American Psycho
Don't get used to Trump's Muzak of Insanity
Editor’s Note: It’s only 20 days until the election! Are you excited?!!! Matt’s not! He’s dreading every miserable second of it! So send any non-political questions to askmattlabash@gmail.com, for post-election safekeeping. We’ll need some sanity-saving diversions during the coming civil war.
Dear Matt,
Charlie Sykes and quite a few others have written about Trump losing the 2024 election. If Trump loses, MAGA won't believe it and will take matters in their own hands. The courts will be flooded with R lawsuits. The process of counting and certifying ballots may be held up for who knows how long. Musk will amplify lies on X. Marjorie Taylor Greene says that Trump haters can control the weather. Since that is true, can we put hurricanes, tornadoes, and all kinds of hail all over Trump's people? Dude, what do we do?
Mac Daddy
First, you calm down. Because when everyone around you is losing their heads, that’s precisely the worst time to lose yours.
Second, no. “They” — as MTG mysteriously put it — cannot control weather/atmospheric happenings in order to eliminate large quadrants of the population. Why They/The Jews would want to eliminate several states that are up for grabs is anyone’s guess. But Marge has never been a stickler for logic. So I’m guessing that’s just her ‘roid rage talking. She is, after all, a gym rat, and can bench twice her weight in bullshit. And if The Joooos/Deep State (usually one and the same in a conspiracist’s handbook) could do such things, I suspect they’d have already aimed a meteorite at her unnaturally large head. If that were possible — and it’s not — I’d have already max’ed out my contribution to the Meteorites For Marge Fund, since she is a cancer on our body politic. Though perhaps I’m slandering cancer.
Third, neither Charlie (my former colleague) nor I can tell the future. But as usual, I suspect Charlie’s pessimism is well-justified. In the MAGAverse, there are only two plausible outcomes for this election:
1. Donald Trump wins in a landslide, even if polls say this race is as tight as ‘nads on a dwarf.
2. If he doesn’t win, that means the election is fixed.
In fact, Trump’s already claimed the election’s fixed, and he hasn’t even lost it yet. And this should trouble those who aren’t big fans of crypto-fascism: he’s well-poised to win, currently ahead in six out of seven battleground states. I actually like his chances. By which I mean, I dislike America’s chances of regaining sanity. Whatever happens, we’re likely in for a very rough ride.
But before we actually get into the deep ugliness, let’s take in a moment of beauty. Which if you’re a regular here, you know I don’t invoke idly. I truly believe beauty is a balm for troubled spirits. So here’s something I posted on Substack Notes last week when the Northern Lights unexpectedly showed up on my doorstep.
Everybody feel better? Good. Put that feeling in a to-go box, because now it’s time to feel worse with some hard truth, which might make me lose a few paid subscribers. To which I say, “I hope we can still be friends with benefits. Please leave my sweatshirt in the drawer.” But if you can’t stomach hard truth, you’re probably in the wrong place anyway.
And the hard truth is this:
Donald Trump is a no-joke authoritarian psycho.
Sorry, but that doesn’t make me a liberal, which I’m not. Or a neocon, which I’m not. Or a tool of the Deep State, which I’m not. It just makes me a clear-eyed acknowledger of objective reality. I understand reality’s not for everyone. But if you refuse to see the magnitude of the present mess, allow me to replay some of the highlights from my Drudge Report doomscroll of just the last week, stream-of-consciousness-style, without belaboring the particulars:
Trump escalates rhetoric on outlawing political dissent and criticism……”The enemy From within”: Trump calls Democrats more dangerous than U.S. foreign adversaries….. How he may try to challenge voting results if he loses again……Swastika flags flown during Trump boat parade in Florida……Chris Christie becomes latest to sound alarm over Trump’s ‘significant’ mental decline……Poll: Fifth of Gen Z Americans think Hitler has some ‘good ideas’ and wasn’t evil….Milley warning: Trump ‘fascist’…danger to USA…….Before MAGA conversion, JD Vance said Biden won 2020 legitimately…..Meteorologists in danger as conspiracies surge……Fox again cuts away after unhinged rambling…..MAGA maniacs going all in on deranged hurricane conspiracies…..Bannon has called his “army” to do battle, no matter who wins in November....Woodward Blockbuster: Trump close relationship with Putin, many phone calls in the past few years …..The Don secretly sent covid tests to Putin during 2020 shortage….Tech Bro fanboys wanted The Don jailed after Jan 6……MAGA trying to rig ‘24 the way they claimed ’20 was rigged?
Any of those stories, if true — and exactly nobody has proven they aren’t — are horrible. But let’s just take the first of those, the one that’s really sticking me: “Trump escalates rhetoric on outlawing political dissent and criticism.” Which if we’re to take Trump at all seriously, which most of his supporters have a vested interest in not doing (“Oh, that’s just Trump being Trump!,” even as they root on his worst excesses), we’re not supposed to believe either him or the knuckle-dragging, room-temperature-IQ’ed minions who will populate his next administration (think Kash Patel or Corey Lewandowski or General Michael Flynn) will exact revenge against his critics and/or whomever they’re displeased with for not being a member of the cult. But what else do they have to do? It’s not like they’re actually interested in governing.
The story pointed out that Trump has recently suggested that his opponent, Kamala Harris, is a “criminal.” (Even if you’re not fond of her, unlike her serially-indicted, convicted-on-34-felony-counts opponent, she’s not.) He has suggested on several occasions that journalists who don’t favor him with their coverage should be prosecuted. He has threatened to go after private companies who have favored his opponent, and has even suggested that criticism of judges who have ruled in alignment with him is “illegal,” that anyone engaging in such activity “should be punishable by very serious fines and beyond that.”
In other words – and though I am a Christian, you’ll forgive my un-Christian language here — Donald Trump is a fucking authoritarian psycho. Or is at least doing a very convincing impression of one. (Novel idea: if he doesn’t want us to think he is, he could stop deliberately speaking like one.) And sorry, Trumpster friends and family and former colleagues and current apologists who refuse to acknowledge the magnitude of his deranged rhetoric. But if you don’t give him proper credit for his dangerous utterances, then you think he’s an even bigger natural liar than I do. Which doesn’t speak well of him. Or of you, if you’re willing to overlook it. (The only thing that’s more dangerous than his dishonesty, at this point, is his honesty.)
But if there is one headline, above all, that bothered me most, it was this one: “Christians flock to Washington to pray for America to turn to God — by electing Trump.” I’m a self-identifying Christian, one who has spent most of my life attending evangelical churches. But praying for America to return to God by electing Trump? Isn’t that sort of like praying for America to return to modesty by electing Kim Kardashian? Or by returning to agrarianism by electing Ru Paul?
It’s a self-cancelling proposition.
I’m going to speak in overtly spiritual terms here — so my atheist readers can sit this one out, or go play in Sam Harris’s comments section or something — but too many of my fellow Christians seem to think that God needs Trump. Rather than the other way around.
What way too many of them never seem to consider is that God may very well be using Trump, but not as Trumpsters think. Not as the fulfillment of God’s will, but as the booby prize conferred by God’s wrath. Maybe he’s leaving us to our own devices, and has had it with us. And more specifically, maybe he has had it with his so-called people, whose holy book instructs them to be a light unto this world, but who continuously embrace their own darkness, not to mention the Dark Angel that’s become their avatar for exacting all their revenge fantasies. This, while blaspheming God by pretending it’s all getting carried out in his name.
But I’ve read the red letters in our gospels. And that ain’t the Christ I serve. If it were, I wouldn’t be serving him at all. I’d be off in Sam Harris’s comments section with my atheist friends, instead of here, telling you something you don’t want to hear, but need to.
As my one-week doomscroll suggests, Trump — and his enablers/accomplices — are responsible for so much chaos per day, that it is easy to become inured to the Muzak of his insanity. To surrender to the normalness of his abnormality. But that’s not what we’re commanded to do.
In the Old Testament book of 1 Kings, chapter 19, the prophet Elijah is on the run for his life. Without getting into the whole backstory, things were bleak. So bleak, that Elijah sat under a broom bush in the wilderness, praying for death. As the story tells it, he then traveled for 40 more days and 40 nights, until he reached Horeb — the mountain of God — where he entered a cave to spend the night.
There, the word of the Lord came to him, telling him to go stand on the mountain before his God. A great and powerful wind broke up the rocks, but God was not in the wind. After the wind came an earthquake, but God was not in the earthquake. And after the earthquake, a fire. But God was not in the fire. Instead, after getting Elijah’s attention, he came to Elijah in what the book calls “a still small voice.”
It’s the voice we should all be listening for. And it can be hard to hear sometimes, when everyone’s blasting the Muzak of Insanity.
Bonus Track: I was wrestling with a few different songs today, but this one seems apt. World Party’s “Ship of Fools” — a 1987 tune with an updated video. World Party was essentially a one-man band headed by the Welsh singer and multi-instrumentalist, Karl Wallinger. (He also played with The Waterboys.) Sadly, Wallinger died of a stroke this past March at age 66. Or less sadly when looked at another way, maybe the lucky bastard got out just in time.