Here: maybe this will be better. It’s a chimp, and that’s not actually poop — but the source is awesome, too.
It’s so hard to get my head around it.
I’m good at understanding things: especially people. I am extremely empathetic, I am a student of human personality and interactions, and I try never to underestimate the complexity of a person and their actions and the motivations. Because of my vocation, I have spent time with and communicated in fair depth with thousands of people; and because of my avocation, I have spent countless hours imagining people and creating their actions and motivations. So I think about this a lot: why do people act the way they do? And normally, I think I’m pretty good at understanding why people do what they do, and making sense of it.
But I can’t make sense of Donald Trump.
It pisses me off, and that’s part of why I call him a shit-flinging gibbon: that is my own frustrated attempt to fling that would-be dictator, that narcissistic Nazi, that Cheeto-skinned charlatan, the hell away from me, to dismiss him as nothing more than a beast, an animal without complex motivations. He tries to have sex with anyone female for the same reason he tries to eat all the cheeseburgers he can: because he is nothing but instinct, pure id. Just basic survival urges in a primate that is not currently in a survival situation, and so, just as if you imagine that great ape in a fine restaurant, for instance, he screams and climbs on the tables and the wait staff, and he chucks the table settings and steals people’s food, cramming it into his mouth while he threatens to bite anyone who gets too close to him.
I like thinking of Donald Trump as a terrified primate who is trying to bluster his way out of danger so he can hide somewhere with the bunch of bananas he just stole. And based on much of what he does, I think it’s a pretty helpful way to try to understand him.
Take his reaction, for instance, when he was first asked about the Signal group chat where his top advisors and his Vice President acted like braggadocious buffoons, while clearly violating multiple federal laws by chatting about war plans, in advance of an attack, on a non-secure, non-governmental chat app that the Russians had already targeted for hacking – the Russians who are years ahead of us in cyberwarfare.
Trump reacts to Signal group chat: ‘I don’t know anything about it’
Now imagine that’s a monkey being threatened by a reporter aggressively asking it a question that it can’t understand at all.
“I don’t know anything about it,” which he repeats several times, is the monkey first grunting and then screeching, backing away and baring its teeth; the nonsense attack thrown out at the Atlantic “I’m not a big fan of the Atlantic, to me it’s a magazine that’s going out of business” is the monkey swiping with a paw at the aggressor; the line about “Well it couldn’t have been very effective because the attack was very effective” is the monkey trying to look taller, maybe beating its chest to appear tough.
See how well it works?
But it doesn’t explain everything. It’s fun to imagine, and there are some moments when, truly, Donald Trump acts like an unthinking animal just reacting – often overreacting – to what he sees as a threat or a challenge; but it doesn’t explain everything.
My biggest problem is trying to understand Trump’s plans and strategies. Obviously this is where the primate metaphor breaks down, because while the great apes are capable of planning multi-step tasks and so on, they’re still not very good at it; and as far as I know, they are double plus ungood at understanding abstract concepts, which Trump clearly thinks about quite a lot: he wants to be famous, he wants America to be great. He may not understand what he’s actually doing and what really makes America great and what does not, but he does seem to have a grasp on the concepts “America” and “great.” So in this situation, he’s not just a shit-flinging gibbon. But it is difficult for me to think about Donald Trump as a person with a plan, and with a strategy. But I know it’s unfair to consider him as the opposite: having no plans at all, having no strategy – just the shit-flinging gibbon. That’s not right either. I genuinely don’t get it: too much of what he does makes no sense, at all. Take leaving the Paris Climate Accords: all he has to do is ignore it, as every past president has done, even the ones who sign these well-meaning but toothless treaties; somehow we’ve never managed to stop extracting and burning fossil fuels, and never managed to reduce our dependence on individual cars, and never even tried to have a national conversation about our consumption of goods and how it produces excess carbon (Here’s a wild thought: what if the tariffs are really just a four-dimensional chess strategy to reduce America’s carbon footprint by cutting us off from our international consumer goods?). Ignoring the treaty, and then making an ad about American energy production standing in front of some oil-spewing well in North Dakota, right in front of a giant oversized American penis-truck, which is parked in front of, let’s say, a single-use plastics factory which is belching out black smoke, would do all Trump wants to do to own the libs and encourage his base in their worst habits; so why make America look bad internationally by leaving the treaty? It doesn’t make sense, which makes me want to understand Trump as an idiot.
But is he?
Let’s examine the data and try to extrapolate a strategy. It makes sense to me that Trump wants the support of his base. That source of power, that he can sway his base any way he wants, has been much of the secret to his rise to the White House twice (Also twice losing the popular vote); so when he says things that make them cheer, that makes him happy. Makes perfect sense. I like saying things that make people happy with me, that make people clap for me; who doesn’t? And as that base following his lead helps keep the GOP in line, it makes even more sense that he would do things that make them happy. So because they are white supremacists, they hate DEI: thus he tries to crush DEI. Being also intolerant evangelical Christians, they hate trans people: thus he tries to ban trans people from existence. Back on the racism tip, along with the backwards-looking (and insane) patriotism, they like Confederate monuments: he tries to bring back the Confederate monuments that were removed after the murder of George Floyd. I don’t believe Donald Trump, who is a racist but also doesn’t seem to particularly care about anything that doesn’t profit him directly, and doesn’t mind spending time with people of color if they do have something to offer him, particularly cares about all of this stuff, but his base does and he likes to make them happy, so he does these things. I get that. No problem.
Another example: Trump is supported by billionaires, and considers himself aligned with billionaires and the pro-business wing of the Republican party. They do not care about DEI or the existence of trans people (Some of them do, to be sure; there are some fundamentalist Christian people who are obscenely wealthy and would really like this country to be a Christian theocracy; Betsy DeVos springs to mind. But for the most part, they just want more money and less government control over them.), but they hate government regulation: so he tries to kill the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and tries to shut down the EPA, and so on. Okay.
Then there is the crazy shit: renaming the Gulf of Mexico, and Mount Denali, and trying to take over Greenland and so on. Now, to some extent, that is sticking it to the libs, which his base and the billionaires love; and it’s also trying to look tough, which his base loves; and the Greenland takeover offers quite a lot of untapped mineral wealth, which the billionaires love. But also: really? I can’t imagine that he actually sees any of that as critical issues for the US to confront, and I can’t see even his base particularly caring about Greenland or any of the names of national monuments and geographic features that most of us never refer to by any name.
And then there are the things he is doing that are clearly just fucking stupid: the tariffs. I know the billionaires don’t want that to happen; they don’t want any government regulation. The regular folks in the base still love anything Trump does, and he has talked for years about how great tariffs are, so okay – but you know what he hasn’t done? Lowered the price of groceries or gasoline. Which was the most important issue that got him elected, by far, among both his base and the Republican voters in general. And if he wants to achieve anything in his term, he needs the Republican party to maintain control of the Congress, and he clearly knows it as he keeps trying to push the GOP candidates in the special elections, and he took back Elise Stefanik’s nomination so she could stay in the House. So why the hell hasn’t he tried to push the grocery stores to lower the prices of eggs? Why hasn’t he reduced or removed regulations that would make it easier to import eggs? Why hasn’t he cut deals with oil and gas companies to reduce the price at the pump – or even easier, gotten Republicans to remove gas taxes to lower the price a few cents a gallon? Anything he could do on that front would cement his popularity, and make him ironclad against any criticism. Even ineffective but well-publicized attempts, which is mostly how he gins up support from his base, would solidify his popularity.
So why hasn’t he done it?
Why is he working so hard to help Israel slaughter the people of Gaza? Sure, the conservative Jewish population supports Israeli aggression in general, and the right wing has used the Hamas attack to beat the drums of paranoia in order to sell guns to right wing Americans (who really need to be scared of military age men coming over the border, because maybe they are going to start gunning us all down just like Hamas did to the Israelis). And there’s this whole bizarre thing about evangelical Christians making Israel very important in their worldview because the apocalypse will happen there, or something. But as I understand it – I am not an evangelical Christian, which is perhaps an unnecessary disclaimer, and I am also not going to investigate their insanity too carefully – the idea is just that the Jewish people must possess the land of Israel before the Second Coming of Jesus Christ can occur. And there’s also supposed to be a bunch of war, and an antichrist (I got a candidate for you…) and a bunch of other things; but it seems to me that none of that requires the full removal of the Palestinian people from Gaza, and nothing else other than religious zealotry would even begin to explain the support for the genocide of the Palestinian people by the most famed victims of genocide in the history of the world. (I also cannot understand the desire of the Israeli government and military to literally just murder every Palestinian person. Don’t they ever get tired of revenge? Have they all just completely lost all humanity?) But there’s Trump, meeting with Bibi Netanyahu, sending all the weapons he can, threatening to rain down hell on the Gaza strip if Hamas doesn’t surrender all their leverage by giving up all the remaining hostages, authorizing (I mean, I assume he authorized it at some point, but maybe it was just Hegseth) attacks on the Houthis for their solidarity with the Palestinian cause – and talking about ethnic cleansing of the Gaza strip so that he can build the “Riviera of the Middle East.”
Okay, I get that last part. Trump is a real estate developer who specializes in gaudy, ostentatious, appalling displays of gross wealth and egotism; of course he’d see an opportunity in Gaza, which is beach front property on the Mediterranean. It probably felt like a task he could actually do well, as contrasted by everything political he can’t do, and who doesn’t like a chance to show off their actual expertise? I think he thought about it like a resort development project he was pitching, and he can’t understand why nobody else can see his vision; I bet he made at least one call to a model-maker whose services he has used in the past. And I bet he was stunned that nobody else agreed with his idea. All of which helps to show that he has the mentality of a child, and maybe he’s just pouting until everyone else decides his idea was the best and then they’ll come back and ask him to fix Gaza.
I mean, we literally did that with the Presidency of the United States. So I wouldn’t even consider it dumb for Trump to expect us all to come crawling back, asking him to do whatever he wants to do. I bet he’s counting on it. After all, when you’re a celebrity, you can do anything to them you want.
I hope all of the MAGA voters understand now what it feels like to be grabbed by a sexual predator. I’m sure the Palestinian people – everyone else in the world, really – would very much like to avoid that experience.
Now, if all of this is merely the actions of a shit-flinging gibbon, then that explains the stupidity of it all. There are some understandable motivations – power-seeking, for instance – which explains some of what Trump has done at least adequately. But I have not been able to think of an overarching goal which gets all of it to make sense. If tax cuts and regulation reduction shows a desire to help business, the tariffs fly in the face of that. If his real goal is to help (or just to please) the MAGA base, then that explains the racist culture wars, but not the lack of even attempted action on grocery prices or the cost of living. And if he really wanted to be a dictator for life, he not only wouldn’t have told the country that he was considering a third term, thereby tipping his hand, he wouldn’t have kept Hegseth and Mike Waltz after the Signal chat, because I guarantee you that what they did pissed off the military, whatever they may say in public (or not) and however they feel about Trump. Hegseth and Waltz – and Gabbard and Rubio and all the rest – actually genuinely put American pilots at serious risk of being shot down by the Houthis, who have advanced anti-aircraft weapons systems, and who have channels through Iran to Russian intelligence, which easily might have picked up the Signal chat PARTICULARLY SINCE STEVE WITKOFF WAS IN RUSSIA WHILE HE WAS PARTICIPATING IN THE CHAT.
One complaint I have about the Trump era: I don’t even know when to use all caps any more. Is that the most egregiously offensive aspect of the Signal chat? Or maybe it was the emojis? When is it time to yell? I want to yell all the time, but obviously I can’t do that. I have outrage fatigue.
Now, there is an obvious answer here, which would have pleased Trump’s base since they love when he is a heartless asshole, and it would have pleased the military, and it would have pleased the Republican party in Congress: he could have just fired everyone in that group chat. He loves firing people. It’s not even like he doesn’t want to signal that he made a mistake with his cabinet picks: he fired like 80% of his own picks during the first term, and the rabble just hooted and hollered and clapped their chapped hands and uttered such a deal of stinking breath that it choked him, and he fell down at it. (Sorry: that’s a Shakespeare reference. To The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, which I have taught often enough to have memorized some parts. I will have to write another post showing the comparisons between that play and Trump – and I better do it before he gets Et Tu’ed in the Senate, or else nobody will be impressed by my acumen.)
But no: Trump didn’t fire anyone. Which lost him (I would guess) support in the military and in congress, and indirectly with his base, who do not actually care about Pete Hegseth or Tulsi Gabbard or Mike Waltz: they care only about Trump. But they do generally support the military, so again, to shore up his own power and reputation, Trump should have fired them all, and made a big deal out of it. Tell me he couldn’t find another half-dozen nutballs to replace those “advisors” with. Are there no other alcoholic womanizing hyper-masculine douchebags in the military apart from Pete Hegseth? Seriously? And I even have a suggestion for someone to replace Gabbard as National Head of Intelligence: Maria Butina.
If Trump wants to be a dictator for real, he will never succeed without the full-throated support of the military; I don’t have to know any history at all to know that, but of course I know enough history to know that literally every single successful coup, ever, was carried off with the military’s complicity or at least tacit agreement and inaction.
So yeah, I don’t get it. Trump doesn’t make any sense to me.
But then I remembered this book I read with my book club. (By the way: I would HIGHLY recommend a book club like the one I am in. Half a dozen smart, involved people, and we read books that help us make sense of the madness of the modern world. It is – not necessarily comforting, because we read a lot of really disturbing shit; but it feels so very good to know that other people are thinking like you are and feeling like you are. Plus we get to have snacks, and the members who host our meetings make DAMN good snacks.)
Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein.
This is a fascinating and deeply depressing book. It explains the economic paradigm known as neoliberalism, championed most effectively by the Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman, and the effect that paradigm and Friedman have had not only on the United States, but on nations around the world. The title comes from another – uh, “expert” – whose ideas have had enormous influence on our world, a psychiatrist named Ewen Cameron. Cameron believed that people who had suffered terrible trauma in their lives, and who suffered the natural and inevitable consequences of that trauma, could be “cured” by replacing their traumatic memories with a tabula rasa: a blank slate. No memory of trauma, no psychological or emotional damage. He thought he could rebuild the person afterwards into a healthy and well-adjusted citizen. He experimented, therefore, with different ways that one could destroy a person’s memories, and eventually, a person’s whole personality, because the personality kept stubbornly resisting the attempts to erase the memories – almost like memory is an essential part of personality, or something. And so the process didn’t work, as any sane person could have guessed it wouldn’t; his attempts to erase a person’s memories and personality essentially just fragmented both, but never erased them. Klein doesn’t say because she doesn’t know what his real goal was, whether he wanted to help people and was just completely soulless, or if he was in fact a monster who wanted to destroy people, but when his theories didn’t pan out, he kept working on them – and ended up working for the CIA, finally creating for them a handbook on torture based on his work. The idea of it was that you could disorient someone so terribly that they would lose the ability to remember things like loyalty to their country or cause, or the consequences of revealing secrets they might have, and would therefore, in an incoherent state following the application of repeated and awful torture, be excellent sources of information because they wouldn’t even realize that they were revealing secrets, and so wouldn’t have to be coerced; and because they wouldn’t know who they were or what they were doing, they wouldn’t do things like conceal key pieces of information or lie at specific moments in order to protect whatever they were telling the CIA about.
The reason Klein talks about Cameron is because the basic system he created was what Klein calls the shock doctrine: in various tortuous and traumatic ways – frequently just literal electroshock, and frequently psychedelics administered without the knowledge and consent of his targets – Cameron would start with an incredible and overwhelmingly destructive attack on the psyche of his victims. He realized – or maybe it was the CIA that realized – that the most effective way to do this to a person was to remove anything that could be used as a solid base to stand on, mentally and emotionally speaking: Cameron is the reason why torturers now disorient their victims as much as they cause suffering, because that makes it easier and faster to eliminate any sense of self, any sense of identity: disrupt sleep, disrupt a sense of pattern or time passing, take away the victim’s knowledge of where they are, of what time it is, of what to expect, of who they are talking to, of anything and everything at all: do it all at once, as rapidly and overwhelmingly and completely as possible. This shock, either electric or psychological, was supposed to create the tabula rasa. And as I said, it didn’t, but it did effectively destroy people’s ability to resist control, and thus interrogation. And Klein’s insight was to recognize that Friedman and the neoliberals he taught and trained, and the political actors they influenced – there are several in the book, which is long and thorough, but perhaps the two most effective examples would be the George W. Bush administration, and Augusto Pinochet, the dictator of Chile from his 1973 coup through his overthrow in 1990 – used the same concept as a way to effectively short-circuit the democratic rule of law in countries they wanted to control.
Pinochet does it first, and he does it with the explicit assistance and advice of Milton Friedman himself, who advised Pinochet on how to establish a capitalist paradise after Pinochet had assassinated the democratically elected leftist president of Chile, Salvador Allende. Friedman’s advice was to take advantage of the shock of the coup and the violence that followed – Pinochet had been a general before his takeover, and so he knew very well the value of the military in overthrowing a legal government; he then used them to silence dissent by jailing political opponents, torturing them (of course) and in his own signature atrocity, having his enemies thrown out of flying helicopters – and force through the changes as rapidly as possible, before the people and any potential resistance could recover their balance and begin to push back. Pinochet did it, and it was largely effective (I’m leaving out a lot of this, of course – I recommend the book), and so it became the standard: the Shock Doctrine. Overwhelm people with something so outrageous, so devastating and unbelievable, that they won’t know up from down, day from night, or friend from foe, and then ram through your agenda before any potential resistance knows what’s happening. Exactly how Ewen Cameron taught the CIA (Who, of course, actively supported Pinochet, who replaced a leftist government with a far-right capitalist one – rule of law and liberties be damned) to overwhelm a person with a complete assault on all of their senses and touchstones, any sense of reality, so that their personality and therefore their resistance could be destroyed.
The book is a little out of date now; it was published in 2006. So of course the last use of the Shock Doctrine by neoliberal political actors that Klein talks about is the George W. Bush administration and 9/11. The terrorists created the shock: and the neoliberal Bush administration followed up with their agenda, mostly the USA PATRIOT Act and the rise of the surveillance state, along with, as Klein explains at length, the capitalist takeover of the military, pushing it through before anyone even knew what was happening, let alone how to resist. If Klein had written the book just two years later, she would have had another perfect example from the same actors: the way that the Bush White House got the TARP program passed directly after the economic collapse of 2007, which simply handed hundreds of billions of dollars to the very same corporate actors who had destroyed the global economy, as the administration enabled the Fed to purchase the “toxic assets” of companies that were, of course, “too big to fail.” If she had written the book fifteen years later, she could certainly have made much hay with the COVID-19 pandemic, though also I would argue that the incompetence of the first Trump administration, and the imperfect allegiance to neoliberalism that was held by the Biden administration, meant that less was done to change this country, and that opportunity was – uhhh, “lost.” I guess. But you can definitely see small instances of the Shock Doctrine being utilized, first in the Paycheck Protection Program that allowed anyone who wanted to get free money to apply for loan forgiveness; and then in some of the more controversial executive orders that both Trump and Biden used – such as Order 42, which kept asylum seekers in Mexico in order to quarantine them indefinitely.
But the neoliberal grip on the country, which probably peaked during Bill Clinton’s presidency if not George W. Bush’s (Every president since Reagan has been a neoliberal, regardless of party. George H.W. Bush was bad at it, possibly because he was actually concerned with helping the country; and Joe Biden moved away from his neoliberal roots, partly because he was influenced by our own Wizard of Oz, Bernie Sanders. Trump is a neoliberal, but also a shit-flinging gibbon, so not nearly as effective as Clinton or Reagan or even Obama.), has been slipping, under both Trump and Biden. So I don’t necessarily see the same unified, effective effort to achieve neoliberal goals (Complete laissez-faire economy, total free market – for details, read the book, or listen to Unfucking the Republic, who have a special, warm hatred for Milton Friedman) happening under Trump the first time, and especially not now – the tariffs are, if there is a God and any justice, making Milton Friedman flip over and over and over in his grave – but in thinking about Trump, and why anyone would want to support him in EVERYTHING that he is doing, I remembered this book.
And so now I’m wondering.
Let me also clarify: I do believe that Trump has handlers. The first term it was Steve Bannon, primarily, and maybe it still is; maybe it’s Russell Vought, the architect of Project 2025 and the director of the Office of Management and Budget. Bannon and Vought are both white supremacists who seek a theocracy, Vought including a neoliberal paradise and Bannon imagining a full-on Reich. I think anyone with more brains than morality, which includes almost everyone in Washington and certainly everyone in the administration (To be fair, Trump has, I suspect, very little in the way of functioning brain cells – but he is entirely amoral and frequently immoral, so “more brains than morality” is so low a bar it’s basically just a floor for the Donald), can manipulate Donald Trump as easily as breathing: tell him he’s a genius, make him feel like he is about to be asked to explain something but you won’t ask him if he just makes this very smart, very good decision, and then when he agrees not only that he should make that decision but it was originally his very smart idea, praise him for his intelligence and his ungodly machismo. Lather, rinse, repeat. I can’t imagine that everyone who wants to wield power in Washington would give up this golden opportunity to be the power behind the idiot.
But I can’t believe anyone would want all of what Trump is doing – or that someone who really wanted to control him would be unable to stop or blunt or reduce some of his stupid fucking ideas. If Vought wants the federal government eliminated so that white supremacy can reign again, why wouldn’t he want the dipshits in the Signal chat to be fired? (Though as I write that, I remember that incompetent government advances the agenda… so maybe this is the right guy to look at if we want to find the puppetmaster.)
So I’m wondering. What if Trump himself, and Elon Musk and DOGE, this whole administration, with its incredible stupidity and its incessant destruction of everything good, carried out entirely haphazardly and with brainless abandon – and yet ALL BAD as though it really was planned – is actually just the shock? What if the goal is to disorient us all so much, to make us all lose faith in so many things, that we don’t resist when the actual agenda is put into place, because we won’t even know who we are or where we are, let alone what is being done to our country?
I don’t know that this is true – I’m a little thrown, now, by realizing that a lot of this might fit in with Vought’s agenda – but I think it does make sense. I’ve always thought of Trump as the distraction: the gibbon flinging shit is impossible to look away from, and hey presto, tax cuts and the repeal of Obamacare. That last was stopped, finally by John McCain, who, I suspect, was not very susceptible to the disorientation of being tortured. (RIP, Senator. We miss you. Even if we don’t miss all of your policies and positions.) And maybe that’s all it is – but the problem is, if I’m right and ALL of this is the distraction, all of it part of the grand application of shock to the whole country and maybe the whole world, then either the plan is already happening while we are reeling – or it hasn’t started yet. And if it hasn’t started yet, I have to assume it is intended to be something so much worse than what we are currently dealing with, that they can’t try to put it in place until after the full shock has sent us all into a tailspin of confusion and desperation, unable to resist control.
I think I need to get my book group to read Project 2025.
And maybe The Handmaid’s Tale.
Just Dusty 