A NEWSLETTER FROM DAVID CORN |
A NEWSLETTER FROM DAVID CORN |
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Trump Bibles and Other Stunts: The Absurdity of Now |
By David Corn April 2, 2024 |
Donald Trump supporters wave a “Trump or Death” flag at a rally in front of Trump Tower on March 25, 2024, in New York City. John Lamparski/AP |
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These are times that try our souls, to paraphrase Thomas Paine. That is, if you care about democracy, climate change, women’s freedom, civil and informed discourse, AI, social and economic equity, and the future of humanity. There have always been struggles for progress, as people have fought for equality and justice, defying established ideas and entrenched power. But what makes the current moment so aggravating (at least for me) is the idiocy. The battle for progress, during this time of immense challenges, is not just a confrontation against the mighty interests of the status quo; it runs smack into excessive stupidity. Or perhaps absurdity is the more accurate term.
Just about every day in this era shaped by Donald Trump—now close to entering its 10th year—we encounter the absurd. Our politics are dominated by it, weighed down by the crazy and the outrageous. We no longer wage ideological contests over important policy battles. What to do about health care? What is the best tax rate structure? Instead, we confront the irrational and the ludicrous. Doesn’t it get to you?
This past week we saw the outlandish spectacle of Trump becoming a salesman for the Bible—that is, a special edition “God Bless the USA” Bible that sells for $59.99 a pop. The former reality TV celebrity will get a cut of the sales, along with fellow co-endorser Lee Greenwood, the country singer who wrote “God Bless the USA.” Of all the grifting Trump has done through his decades of hornswoggling, this may be the most laughable. He has in the past demonstrated he knows little about this book, and a quick check of the Ten Commandments (King James Version) shows that Trump has violated most of them. Idol worship? Check. Taking the name of the Lord in vain? Check. Not keeping the Sabbath holy? Check. Coveting thy neighbor’s wife and committing adultery? Check. (Remember the Access Hollywood audio: “I moved on her, actually. You know she was down on Palm Beach. I moved on her, and I failed. I'll admit it. I did try and fuck her, she was married.”) Bearing false witness? Check (over 30,000 times at least). Steal? Check. (See the contractors and others he stiffed.) Worshipping other gods? Well, he has compared himself to Jesus. And on Easter he promoted on social media an article written by a loony conspiracy theorist that proclaimed Trump “the Chosen one” and a “miracle” sent by God. Perhaps Trump honored his mother and father by splashing the family name on all his properties. As for not committing murder, he has fantasized about doing so.
It was perhaps inevitable that Trump, who’s been flimflamming the religious right for years, would add the Bible to his long line of hucksterism, which includes steaks, vodka, a board game, welcome mats, Trump University, NFT trading cards, sneakers, and his own mug shot. And it was especially laughable during a week he mounted his biggest scam: the public offering of stock in his money-losing social media company that landed him an on-paper windfall of billions of dollars. (It also set up a pathway for anyone—a billionaire, a lobbyist, a foreign government—to curry favor with Trump and increase his wealth by purchasing this hyper-overvalued stock.) Once upon a time, a stunt like this brazen Bible profiteering would have a scandalized and indicted politician widely ridiculed and even draw sweeping rebukes from religious figures. Not so with Trump. It’s just another day. And it’s maddening that his millions of devotees—evangelical Christians or not—are not put off; they’re easily suckered by this. This move did provide fodder for Saturday Night Live:
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Let’s turn to another Trump stunt. Last week, he showed up at the wake of slain New York police officer Jonathan Diller, who was tragically shot and killed last Monday when he approached an illegally parked car. Trump, the target of four criminal prosecutions, exploited the occasion to claim he’s a law-and-order politician who loves cops. Yet Trump has been supporting and acclaiming the January 6 criminals who assaulted scores of police officers. At least 140 cops were injured that day. At his campaign rallies, Trump enters to a chorus of J6 defendants singing the national anthem. He has praised the insurrection rioters as “unbelievable patriots” and vowed to pardon them. In doing all this, he glorifies treasonous violence and its perps. This doesn’t alienate him from his base, the GOP, law-and-order conservatives, or police unions. Worse, Trump’s blatant hypocrisy—driven by his authoritarian impulses—doesn’t make headlines. The New York Times article on Trump’s appearance at the wake didn’t bother referring to his soft-on-crime stance regarding the J6ers until the penultimate paragraph, where it noted that Trump has “recently voiced support for those imprisoned in connection with their roles during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.” That downplayed Trump’s celebration of the brownshirt violence he incited.
But the brother and father of Brian Sicknick, a police officer who died after the January 6 assault, slammed Trump’s appearance at the gathering for Diller. Charles Sicknick, the father, told the Daily News that Trump “makes sure he gets his face out there. The guy’s a criminal. He’s the reason my son is dead—because of the riot at the Capitol. He’s a publicity hound. Trump does whatever will get him votes and helps Donald Trump. There’s nothing good about that man.” Still, millions buy Trump’s law-and-order con.
Days later, Trump went further with this bunk. On social media, he posted a video of a truck emblazed with Trump imagery that had a lifelike image on its tailgate of President Joe Biden hog-tied, as if he had been kidnapped. This was yet another instance of Trump embracing political violence. His endorsement of such suggestive messaging falls into the category of stochastic terrorism—the demonization of a person or group so that they might become the target of violence. Once upon a time, this endorsement of hate would have drawn denouncements from across the political spectrum. But no longer. And this was hardly a first for Trump. As I wrote in September:
There have long been many instances of Trump encouraging political violence. Axios has compiled a list. As has ABC News. And Vox. And the New York Times. Often, it’s been tough-guy bluster, with Trump telling law officers to handle suspects roughly, pledging to shoot looters, or saying to attendees at his rally that it’s okay to beat up protestors. Stochastic terrorism is more indirect and perhaps more effective: It’s pinning a bull’s-eye on the back of an opponent in a volatile situation—perhaps suggesting the world would be safer without this supposed threat—knowing this could lead to violence against that target. It’s indirect incitement, inspiring someone else to do the dirty work.
Here's a bold prediction: This won’t cost Trump any support or change how the media cover him day to day. Trump’s campaign spokesman Steven Cheung even had the chutzpah to respond to this episode by claiming “Democrats and crazed lunatics” have “called for despicable violence against President Trump and his family.” The both-sides MSM allowed Cheung to promote this disinformation.
With Trump, every day is Upside Down Day. Or Opposite Day. Or Bizarro Planet Day. Or Alternative Facts Day. As he constantly scrambles the news cycle, our political media system doesn’t know how to contend with this. It’s all so dumb—though dangerous, nonetheless. Trump is a driver of the political inanity that imperils American democracy. He is not merely pushing a wrongheaded agenda; he is constructing and advancing narratives that encourage and depend upon imbecility and ignorance. The staying power of this approach is maddening for anyone who wants a straight-up fight over, say, housing policy.
It's exhausting to have to face this nonsense on a daily basis. No surprise, news consumption has generally decreased. And that’s the point: Trump’s constant yammering and hammering (of decency and rational debate) is meant to wear down those who are not cult members hanging on every word from Dear Leader. He knows that his never-ending torrent of crap is numbing, particularly for the media. Who can keep up? And if he infuriates and exasperates the rest of us, well…Mission Accomplished. At the end of the day, we’re left frustrated and perhaps alienated—which could weaken the resolve to engage fully in the fight against the authoritarianism and know-nothingness that Trump advances. But for inspiration, we can turn to Stephen Colbert.
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When the jesters tell the truth better than the rest of the media, we are in trouble.
Got anything to say about this item—or anything else? Email me at ourland@motherjones.com. |
The Next Our Land Zoom Get-Together |
About two weeks ago, I held another Zoom gathering for Our Land premium subscribers, and we all had a ball. Several dozen Our Landers came ready to chat and vent. Not surprisingly, we talked a lot about the presidential race, and I got to test out ideas for subsequent issues on Trump Normalization Syndrome and other topics. In attendance were both regulars and first-timers. It was like a cable news show with a live audience. And I vowed—once again—to hold these sessions more often. Too often, the weeks fly by with one bonkers news cycles after another (see the above rant).
My solution: commit in advance. That is, pick a date and stick to it. So the Our Land team studied long-term weather patterns, astrological charts, and tidal schedules and picked April 17 at 8 p.m. ET for the next shindig. Now we all can put it on our calendars and plan accordingly.
A reminder: This gabfest is open only premium subscribers—those gallant and noble souls who kick in a few bucks each month to keep Our Land alive and well, as well as available, in its limited version, for others. If you’ve ever wondered what goes down at the Our Land speakeasy, now’s your chance. There’s plenty of time between now and April 17 for non-subscribers to sign up here. As you know, if you’ve read my previous beseechments, we need to pump up the premium subscriptions so that Our Land remains a thriving venture and we can continue our current operations. Please consider joining the mighty Our Land backers—whether or not you want to yak with us on April 17.
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The Watch, Read, and Listen List
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The Freaks Came Out to Write: The Definitive History of the Village Voice, the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture, Tricia Romano. When I was in high school, on many Wednesdays I would trek the mile or so from my house to the local stationery store that had a newsstand loaded with papers and magazines. The prize I sought was the new issue of the Village Voice. I lived in a New York City suburb, but a world away from the grit and hipness of the Big Apple. Still, I was entranced with the Voice. It was a chronicler of cool, for music, movies, theater, and art; it was a source for crusading journalism that could not be found elsewhere. It was boho, high-brow, obsessed with pop culture, and kick-ass—and full of, uh, voice, with columnists, reporters, and contributors pursuing and expressing their devotions with guts and literary flair (and, occasionally, with nearly incomprehensible prose). I relished the investigative reporting by Jack Newfield and others that tore the hide off the corruptions of NYC politics and government. I pored over the music reviews and received a graduate-level education in criticism. This was the world I wanted to live in.
A few years later—while still in college—I got my first freelance political journalism gig: being a leg man for Joe Conason and Jim Ridgeway, two Voice reporters covering the 1980 Democratic convention in New York City. I ran around town hitting various convention-related events and phoned in or dropped off my notes—and was thrilled to see a few sentences in their reporting that were the result of my labors. Bigtime: I was—in a way—in the Voice. (Years later, I would work with Ridgeway at Mother Jones, and recently Conason asked me to blurb his forthcoming book on the long history of right-wing grift.)
Not long after that, I had my first job in journalism at the Nation, which was located a couple of blocks from the offices of the Village Voice. As a member of the NYC journalism club—as lowly as I was—I got to hobnob with legendary Voice writers. Going to lunch at the Cedar Tavern, once a popular hangout for abstract expressionists and beat writers (including Jack Kerouac), and witnessing Nat Hentoff, the civil liberties columnist at the Voice, compose his latest article at the bar in longhand was thrilling. (This was before the ever-cranky Hentoff became an opponent of abortion.) Eventually, I would even freelance for the Voice, but I never ended up on its payroll.
This is a very long way of saying that I am enjoying the hell out of a new oral history of the Voice—The Freaks Came Out to Write—by Tricia Romano, a Voice veteran. She covers its storied history from the paper’s founding in 1955 by Norman Mailer, Dan Wolf, Ed Fancher, and John Wilcock to its shut-down in 2017. (The Voice now exists in a limited online version.) The book is jammed with feuds and conflicts—between writers and management, between writers and owners (one of them for a while was Rupert Murdoch), and between writers and writers.
Frequently blows were almost thrown (or, more than once, actually thrown) and on a regular basis contributors would assault other contributors in their columns or the letters section, as staffers battled over the cultural and political currents of the day. Culture writer Stanley Crouch, an influential jazz critic, would brawl with younger writers who celebrated hip-hop. During the Great Yam Controversy, investigative and political reporters on the staff—derided by other VVers as “the whiteboys”—decried the decision to front-page an article by C. Carr on performance artist Karen Finley, whose art included smearing food (such as yams) on herself (and perhaps into her privates) while reciting profane monologues. They argued this devalued the serious journalism the Voice featured on its venerable cover. The back-of-the-book culture gang saw it differently. It seemed a cataclysmic clash at the time, but the Voice survived.
The history of the Voice is the history of New York politics and arts. With its mission-propelled and muscular journalism—such as Newfield’s annual features highlighting the 10 worst landlords and the 10 worst judges—it offered a role model for alternative weeklies across the country. It created a platform for pioneering feminist writers and LGBT writers (though it was late, like much media, to the AIDS epidemic). It placed Off-Broadway theater, punk music, rap, avant-garde film, street art, and much more on a wider cultural map. It provided a platform for a new style of raw and edgy photojournalism and pioneered media criticism with Alexander Cockburn’s acerbic “Pressclips” column. (Years later, I would feud with Cockburn at the Nation.) Via the never-stop-digging reporting of Wayne Barrett, the Voice was on to Donald Trump’s sleazy ways long before the rest of the world. Music critic Robert Christgau became the dean of rock music journalism.
Romano chronicles it all in the voices (pun intended) of dozens of writers and editors who were part of this glorious and often chaotic circus. There’s some score-settling and much exposing of dirty laundry. And some of the romance of the VV is stripped bare. But that’s all in keeping with the rambunctious spirit of the Voice. As an oral history, the book meanders at times through this long narrative, and my hunch is that a few of the episodes, as described in these first-person accounts, might befuddle an uninitiated reader. Yes, you had to be there. But Romano deftly captures the tempestuous life of one of the more important media outlets in American history. A former Voice writer, Mark Jacobson, told her, “It could have gone on forever if it weren’t for the internet.” The nostalgist in me wishes the old Voice had lasted forever. But what this book illustrates most is that the Voice was of its time—across more than half a century. And there may be no better epitaph for its band of passion-driven journalists.
“Ripsaw Review,” Lost Ox. Dylan DiSalvio is the technologist at Mother Jones and juggles numerous responsibilities, including helping to zap out this newsletter twice a week. Without him, my copy would remain inside my laptop. Dylan has another gig: He’s one of the three members of Lost Ox, a band based in Portland, Oregon, that describes itself as “genre-blending jammers” that combines “elements of funk, psychedelia, jazz, Americana, and progressive rock.” The other day, he sent me the group’s latest tune, “Ripsaw Review.” It’s the second single off the forthcoming album, Tale of the Fool, which comes out next month.
As Dylan, who wrote this number, tells me, the lyrics of this song were inspired by a story related by American poet, songwriter, and radical labor organizer Utah Phillips, who died in 2008. They cover the tale of Tom Scribner, an early 20th-century lumberjack, radical labor organizer, and free-press advocate. He ran two newspapers, the Lumberjack News and Redwood Ripsaw. In Phillips' account, Scribner got in Dutch with the lumber bosses, who fired him when they learned about his muckraking efforts. Now that’s my type of Paul Bunyan, and the musical stylings of the tune would do the Grateful Dead proud.
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Read Recent Issues of Our Land |
March 30, 2024: Accountability time for Trump’s henchmen; Dumbass Comment of the Week (Robert Kennedy Jr. and Nicole Shanahan); the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more.
March 26, 2024: Donald Trump and the United States of Amnesia; No Labels, RIP?; Bad River’s inspiring ride; “Tennessee Rise” lifts up a Senate campaign; and more.
March 23, 2024: Trump Normalization Syndrome—a threat to the USA; the most important 1 percent in 2024; Dumbass Comment of the Week (Ari Fleischer); the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more.
March 19, 2024: It’s time to start worrying about Christian nationalism; Constellation is lost in space…and time; the wonderful musical party Karl Wallinger left behind; and more.
March 16, 2024: Time to unleash Kamala Harris to trigger Trump; Our Land needs you; Dumbass Comment of the Week (Dwight D. Opperman Foundation); the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more.
March 12, 2024: Jared Kushner and the award that’s not good for the Jews; old cops versus new cops in Criminal Record; James Grady delivers a different mystery with The Smoke in Your Eyes; and more.
March 9, 2024: Trump’s back on top, and this is not fine; Dumbass Comment of the Week (Mark Robinson); the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more.
March 5, 2024: The threat to democracy from white rural rage; the common flaw of Maestro and Napoleon; Tierney Sutton’s jazzy take on the racial wealth gap; and more.
March 2, 2024: Barbara McQuade on disinformation in 2024; Richard Lewis, RIP; Dumbass Comment of the Week (Sen. Tommy Tuberville); the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more.
February 27, 2024: The new “It Can Happen Here” project; the darkness of True Detective: Night Country; and more.
February 24, 2024: The racism is the point; the Smirnov affair; Dumbass Comment of the Week (Robert F. Kennedy Jr.); the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more. |
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Got suggestions, comments, complaints, tips related to any of the above, or anything else? Email me at ourland@motherjones.com. |
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