Actions not words. Win McNamee / POOL / AFP via Getty Images
In the days leading up to Trump’s explosion last week against Zelensky, several incidents occurred that, in their expression of blind power, were as consequential as the astounding scene in the Oval Office. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the new Secretary of Health and Human Services, cancelled the annual, crucial meeting of scientists to determine what ingredients should be in the flu vaccine for next year. And after an expanding measles outbreak in Texas killed a person in America for the first time in 10 years, it took days, and a torrent of criticism, for him to finally urge parents to get their children a measles vaccine.
At around the same time, Kash Patel, the new director of the FBI, met with the bureau’s agents and employees for the first time since he was confirmed as director by Congress. Along with explaining to the several thousand people attending the Zoom session that, unprecedented in the bureau’s history, he would be working mostly out of Las Vegas, and not Washington DC, he announced that he would be establishing a partnership between the FBI and the UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship) an extreme martial arts entertainment behemoth. Which just happens to have its headquarters in Las Vegas, and whose CEO, Dana White, just happened to be a major donor to Trump’s presidential campaign.
But the opening act, as it were, for Trump’s and Vance’s humiliation of Zelensky, was Musk’s presence at the first gathering of Trump’s cabinet. Musk held forth, standing over the seated cabinet, talking more than anyone else at the meeting, including Trump, as the assembled cabinet secretaries remained mute. When a particular secretary did talk, they preceded their remarks by praising Trump with ritualistic submission. It was unlike anything any Americans had ever seen.
But just about everything that has happened in the five weeks since Trump was inaugurated is unlike anything we have ever seen. Yet a society changing for the worst, without violence at the beginning, changes without much opposition because the new conditions blend seamlessly, like spies, into the old conditions. Humans have a great stake in keeping a bright outlook and not rocking the boat they have to sail in every day. And Americans, numbed by screens, psychiatric drugs, pornography and infinite niches of fantasy and entertainment, have become passive and inert.
The establishment, watching, simply does not know how to combat Trump. The late-night comedians, bedtime storytellers for liberals, soften his unprecedented assault on American government, on old international alliances, on the dignity and decorum of democratic statesmanship with laughter. Oh, that Trump, you chuckle to yourself before turning off the light and pulling the blanket over your head.
The media attempt to oppose him by describing his aberrations in rational prose, which only normalises his dizzying about-faces and casual bombshells. Rather than consider how appalling Trump and Vance’s outburst against Zelensky was, for days it swirled the following conundrum around its navel: was Zelensky’s humiliation by Trump and Vance planned or spontaneous? As if that mattered in the slightest. And so his most bizarre actions are analogised into familiar gestures. They are historicised into normalcy. He is Nixon, sort of, kind of like Reagan, maybe, a throwback to McKinley and Andrew Jackson for sure; he is using Putin’s “playbook”. Some of this might be true, some of it might be illuminating, but none of it thwarts him to the slightest degree.
Meanwhile, bored, Trump can only rouse his own interest by falling back on the one activity he excels in, which is making deals. But the thing about a deal is that it happens in isolation. No one on any side of a deal is thinking about a larger context outside the deal. If you are negotiating building a shopping mall, you are not thinking of the history of shopping malls, the effect of the shopping mall on social relations, the effect that particular shopping mall will have on the surrounding area in 50 years. If you are about to “screw” — to use one of Trump’s favourite words — someone in the course of making the deal, you are not thinking of that person retaliating, of that person’s allies turning against you, of whether you will ever talk to that person again. Everyone in on the deal moves on upon the completion of the deal, after which everyone is ready to come together again to make another deal. Trump doesn’t have the political imagination to consider the complicated long-term ramifications of the actions he takes, or says he is going to take.
And this jumping from isolated deal to isolated deal has caused a dramatic change in the country’s atmosphere. Each episode is discussed, critiqued, condemned in isolation from everything else he does. Few people seem to have the will to connect one new fact with another. And here are the unprecedented facts: the military lawyers who keep the military from violating the Constitution have all been fired by the new Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth. Trump is installing flunkies as generals and admirals. The Pentagon has been ordered to stop offensive cyberoperations against Russia. Trump has put the government in the hands of Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, whose $500 billion is able to generate currents of persuasion that can set in motion generals, admirals, politicians and judges. Either the lunatics are running the asylum, or the criminals have taken charge of the justice system. Or both.
In his classic book about the 1968 Democratic and Republican presidential conventions, Miami and the Siege of Chicago, Norman Mailer described the “goons” Chicago Mayor Richard Daley had surrounded himself with: “Some of them had eyes like drills; others, noses like plows; jaws like amputated knees.” Daly himself “from up close had a red skin with many veins and hair which looked like dirty gray silk combed out straight”. After Obama’s taut, vain, self-consciously sculpted gym body, and all the polished prettiness of the liberal mandarins here is the opposite number: Trump’s garish orange hair and skin, his bulging stomach and spindly legs; RFK’s lizard eyes and dying frog voice; Steven Cheung’s siloed, eyeless head and Costco bulk; Bannon, MAGA’s intellectual giant, an unwashed homunculus who seems to have absorbed culture in the manner of a partying banker, uncomprehendingly, through the nose.
Just as in Mailer’s telling, today’s grotesques are in a rage, not just against the liberal and neoliberal sham of “merit” — liberalese for “the fix is in” — but furious at anything that doesn’t respect them. It’s just like the anger amid the regime in Fritz Lang’s 1943 Hangmen Also Die. Watch any member of Trump’s new rank being interviewed. They are absolute paragons of politeness until they are challenged. Then they explode. No one has ever found themselves in a situation like this, and no one knows how to react.
Instead, in Congress during Trump’s speech, having being chastised by House Speaker Johnson for booing Trump — for sounding, in other words, like the far more robust House of Commons — the Democrats sat in submissive silence, holding circular signs saying things like “False” and “Save Medicaid”. The writing on the little signs was so neat! While the Republicans screamed and roared and chanted “USA! USA!” the Democrats behaved like the good little girls and boys they had been all their lives. They had never been put in a situation where the delinquents and cut-ups took over the school.
Paralysed by losing the working class, by being shunned as “elites”, by being accused of lacking the ordinary person’s “common sense”, the Democrats can’t seem to find a way to strike back at Trump without appearing to be “out of touch”. So even as they agonise over Musk gutting the federal bureaucracy that has always stood between people and a rapacious marketplace — the bureaucracy, for all its maddening flaws, is a vital sliver of civil society within the government — the liberals mechanically intone the need to tame the bureaucracy.
The leaden, Manchurian-Candidate mantra that is deployed by the Right to justify Trump has been “the system is broken”. Adjunct to that is: “behold all the waste and fraud.” But the “system” is no more broken than “systemic” racism pervaded every nook and cranny of American life. There is no one “system”. The “system” is made up of countless realms — health, education, welfare, law, environment, economy and so on — each of which constitutes its own special world. None could possibly be “broken” in the same way, and none could be “fixed” in the same way. They fail to function here and there, sometimes miserably, but America functions in all those realms, every day. Life, for most Americans, is ok. Syria is broken. Sudan is broken. Gaza is broken. To say that the American “system” is broken is to not understand the meaning of what is being said.
As for waste and fraud, so be it. They should not be used as excuses to break the “system” under the pretext of “fixing” it. They are the collateral nuisances of a democracy. Totalitarian and authoritarian regimes erase “waste and fraud” from their societies along with freedom. In those regimes, instead of waste and fraud in society, corruption and deceit thrive in politics. But now you have liberal bien pensants nodding their heads and stroking their chins and saying, “Yes, well, harrumph, of course, we too want fix, harrumph, a broken system and to rid America of, harrumph, waste and fraud… But, please, let’s not get carried away!”
America has now changed, irrevocably. It will never be the same again. The challenge is to keep the change from becoming cataclysmic. “Political life as a whole is an endless chain consisting of an infinite number of links,” said Lenin, who advised grabbing hold of the link “that most of all guarantees its possessor the possession of the whole chain”. For all the mewling about the broken system, no one seems to have any idea of how to leap beyond addressing isolated moments and to go beyond theorising about opposition, to actually doing it. In The New York Times, James Carville, the liberal establishment’s not quite adequate answer to Steve Bannon, did connect some of the links—only to advise not doing anything at all and simply allowing Trump to implode before the country does. What a brilliant idea.
The only force, the vital link, that will stop the unstoppable force of Trump is something equally original, astonishing, daring and uninhibited. Someone, as they say across the Southern border, needs the cojones to stand up to Trump and the cadres of craven careerists and flunkies the Republican party has become. Is there no one, in this unbound, uninhibited, wildly unpredictable place who can do that?
Very sober analysis, Lee. It’s telling that you reference Lenin who constructed the most prolific, democratically unaccountable bureaucracy in the history of the world.
I wasn’t aware that the goal of the bureaucracy was to stand between the people and the marketplace. But now that you say it, that really explains why it’s so difficult to contain prices or build things. I guess when “experts” always place 2000 pounds of red tape in the way, you don’t exactly have financial freedom. You have something like an Omnipresent DMV scolding and nudging you at every step.
I wish you luck in constructing new forms of agitprop for Les Resistance!
This article is in a nutshell what’s wrong with the Democrats. In fact, there is nothing wrong with them, except that they keep seeing Trump as a sort of aberration to the wonderful world of American politics. Their analysis is missing that the world of yesterday has gone. There’s no way back to the liberal globalism of the 90s. Technology and China ( and Russia) make it impossible
This truly unexceptional author needs to look in a mirror. He spent too many weary paragraphs spewing bile against DJT and his administration, pulling facts from their necessary context, and inserting his own biased views in every second sentence.
But it is his own mind that is closed, rather. And no, I won’t respond to his each and every point. He made too many, and brought too little backing for each one. One who argues with a fool only proves that there are two ….
Totally agree.
We all need to look in a mirror now and again, but sadly few do so – have you done so recently? What views does anyone have that aren’t their “own biased views”? That’s the whole point of views and if they don’t tally with yours even more reason to listen to them in order to question yourself; nobody learns by only seeking out props to their existing positions.
Agreed, but I don’t see the author of this article making any effort to engage with or understand the policies of the new administration, he merely focuses on the most extreme examples he can to make the whole project look mad. And there are elements of crazy in Trump’s administration to be sure, but it is not all that. For example, the reforms proposed by Kennedy to combat corruption and entrenched corporate influence over the national health system are long overdue and many were campaigned for by Democrats not so long ago.
I subscribe to the Free Press as well, where there is plenty of anti-Trump sentiment. It just seems so more authentic there. Siegel comes across as a Dem party hack. It’s just kinda a meh and unserious. This isn’t a criticism of Unherd either. We need to hear from the Trump critics. Siegel isn’t the answer IMO.
I think the Anti-Trump resistance fears the politics of small differences will bring the Party back to the Right. They feel like they need to be wholly oppositional in huge ways instead of using nuance to fight back in a slow, rational way.
I defy you, TB to give 10 examples of when Trump has acted “in a slow, rational way” in say the last two months
Indeed. This fellow sounds like he has a weak understanding of America’s deeper history. If he possessed such, he could put Trump in context with a history that includes similar men like Andrew Jackson, Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, and even Lincoln as agents of disruptive change who acted almost as autocrats and were praised for doing so because they were perceived as acting for the people, not themselves. Whatever side deals Trump cuts to benefit himself or his cronies will be forgotten or brushed aside if his reforms prove popular and Siegel probably is smart enough to know that.
Siegel strikes me as the sort of person who expresses his anger and dismay at Trump but the real psychological driver of that anger is that Trump’s election and reelection challenged his notion of human progress and his image of what America actually was. The America that he believed in couldn’t elect Trump twice, but that happened, thus the cognitive dissonance drives him to hyperbolic levels of vitriol that sound more unhinged than Trump himself. Whether he’s aware of this at a conscious level is anyone’s guess, but I think this is what fuels much of the TDS we see in the media.
Well said. There is plenty to be concerned about in what Trump is doing, but also a need to look at why the Democrats lost, and frankly there was a lot of bad stuff going on under the previous administration (and several previous ones) that needed to be stopped – not least in order to avoid WWIII.
I choose not to write a comment. And I see that I am not alone.
The writer of this article should not be ‘normalized’ with a response.
I think we’re being pranked. The author surely cannot believe all the broad, unsubstantiated assertions he makes. Perhaps he’s learned the art of hyperbole from Trump.
This is a restrained piece. Simplest explanation is that DJT aims to become America’s Putin, including looting the place (see crypto reserve plan) and becoming a law unto himself. Stay tuned, in a few years he will be one of the world’s richest men.
Just a thought … if the USA hadn’t been fighting endless wars in recent years, if the security forces had not conspired to assassinate a US President in 1963 and a Presidential candidate in 2024, if the murder of American citizens on 9/11 had been investigated, if the vast majority of the US population had seen a rise in living standards in the last 50 years, if the Federal budget had not been bloated to allow the arms industries and other interest groups to steal from the American people, if the vaccines forced on American children had been tested, if the legal system had not been turned into a machine for repression and censorship, then Trump wouldn’t have been elected.
A trivial detail but it shows how deranged the author of this article is. Obama did not have a ‘gym-sculpted body’. He was so self-aware of his skinny body, that he refused to be photographed topless.
Can Unherd get its hands on topless pix of DJT for page 3?
I can’t work out whether you are an extreme conspiracy theorist or just taking the mickey out of them with that list. Maybe your answer to this would help me: what vaccines have not been tested, do tell (and I don’t include injecting bleach!)?
Trump never recommended injecting bleach. That falsehood was perpetrated by (unsurprisingly) one Joe Biden. See the debunking of the bleach narrative here: https://eu.statesman.com/story/news/politics/elections/2020/07/13/fact-check-did-trump-tell-people-to-drink-bleach-to-kill-coronavirus/113754708/
That depends on what you mean by ‘tested’.
You forgot the Moon Landing ! Another slice of fruitcake ?
Very well written
And probably an exercise in how to engage : none of the potential positives are even mentioned, chiefly, the destruction of federal non elected bodies /agencies interfering in the free agency of individuals.
Time will tell.
Overall impression is of an intellectual outraged by the mere existence of a ruffian like Trump, let alone him being potus
“America has now changed, irrevocably. ”
Like, “now” now, right now? Because everything was normal for the last four years? Your Democrats are not ineffective because they are misguided; they are simply mendacious and delusional.
“The only force, the vital link, that will stop the unstoppable force of Trump is something equally original, astonishing, daring and uninhibited.”
Perhaps his political opposition can decide to, at the very least, stop advocating for biological males to obviate women’s sports and simply agree that partial birth abortion is gross and shouldn’t be aspirational. Basic stuff. They’ll never do it, of course, instead hold their little placards like children, and continue to lose.
This author’s pants-on-fire rant is unbalanced and bereft of analysis. It was a slog to read and I quickly realized that there was nothing to learn. It’s unfortunate because there is a story to be written about the Democratic Party’s impotence.
Amen. This is nothing but a counter revolution after 30 years of complete rot. Mr. Siegel is apparently caught up in the swirl of an MSNBC doom loop. We are finally returning to common sense government and policies. Nothing more.
Mr Siegel. There’s no place in government for politicians who claim, and legislate, straight-faced, tha a man can be a woman, just because he says he is one.
Of course, there have been many problems. But gaslighting an entire population is a really stupid thing to try to do.
Well, I got to about the 5th paragraph but then decided life is just too short.
I think it was the implication that the US has changed for the worse since Trump took office. Well, the author is free to think that – but a majority of his fellow citizens seem to disagree and like what the government is doing so far.
If there was a sign of the country getting worse, it was surely the Democrats refusing to applaud for DJ Daniels at the State of the Union address. Maybe the author wrote that further down the article but, like I said, I just couldn’t be bothered.
I, too, had to skim this article. Tedious.
I’m not clear when during the last three decades the Democrats had open minds, yet the article suggests they have only just closed.
The number of US citizens supporting Trumps insanity is dwindling daily. Perhaps after the bird flu has killed off a 100M chickens, driven the price of eggs through the roof, and as well as evolved to kill 10M Americans including everybody you love, because you could not be bothered to elect a person who can do no better than defy the term “ept” and refused to get vaccinated. Maybe then you will have time to reflect.
Everybody back to their Covid bunkers. Global Climate Lockdowns are the only responsible way to cooperate as global citizens and practice inclusive safety. Do as you’re told and don’t ask questions!
You do remember the alternative candidate on offer was Harris? On what planet would she have been a better POTUS?
Deranged.
All those things are just happening in your head.
I read it all the way through just to confirm, and yes this may be the worst article I’ve read on UnHerd. The writer fails to understand that what most of us are tired of hearing is people like him.
I decided to read it all just to confirm, and yes this is the worst article I’ve read on UnHerd. The author fails to understand that what most of us are tired of hearing is people like him.
I don’t mean this as a throwaway comment, and I think yourselves prose are very good, but you are demented.
Your mind is so poisoned and this article so impossibly skewed by you TDS I don’t know what to say beyond that.
An exercise in displacement activity.
Trump has created a news vortex twisting out of control and sucking up everything, so every issue has to link to Trump somewhere. Outside sports and Meghan Markle, it’s almost impossible to find news without a Trump-angle. The Pope on his death bed? No-one notices.
We are being entertained – with aahs and oohs and boos and gasps – by the chaos, fireworks and spectacle – it’s like November 5th and July 4th and Bastille day and Mardi Gras all wrapped up in one. People are cheering the bonfires and burning of the effigies. Tomorrow will be ashes and fixing up the debris, but now, all eyes are looking for the next explosion from the box of firecrackers.
Bla bla. More mindless wittering.
For days the commenters swirled the following conundrum around its navel: was this article planned or spontaneous?
The author is so wrong about so many things that it would be a waste of energy to address his many perceived grievances. I am afraid this author’s TDS is terminal and there is nothing more to say.
“the bureaucracy, for all its maddening flaws, is a vital sliver of civil society within the government”
This is utterly false. Bureaucracy is characterised by formal, impersonal and abstract relationships governed by policies and procedures. It is diametrically opposed to the spirit of civil society which at its best is local, rooted and personal, embodying the ethical principals and forms-of-life of the community in which it exists.
The suggestion the author makes that there is no “system” is also disingenuous. While there are many functions within government, each of which have their own specific policies and bodies of knowledge, there absolutely is a unified form of liberal ‘governance’ complete with its own identifiable ideology which animates the whole. It is precisely at this that the Trump administration is aiming its attacks. And yes in many respects that does mean breaking the system in order to remake it again in a form that actually serves the people who pay for it, rather than merely being a giant self-perpetuating grift.
It’s appropriate that the author quotes Lenin who well understood that the first task in making a revolution is to smash the State. The regime developing in Washington maybe something like the Right-wing Leninism a few observers have suggested was needed to break through entrenched interests and actually change things.
Great comment
The author is a statist and blind to anything else which could potentially improve democracy.
Underlying this view is a profoundly negative view of his folk. Speech control and gaslighting à la Biden are preferable to free agency
It’s useless arguing with nihilism
I see casual racism and ageism is alive and well. When the targets are the wrong type of course, and hence not victims.
Democrats have only themselves to blame for losing to someone as combustible as Trump. So have the old stagers in the GOP as well.
GOP (pre Trump) and DNC create a globalised world where the working class long since hollowed out by Reganomics and Financial crash caused by Clinton created the ground for Trump and his ilk to rise.
Own it and come up with a solution.
This piece is a whirlwind of left over salad.
Accent on “left”
What a great turn of phrase.
Nice. I read this as LEFT over salad.
The tactic these days is for politicians to find or invent a personality defect in a political opponent in order to discredit everything that opponent says, especially inconvenient truths. They should watch this video as an example of how to judge a leader –
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=py5mmAScScU
Americans have for too long suffered cancerous ideologies telling them for instance they should be ashamed of their history, apologise for being white and accept persuading children to change their gender. The “imperfect” Donald Trump is for them a breath of fresh air.
Meanwhile authoritarian China marches on and Europe descends ever more rapidly into an Islamist swamp
Not convinced by this. Too many rhetorical flourishes and too much emotive language (including insulting comments about the way the republicans look – bit lazy, that) and not enough substance.
Example: “But the thing about a deal is that it happens in isolation. No one on any side of a deal is thinking about a larger context outside the deal.” Except it often doesn’t and they often are.
It seems to me there are lots of assumptions being made here about the reprehensible nature of Trump’s evil totalitarian empire, etc. etc., but not enough solid evidence of what he’s actually doing. Surely he’s given his critics enough to work with by now?
The author trying to lecture us on “deals” is at least amusing.
Zelensky was spoiling for a fight, and didnt really want to sign the minerals deal. I suppose the author didnt actually watch the whole 40 min. And I lost interest in him when he lit candles for the ‘ 100 angels’ killed in the coup, many of whim were serious Nazis. And his history then washes out the civil war launched by Poroshenko against Donbas which kilked 14500 citizebs, for whom there were no candles. . I did like the dignity and decorum reference though, especially the last four years….very funny.
“But the “system” is no more broken than “systemic” racism pervaded every nook and cranny of American life.”
I didn’t notice the author telling the race baiters they were wrong for the last X years………..
“Yet a society changing for the worst, without violence at the beginning, changes without much opposition because the new conditions blend seamlessly, like spies, into the old conditions.”
Completely true, except that it applies not to Trump, but to the decades of slow undermining of America that the wannabe social tyrants of the Left have successfully carried out. Trump and his supporters are simply saying, “Yeah, enough of that.”
These boot lickers who kept quiet for four years when they were being governed by a demented president suddenly seem to have had their cajones re-attached
“Is there no one, in this unbound, uninhibited, wildly unpredictable place who can do that?”
I love essays like this… essays which exemplify the problem they purport to identify. (UnHerd is often full of them.)
The reason the Democrats are proving so inadequate to the moment is because (like this essay) they believe hand-waving-freak-outery is the appropriate response… rather than rational discussion of the things that Trump is pushing for.
By way of example… he complains that Trump is firing generals and ‘installing flunkies.’ But who in our system has the authority to decide if a general’s emphasis on DEI is undermining our military preparedness? The Washington Post? A Congressional subcommittee? Open the Constitution and see for yourself…! And this President is springing no surprises on the electorate, but doing exactly what he said he would do, and was elected to do.
This author’s utter failure to understand, appreciate and respond to what is happening, perfectly exemplifies why the Democrats are in such disarray. So the irony of his complaints is so very delicious.
Are you well, Lee?
Well, at least the author is forthright enough to admit he thinks waste and fraud are a necessary and acceptable price to pay for bureaucracy. He may be right in the abstract, but how much waste and fraud are tolerable?
Well that’s a very different opinion from my own. Reading it has strengthened my opinion. Thank you.
“America has now changed, irrevocably. It will never be the same again.” Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition. After watching the Democrats and uber left drive the country into the shit hole, starting with Obama, and after a brief sane interlude during Trump I, continuing to near destruction under Biden, sane people welcome the shock and awe of Trump II. We never want Democrats or liberals in control of this country again.
The slant of bias among the subscribers to UnHerd is ever so notable when it rears its regally obsessed head to diss an article that explicitly captures my concerns, while giving great woohaws to far less credulous essays critical of the left. Your obsession with the positive illusions of Trump’s greatness will eventually be totally flummoxed by Orange Jesus own sick mind, which races daily to come up with new idiocy.
So, I take it that you did not vote for Trump then?
Lee, are you commenting on your own article again…?
Reading this guy makes me want to cancel my subscription.
Thankfully, it is not representative of UnHerd’s US political coverage.
Several commenters have implied here that Trump is returning America to a much needed state of normality. As pointed out in in the context of the original essay, from the POV of the Left, there is very little that is “normal” about Trumps Circus or the 2025 Project goals he intends to accomplish. The presumption that somehow the various functions that this nation takes for granted that the Federal Government will perform consistently after the Trump “fix” is absurd. If there is one thing we can all agree on it is that our visions of a good life in America are very different.
During the Satanic rituals, in which Trump and Musk squirt steaming chicken blood all over the mentally ill cabinet members, they often do Hitler salutes and fling their celery-string laden feces spastically at the hallowed walls of the Oval office. Trump is orange and fat because that is the way the Great Beelzebub likes him.
I am disappointed that my colleague, Siegel, didn’t beat the Putin truth hard enough. Unable to fell*te Putin on a daily basis, Trump has hired a slippery Putin Look-alike who, bare-chested, rides a sweaty Donald Trump around the White House, mumbling about shrubberies, smoking a cigar, and cackling about the thousands of dead Bipocs lining the streets after budget cuts – only to essential spending programs – by the way. Nobody in the White House says anything because their children and grannies are locked in Pete Hegseth’s basement, threatened with anthrax injection.
Meanwhile, Trump’s voters, dead-eyed and meth-addled, hunch in their trailer houses, plotting the violence that will surely come. Their urine-matted hair and booger breath is no longer a social liability. Certainly, they will rise up and force the Irish back into slavery. It’s only a matter of time, even though few of them can tell time.
And: Nixon, Manchurian Candidate, aberration, “USA, USA”, Chamberlain – you get it. ‘Nuf said, right?
LOL…Reads a bit like some of the older P.J. O’Rourke stuff.
Another unoriginal TDS rant that suggests that, pre-Trump, the government was honest, effective, fair-minded, and rational. The depiction of Americans as narcotized into an opium den of complacency is 180 degrees off. To use a better drug analogy, Americans are now more like jittery coke heads, paranoid and jumpy.
“Journalists” like Siegel need to step back and realize that no one is under informed about the bizarreness of Trump. He is by orders of magnitude the most scrutinized leader ever. Every crevasse of his life has been archeologically explored by his formidably resourced foes, leaving nothing unexposed. He has been impeached, tried in civil and criminal courts, and–having no talent for subtle dissimulation–drops every one of his conscious thoughts onto his tongue in a stunning habit of cognitive transparency utterly unique in politics. There is nothing left to reveal about Trump and yet the media opposing him soldiers on with the notion that some large body of the populace remains unaware of Trump’s nature and need to be informed thereof. Or, more likely, they simply want to insult those who, out of disgust with the perfidious alternative served up by Democrats, chose someone as crassly disruptive as him over the idiots, crooks, and grifters they offer up. No one is in denial about Trump, it is leftist journalists who are in denial about the bankruptcy of progressivism.
I decided to read it all just to confirm, and yes this is the worst article I’ve read on UnHerd. The author fails to understand that what most of us are tired of hearing is people like him.
What a load of bigoted, subjective hogwash!
When an author resorts to insults about someone’s personal appearance in what purports to be a serious article you know he/she (not ‘they’!) have zero credibility and no depth of intellect.
“… Trump’s garish orange hair and skin, his bulging stomach and spindly legs; RFK’s lizard eyes and dying frog voice; Steven Cheung’s siloed, eyeless head and Costco bulk; Bannon, MAGA’s intellectual giant, an unwashed homunculus …”
I was originally prompted to subscribe to UnHerd by its intelligent, informed and critical journalism on Britain, its base, but also the rest of the world, particularly North America. The articles leading up to the U.S. election were fairly non-partisan. However, since Trump’s election its articles have taken on a clear partisan, class bias reflective of the university credentialed, middle-class commentariat of the Anglosphere: distaste for the Trump’s rejection of their virtue signalling vapidity and his current efforts to dismantle the wokist administrative autocracy that brought us Covid lockdowns, net-zero and all the other distopianism of the current era. “Ooh, but he so crass.” UnHerd really needs to find some good journalists to cover U.S. politics.
Why is the annual meeting to determine flu vaccine strategy crucial? We almost always follow the WHO recommendation which is a always a guess anyway. We also never run trials on the flu vaccine strain selection strategy, so why not adopt a different methodology than a rubber stamp meeting for the WHO recommendations?
Another BS spin article by Mr. Siegel. I would say they stood up to Trump at the State of the Union. The Dems are using Lawfare to kill anything that moves from the Administration. The trouble is, especially for Mr. Siegel and his handlers, they looked like petulant morons holding little signs that should have read “I am a Dumb Ass who is a loser”. The Dem lawyers are winning a few battles but this will change as time goes on. The present Dem party, like Mr. Siegel, are irrelevant as they are out of touch with what the great majority of Americans really care about. Not the DEI, ESG, globalist, racist pap the Dems have been spewing for the last 16 years. We need a vibrant, inclusive, and realistic Dem party who are attuned to the citizen’s needs and are willing to compromise for the good of the nation.
This is a TDS-soaked article reduces the current political moment to a series of good guys-bad guys cliches, and thus fails to either understand what is happening or to offer anything in the way of a serious remedy apart from ‘standing up to Trump’. How about starting with addressing the reasons why a majority of voters voted for him? The warmongering neocon-adjacent Biden administration, its addiction to covert censorship and surveillance of Americans, and especially the destruction of the middle class and working class and the siphoning of wealth to the super rich that was dramatically accelerated through the policies adopted by successive administrations over the course of the Covid19 pandemic. A president who fails to be re-elected has only then been re-elected once before in US history, which speaks volumes of the self-own that the Democrats have accomplished in 2024.
Yes, many of Trump’s actions, and those of his administration, are grotesque and his loyalty to democracy is about as trustworthy as Napoleon, and many of his actions need to be strongly resisted; however people such as this author who fail to acknowledge the genuine policy differences that the American voters have chosen, and instead choose to make cartoonish personal attacks on elected officials, are engaging in a species of virtue signalling rather than making a series contribution to the needs of the moment.
An enjoyably crafted piece of English, word-smithed by a master, but basically just a screed full of cleverly original name calling (Bannon, who is 5’11”, as a “homunculus”). Totally bereft of any analysis as to how, exactly, the Democrats ended up “losing the working class, …shunned as “elites”, …being accused of lacking the ordinary person’s “common sense…”, veiled by the author’s passive voice constructions, as if Democratic party policies themselves were not to blame. Until analysis replaces this kind of self indulgent—but clearly highly cultured–whining, little progress will be possible.