to present an image of indomitability. It’s the language of the made man in a mafia movie explaining how you gotta soften people up, rough them up just enough to make them pay for protection or pony up their late rent or do whatever favor the Godfather has asked you to do.

I can practically hear Marlon Brando’s Don Corleone saying with a combination of menace and self-pity, “You don’t ask with respect. You don’t offer friendship. You don’t even think to call me Godfather.” Except Brando was a first-rate actor; Trump is as third-rate as you get, and in his dotage, he is getting more third rate by the minute. As his tired and desperately boring performance at the recent White House Correspondents’ Dinner showed—do we really want a commander-in-chief who thinks the funniest thing in the world is to make fat jokes about his political opponents?—he’s become little more than an aging Catskills’ performer, seeking just one more chance to win the adulation of an audience. The thing is, no one is buying it anymore. Witness the reaction of the Alabama Daily News, which tends to cater to a conservative, business-friendly audience in the Deep South—the sort of people who have voted for Trump and MAGA candidates in every election cycle since 2016. As Trump launched into a series of bizarre personal attacks on CNN’s Kaitlan Collins (a onetime Alabama native) that were supposed to amuse the captive members of the news media, the newspaper reported, “There was no laughter or any sound from the audience.” His jabs had fallen flat, and his punchlines were met with crickets.

For a man as needy as Trump, the silence must have been brutal. Like all authoritarians, Trump insists that he knows best about everything, be it humor—if he says something’s funny, then goddammit it must be funny— be it war, or be it culture.

Take his shamelessly fascist efforts to try to intimidate the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History into toeing the MAGA party line. Last week, after months of failed attempts to bend the museum to his will, Trump signed an executive order mandating that the National Park Service put up warning signs and alternative exhibits in public areas surrounding the museum, informing visitors that the museum’s exhibits were “inaccurate” and that the museum has “failed to appropriately honor the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence.” More generally, the warnings were designed to let visitors know about “the ideological capture” of the museum by a bunch of anti-American lefty lunatics. By doing so, Trump is posing as an all-knowing historian; just as during the World Cup, he became the all-knowing arbiter of soccer fouls.

If you aren’t familiar with the Nazis’ clampdown on “degenerate art,” I suggest that you read up on it. I suggest, too, that you study how Joseph Stalin used the cult of the personality around his leadership to attack—and ultimately to have imprisoned or killed—artists, musicians, writers, and other cultural figures whose work, and whose understanding of the Soviet Union, he disapproved of.

Trump and his enablers know that time is running out on their odious project. For months, the public has soured on every signature policy they have put forward, and the latest poll numbers regarding Trump’s leadership are devastating: Just one in five Republican voters are “enthusiastic” about his remaining years in office, and more than two-thirds of US voters polled are fearful or pessimistic about the country’s future so long as Trump remains in power. With inflation surging again, the Iran war intensifying, ICE agents going on a killing spree, and public health crises such as the Cyclospora outbreak escalating, those numbers aren’t going to get better any time soon.

Yet, the more the public turns against this vicious political movement, the more extreme Trumpism becomes. The KKKer Fred Trump taught his son that thuggery is the way of the world, that compromise and an admission of fault signify only weakness. And so no matter how distasteful most Americans find his schtick,Trump will work ceaselessly to shore up his thug credentials, nominate more extreme people for senior government rolls, and push more extremist policies via executive order.He will always, always, always go on the attack.And if the public doesn’t buy what he’s selling anymore, well that’s clearly the public’s fault. It’s a Götterdämmerungphilosophy that threatens to bring the house down not only on his regime but on the American democratic experiment.