Potemkin village populism
Trump thinks he's fooling the public, but he's only deceiving himself.
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Some observers take umbrage at descriptions of Trump’s increasingly aggressive attacks on the nation’s cities as diversions. Trump’s a fascist, they declare, so how can you call his actions “mere” distractions?
Yet Trump’s entire political career, and particularly the last six months, has been characterized by an often desperate effort to change the topic with ever more dangerous authoritarian gambits.
These gambits are distractions, but they are also catastrophes.
A tale of ruler-pleasing lies
In 1783, Grigory Potemkin, a general and lover of Russian Empress Catherine II, prepared a special treat for Catherine’s tour of the territories Russia had taken by force from the Ottoman Empire and renamed New Russia, including Crimea and other parts of what is now Ukraine.
Potemkin, who Catherine had named governor of Crimea, wanted the Empress’s support for what was likely to be another war with the Ottomans. But the colonies in which the Russians had been engaging in ethnic cleansing were in a sorry state.
The story goes that Potemkin set up a series of “mobile” fake communities, complete with Russian villagers. These have gone down in history as “Potemkin villages.” They extended all along the route of the Empress’s journey down the Dnipro River, the goal being to make it appear as though the new colonial settlements were thriving and therefore worthy of fighting for.
Historians have questioned the accuracy of the tale, which portrays Catherine, who was no fool, as a dupe. But the relevance of the story to our current times is not so much about the accuracy of the particulars as about the underlying dynamics.
As life in the United States now reminds us every day, dictators often rely on their stooges to help them stage alternative realities. They do this not because the rulers believe those fictions are real, but because would-be kings — like Donald J. Trump — enjoy forcing others to accept their transparent lies.
But as the Trump 2.0 regime has already demonstrated, it’s dangerous when a dictator begins to confuse his own idiosyncratic (and often performatively sadistic) fantasies with the desires of the public at large. Indeed, it can be downright dystopian.
Trump was elected to the presidency again based largely on a single promise: to increase the prosperity of middle America and lower the cost of living. A conventional politician with such a “mandate” would have entered office focused on fulfilling it.
But Trump is a professional huckster and a profoundly lazy man. So instead of tending to his promises to working Americans, he entered office immediately pursuing his own bizarre obsessions. He then proceeded to devise a series of Potemkin village-like distractions calculated to divert the nation’s attention.
The problem is that far from being popular, Trump’s distractions are themselves theaters of cruelty and nihilism that alienate more and more people, thus leading to the need for more diversions. Now, seven months into the regime, the nation is caught in a whirlwind of ever greater extremism as a self-appointed dictator tries to counter his diminishing popularity by taking actions that are increasingly unpopular, and in many cases outright evil.
The next “big thing”
The accuracy of Trump chronicler Michael Wolff’s more outrageous stories has been called into question. But Wolff — who spent many hours not only with Trump, but also Steve Bannon and Jeffrey Epstein — is unquestionably insightful regarding Trump’s motives and frighteningly debased mind.
According to Wolff, over the summer Trump became more and more concerned about the failure of his efforts to distract the public, the press, and particularly his own followers from his refusal to make good on his promise to release the DOJ’s Epstein files. As a result, Trump took to repeatedly declaring to his advisers that he needed a “big thing” to finally put Epstein — meaning his own association with the notorious child sex abuser and trafficker — behind him.
Faced with such a problem, a rational (if devious) politician in Trump’s place would rely on advisers to help him devise an effective diversion scheme. As Wolff (credibly) describes it, however, Trump never listens to others — he just talks endlessly, then comes up with his own answers. But Trump’s assumption that most Americans share his obsessions and hatreds is false.
As the Epstein scandal and Trump’s clumsy attempts to cover it up started making headlines last February and March, Trump responded by ramping up his illegal invasion of LA County, and with it the recorded and broadcast attacks on “criminal aliens” like housekeepers and agricultural workers. As polls confirmed, however, instead of cheering Trump on, most Americans were revulsed by assaults on immigrants as they worked in restaurants and took their kids to school.
Trump assumed his base would forget about Epstein when it learned immigrants were being torn from their families and imprisoned again. But that was not to be. The drumbeat of demands for the release of the documents only grew, and a House committee issued a subpoena for them before Speaker Mike Johnson peremptorily called a recess that ended this week.
The “New Russia” gambit
Faced with a threat that his past would catch up with him, Trump devised yet another diversion.
On August 8, apparently without even minimal preparation, Trump announced a meeting with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin in the former Russian territory of Alaska. Trump also signaled he was finally going to bring “peace” to a Ukraine being pummeled daily by Russian invaders that he had promised to deliver immediately upon reentering the White House.
Nearly a month later, no one has adequately explained what Trump was actually trying to achieve through the shambolic Putin II summit, which in its absurdity rivaled his 2018 encounter with the Russian dictator in Finland. But Trump seemed to believe he could please his followers (as well as his pal Putin) by getting the Ukrainians to agree to hand over large, as yet unconquered, portions of their country, thereby paving the way for the recreation of the “New Russia” Potemkin conquered for his Empress.
Trump may have even imagined that such a sham “peace” plan would win him the Nobel Peace Prize he covets so desperately. This, however, was just another Trump fantasy.
After Trump realized that Ukraine was not going to agree to be voided and that European leaders were not responding to his plan to cut up Ukraine with the same cheers that greeted Chamberlain as he announced the betrayal of Czechoslovakia to Hitler, Trump declared himself bored with the “peace process” and moved on to other performances.
Turning the army inward
Faced with the failure of one “Big Thing” and seeking another, Trump turned to his favorite theater of cruelty — the nation’s cities.
Drunk with the perceived “success” of his invasion of LA, Trump embarked on an even more ambitious effort to “clean up” the District of Columbia and end the “explosion” of crime there — never mind that crime in DC is at a 30 year low.
Had his DC stunt been devised in a minimally rationale way, Trump could well have shown up Democrats and pleased his own base by surging funds for actual law enforcement resources in a manner calculated to improve the quality of life in a city that has recently been faced with a punitive $1 billion dollar GOP budget cut. But that, of course, was never going to happen.
As it turned out, Trump’s “anti-crime” initiative, which includes not only federal law enforcement officers but also National Guard troops (now bearing wartime armaments) has been directed at terrorizing undocumented immigrants and people of color. DC’s municipal and even federal courts are being flooded with charges arising from such dangerous offenses as eating in parks.
Predictably, Trump’s sham anti-crime initiative is being rejected. A large majority of DC residents resoundingly oppose Trump’s invasion, as do the American people. A recent poll found that only 41 percent of Americans support Trump’s deployment of Guard troops in DC, and Trump’s overall approval rating on crime is now far underwater, at 42-54. Tellingly, after Trump’s handpicked prosecutor, Jeanine Pirro, announced her intention to throw the book at a man who threw a sandwich at federal agents, a grand jury refused to indict him on felony charges.
But instead of responding rationally to the nation’s rejection of his performative terror of DC residents, Trump has taken to declaring that he wants to take the show on the road by conducting similar invasions of other major cities.
A lost cause termination
Trump’s greatest political vulnerability is only beginning to enter the nation’s political consciousness.
While he won the White House by relentlessly promising to lower the cost of living, his economic “policies” have been so irrational that they are driving the nation towards a dynamic of stagflation the likes of which the US has not seen since the early 1980s.
After Trump’s initial announcement of huge tariffs on nearly every country but Russia nearly caused a meltdown in the bond markets and thereby threatened a near instantaneous recession, it momentarily appeared that he was going to back off. Instead, the president has created an alternative reality for himself in which tariffs — which have repeatedly led to economic contractions — are the key to prosperity.
Meanwhile, as tariffs ate into economic growth this summer, the MAGA majorities in Congress passed a hugely regressive budget bill that will fund tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans by assaulting healthcare coverage for millions of Americans.
Trump plainly senses just how dangerous a political position his economic nihilism has put him in. But instead of rethinking anything, he’s demonized a Federal Reserve that’s being forced to deal with the growing and potentially intractable problem of sticky inflation combined with weakness in the labor market.
Trump incoherently insists that the economy is going like gangbusters, but also is in need of massive rate cuts that he claims the Fed’s Open Markets Committee is nefariously refusing to provide.
As part of his scheme to blame the Fed for his accelerating economic problems, Trump attempted to force Fed Chair Jerome Powell out of office despite a recent Supreme Court opinion saying he can’t fire Fed governors at will. Trump staged a surprise visit to the Fed in which he planned to prove Powell had mismanaged a long-term renovation of the Fed’s officers by asserting that the cost of the project had just massively increased. Powell, however, quietly beclowned Trump by pointing out his figures were wrong.
Trump seems to have gotten the message that his threatened attempt to fire Powell would probably fail and could result in an immediate financial crisis, but he and his cronies have responded by making Fed Governor Lisa Cook their new target.
From an economic point of view, ousting Cook wouldn’t seem to accomplish much, since she’s known as a “dove” who generally favors lower interest rates. But the highly experienced and respected economist happens to be both a woman and Black, and Trump apparently assumes most Americans share in his bigotries. Accordingly, Trump has announced he is “firing” Cook for “cause,” based on wholly unproven charges of “mortgage fraud” having nothing to do with her professional activities.
The purported “for cause” termination of Cook is of a piece with Trump’s attempt to revive the “Lost Cause.” Cook grew up in a segregated town in Georgia where city officials filled in a public pool to keep Black children out of it, yet she succeeded in reaching the pinnacle of the economics profession.
Cook is a painful reminder to bigots of the successes of the Civil Rights movement they are assiduously working to undo. Trump likely believes he can convince people that the nation’s growing economic problems are the fault of a Black woman, not his own incompetence. But simply stating the proposition demonstrates its absurdity.
Trump is building and then burning down his Potemkin villages at an ever increasing rate. But unlike the fake villages Potemkin erected for his Empress, Trump’s theaters of cruelty and nihilism are not harmless diversions.
The violence and damage Trump is imposing on the nation is real. And while Trump imagines Americans cheering him on, his performative sadism is only a winning strategy in his own mind. In reality, he’s becoming more and more reviled.
That’s it for today
We’ll be back with more tomorrow. If you appreciate this edition, please do your part to keep Public Notice free by signing up for a paid subscription.
Thanks for reading.
Excellent article and explanation of what Trump is doing.
A senior Israeli cybersecurity official working directly under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was arrested in Las Vegas for soliciting a child for sex. The Trump Administration is complicit in 1) whisking the official out of the country and 2) arranging for his state-based attorney. Netanyahu denied he was arrested, except the arrest warrant says otherwise. A Trump-picked advisor defends the Israeli official.
https://hotbuttons.substack.com/p/trump-picked-advisor-defends-israeli