This weekend, I was surprised to learn that Donald Trump seems to see himself in the same way I do: as a would-be monarch spraying the citizenry with excrement.
On Saturday, perhaps stung by the enormous nationwide “No Kings” protests, Trump posted an A.I.-generated video on Truth Social that inadvertently captured his approach to governing. In it the president, wearing a crown, flies a “Top Gun”-style fighter plane labeled “King Trump” above American cities crowded with demonstrators, dumping gargantuan loads of feces on them. Amplifying it on social media, the White House communications director Steven Cheung gleefully wrote that the president was defecating “all over these No Kings losers!”
It is not at this point surprising that Trump holds half the country in contempt, or that he treats urban America as a group of restive colonies to be brutally subdued. This is a man who told the military it should use our cities as “training grounds” for foreign operations, and who has sent both troops and federal agents to terrorize Los Angeles and other cities. The president’s attempts to demote the residents of blue America from citizens to subjects have become so routine they barely make headlines anymore.
What’s curious, then, is not Trump’s eagerness to degrade us, but his uncontrollable urge to defile himself and his office. Most national leaders, after all, do not willingly associate themselves with diarrhea. Scatological attacks are usually the province of outsiders trying to cut the powerful down to size. (French farmers, for example, have vented their fury at ruling authorities by dumping piles of manure in front of government buildings.) Rulers, by contrast, tend to jealously guard their dignity. But not Trump.
A perverse delight in defilement has always coursed through MAGA circles. Describing the profoundly cynical, curdled atmosphere in which 20th-century totalitarian movements took root, Hannah Arendt wrote, “It seemed revolutionary to admit cruelty, disregard of human values and general amorality, because this at least destroyed the duplicity upon which the existing society seemed to rest.” A similar giddy nihilism has long surrounded the president and his devotees, who often treat his unlikely ascension as a world-historical feat of trolling.
There’s a tension, however, when people in power adopt this oppositional stance. On the surface, Trump longs for grandeur. But on some subconscious level he and those around him have a deep instinct for degradation. The administration purports to venerate traditional aesthetics; an August executive order on federal architecture disavowed modernism and called for classical designs that convey “the dignity, enterprise, vigor and stability of America’s system of self-government.” At the same time, Trump paved over the lawn of the White House Rose Garden to make it look like the patio at Mar-a-Lago. On Monday, The Washington Post reported that his construction crews have begun demolishing the facade of the White House’s East Wing to build a ballroom.
The dominant aesthetic of the administration comes not from antiquity but from A.I. slop, the tackier and more juvenile the better. (Think of the White House’s image of a crying migrant rendered in the style of a Japanese Studio Ghibli animation.) Last week, when HuffPost asked the White House who chose Hungary as the site of an upcoming meeting between Trump and President Vladimir Putin of Russia, the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, responded, “Your mom did.” She was obviously trying to insult and delegitimize a representative of the liberal media. But the result was to reveal herself as a gross parody of a professional press secretary. The administration plans to mark American’s 250th anniversary with a UFC cage fight on the White House’s south lawn, an idea that seems ripped from the scabrous 2006 satire “Idiocracy.”
The Trump gang’s compulsion to debase and cheapen almost everything they touch is far more than a matter of style. Perhaps the most puzzling thing about the second Trump administration has been its attacks on pillars of American strength that pose no challenge to its ideology. It was predictable that the White House would gut support for the humanities, but not that it would defund pediatric cancer research. I expected it to try to eliminate the Department of Education, but not to deliberately wreck the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which helps communities in both red and blue states when they’re beset by disasters.
Some of this slashing and burning can be explained by the old-fashioned small-government fanaticism of administration personnel like Russell Vought, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget. But it also seems like a function of Trump’s abusive insecurity. Part of him wants to aggrandize the country to reflect his own inflated self-conception. And part of him seems to want to trash it out of rage at the limits of his dominance.
In “The Emergency,” an allegorical novel coming out next month, the writer George Packer captures some of the lust for desecration animating the Trumpist right. The book hinges on a conflict between self-righteous Burghers, who live in cities, and resentful, paranoid rural people known as Yeomen. In a narrative turn that appears, in light of Trump’s video, quite prescient, the Yeomen make plans to bombard the Burghers’ city with fecal cannons. It’s as if Packer managed, for a moment, to tune into the president’s wavelength.
“There was something so audacious about it, so inventive and barbaric, so low,” he writes, adding, “It would break through the final restraint, and there would be no going back.”
Fights over resources and beliefs can be settled. It’s much harder to imagine rapprochement with those who want, above all, to befoul us.
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Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s rights and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment.
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