Reign Of The RINO
Month 1.5 of Trump 2.0
Well, I’m not going to pretend that I’ve been calmly following the exploits of Don and Elon for the last 4 weeks. Things have been pretty topsy-turvy. Trying to piece my life back together from my perch on a friend’s couch, while searching for a suitable replacement for the home and neighborhood that exploded into ash and twisted metal just two weeks before Trump took office.
And then moving into that wheeled replacement in a new and unfamiliar neighborhood. My news-following has been reduced to an hour or so each morning reading unbiased sources, and another hour of podcast discussions during my evening walks.
But, even while taking most of what’s gone on as glancing blows, the chaotic nature of his new regime has been impossible to ignore. And even harder to write about. A women that I met at a party Sunday, said that trying to process Trump and Musk’s exploits is like walking across a floor covered in ball-bearings.
That about says it for me. I’ve started writing five different pieces in the last two weeks, and by the time I approached the finish-line of each, the whole situation had changed.
It’s maddening.
As I wrote the words ‘TOOK Office’, a moment ago, the phrase felt unusually apropos. He hasn’t only inhabited the oblong headquarters of our government … he’s TAKEN it. Claimed it. Done everything in his power to possess and redefine it in his own bully-boy image. He’s grabbed the very idea of the ‘office’ of president, and turned it inside-out.
From all appearances, he intends not to ‘preside’ over congress - as his title implies - but to render congress obsolete. This is not a man who relishes the concept of civil service. This is a man who’s spent his life trying to assert his own alpha status. And if he’s ever possessed a teaspoon of humility, it’s long ago been cleansed from his soul by the obsequious flattery that any famously rich man encounters on the daily.
But all armchair psychology aside, the politics of the man have gone rogue. Anymore, Trump isn’t even pretending to be a conservative.
Thousands upon thousands of subscribers to Blue Collar Logic - my once-popular YouTube channel - called me a RINO when I took the word of every solid conservative leader and thinker in the country, that Joe Biden had legitimately defeated Trump in 2020.
RINO is, of course, an acronym for Republican In Name Only.
I’d never called myself a Republican, but now I was accused of being a fraudulent one. Because I failed to trade away every last bit of respect for our system of governance, and become instead, an unquestioning acolyte of a New York real-estate hustler. A branding savant who had pulled the cloak of conservative politics over his hulking frame simply for the purpose of achieving the greatest self-promotions coup of his long career.
That of becoming the most powerful single human on Planet Earth.
Back then, in his first term, he was working from a laundry list of conservative ideas and ideals, culled from the countless opinions of ‘ditto-head’ callers to AM talk-radio shows. So as long as he was ticking off those items, he did look like a man of Republican action.
But his abject inability to explain any of these concepts in the slightest detail, proved over and over how shallow a grasp he had on the methods of American governance. Or its aims.
After failing to earn a second term, any man who really cared about ‘The American Mission’, would have shored up his knowledge before running again. Come to deeper understandings of the issues that are really important, and the reasons we disagree about possible solutions.
Instead, when he gave any thought at all to what an average voter faces in the rough waters between paychecks, Donald Trump thought only about how he’d turn our vulnerabilities and frustrations into anger at the Democratic party.
In fairness though, if Democrats had themselves focused on those kitchen-table struggles, they could have developed real strategies for 2024. Rather than swarming the then-former president with indictments over minor issues that could easily have waited until 2025 … they might have helped Biden to communicate and sum-up his ‘bridge presidency’ fully enough that he’d be satisfied with handing off to a younger, more energetic candidate who spoke fluent Blue-Collar.
Somebody who could see that the focus on ethnic and gender identities was ripe to be replaced by a more universal focus on economic identities.
Instead they talked about and wrote about and schemed about burying Trump under enough legal baggage that he’d be disqualified in November of ‘24.
To say that this plan backfired on them - and on us all - is to be kind.
Much is said about how Trump turned legitimate anxiety over the effects of immigration and off-shoring of working class jobs … into resentment and outright hostility. His tirades of scapegoating certainly were bottom-feeder stuff as his rallies came back into the news after he’d dispatched the GOP competition.
But HATRED has been a political tool on both sides of our politics for at least the last three decades. (the historically savvy among you will know that it didn’t start then)
I released a video on January 21st, 2024, explaining why I thought left-biased media was so hyper-focused on DJT. It wasn’t so much confidence that they could expel him from the race. Rather, it was Trump’s willingness to embody everything that their rank and file finds loathsome about Republicans.
They NEEDED the specter of Donald Trump, according to my thinking, in order to pull together the various identity groups that no longer thought of themselves as bonded, each to the others, against ‘the oppressor’. They, Democratic political strategists, needed for Trump to be the rich, white devil who posed an existential threat to them all.
By the tried and true methods of Saul Alinsky, anti-oppression forces needed to focus not on such vagaries as ‘systemic racism’ or ‘crony capitalism’, but on one bad guy who puts a face on everything unjust in America.
Of course Trump’s base, being so emotionally invested in him, simply took every insult aimed at him as a personal affront to them. He was their standard bearer. Their ‘president in exile’. Their living martyr. Trump benefitted immeasurably by all of the unsuccessful prosecutions. The real result was a coalescing of his following into an army of hardened true believers.
Additionally, many ‘undecideds’, independents, and also disaffected Democrats struggling to pay their bills … remembered how wrong left-wing predictions had been about his first term being Hitleresque. Also how generally prosperous the country was in those pre-COVID years. Unconvinced by the tepid messaging of Democrats, these non-MAGA voters decided to give The Orange Terror another go-round.
How bad could it be, right?
The answer to that question has been in the news every minute of every day for the last six weeks. It can be very bad indeed.
Even after 10 whole years as a political force, Donald Trump seems clueless as to what is contained in our constitution, and why our founders took such pains to develop and reinforce our system of checks and balances.
Truly, this man is not only ignorant about the founding documents that have always obsessed Republican politicians, he’s profoundly disinterested in them.
If anybody is a RINO, it’s Donald J. Trump.
Frankly, I don’t know what the MAGA masses consider themselves to be. To the eyes of observers though, they seem little more than fan-boys and fan-girls rooting for their wrestler of choice as the sloppily-scripted mayhem ensues.
Less charitably, they seem like cultists who’ve parked their objectivity in some dark corner of their minds, in order to bathe in the sense of belonging and purpose that I’ve often pointed to as emotionally crucial to the human animal.
But I digress.
Here’s a definition of ‘conservative’:
”Conservatism is a cultural, social, and political philosophy and ideology that seeks to promote and preserve traditional institutions, customs, and values.”
Yeah. That’s what we always meant when we talked about a conservative mindset. I came to embrace that, within the context of Los Angeles, in the early decades of the twenty-first century. As what we now call ‘wokeness’ became an ever greater provocation to the non-trendy peeps, who simply wanted to live and let live.
I didn’t adopt a conservative outlook. I was just minding my own business, when others insisted that I’d become conservative. It’s a little bit akin to Mexican Americans who say “I didn’t cross the border. The border crossed me!”
The Overton Window, if you will, moved on while I was busy being who I’d always been.
I believe in personal liberty within the boundaries of societal structures linked to evolved-in features of homo sapiens.
I believe in stop-signs and speed-limits, both real and metaphorical. That shop-lifting ought to inspire a police-response rather than locking half of a department store’s goods behind plexiglass enclosures.
That school-children need and deserve discipline. That tattoos and piercings ought never have become the mass self-mutilation we now take as ‘normal’.
That social norms and social pressures actually enhance free societies, by lending a steady matrix against which progressive flourishes can be noticed and tested and accepted wherever they have proved themselves to be actual progress.
In my eyes, there is nothing as important to a stable society as stable families. Particularly ones where the male of the species and the female of the species learn from and influence one another … so that their children might do the same.
I believe that all should live modestly within their means, save their money, and strive to be fair in every human interaction. Ethics ought to be self-imposed, no?
But my own understanding of conservatism DOES accept that times change and cultures leave behind some patterns while adopting others.
The part of me that holds to familiar ways, strives as well to be open-minded. To say ‘yes of course’ to changes that bring measurable improvements without undermining our societal foundations.
I am at peace with what Trumpers have come to hate about being conservative. And that is to have a political identity that is somewhat stodgy by nature. A foot covering the brake-pedal of the enormous conveyance of culture. As it carries us all into the future.
A conservative, by his very nature, is not the cutting edge. His value is as a firm and restraining hand on that blade’s handle.
Liberals however, ARE the cultural vanguard. They are the ones who will change the language constantly. Develop the trends in fashion and food. Move our story-telling this way and that by dominating literature, film, television, and popular music.
Conservatives, by contrast, are doomed to be the foot dragging along the ground, calling out “Wait! Is all of this really good for us?”
It’s a thankless job, but somebody has to do it. Republicans like my parents and maybe like yours, took on that job and served as ‘the loyal opposition’ when Democrats were ascendant, and as the ‘rest and regroup’ people when they themselves held the power.
I know more than a few Democrats who miss actual Republicans desperately.
Long ago, conservative media personalities like Rush Limbaugh and his many imitators, began to reframe the natural tug-of-war between the future-forward party of liberals, and the tradition-friendly party of conservatives. These AM talkers pushed a fearful vision. The one side seeking to destroy America, and the other side seeking to prevent that destruction.
This simplistic reduction of the much more complicated realities of cultural evolution … made for the Manichean mental imagery held today by Trumpers.
If you speak to them, you will hear that they don’t just prefer Donald Trump to, say, Kamala Harris. They’ll tell you that only this one man can save us from the complete demolition being worked by those who voted for Harris.
When a fired-up MAGA-bro or MAGA-sista, presents his or her vision of what’s going on here, they will tell you - in all sincerity - that Democrats are more than half-way to turning The United States into a shattered godless dystopia. One bearing no resemblance to the world of their own childhoods. Or ours for that matter.
And so it is that - like any religionist considering his or her deity - Trumpists greet any internal doubts about their leader, as an opportunity to flex the muscles of ‘faith’ that have been strengthened, even as the sinews of their skepticism have atrophied and fallen slack.
They are NOT conservatives. Not anymore. They are now something that, should they ever snap out of it, will leave them with a terrible sense of having been conned.
But hey … isn’t that the very reason that people avoid news sources that can’t be counted on to affirm our existing assumptions? Isn’t that why we avoid talking to people who vote differently? Why we’d would rather not self-reflect honestly?
Oh the fatal limitations of the human brain.
That’s enough for now.
Thanks for reading. (thanks especially to those who’ve upgraded to a ‘paid’ subscription. very comforting in my precarious living situation)
Wish I’d have written that
I appreciate your eloquent contrast between the careful treasuring of traditional values of genuine conservatism and the boundary-breaking, bullying spirit of Trumpism. The fire that burned down Altadena was uncontained for far too long, leading to incalculable and tragic destruction. The spirit of the current administration feels like being in that kind of uncontrolled fire with no end in sight. We so need a sane conversation about what the boundaries should be in our society -- from the balance of powers to the tensions between law and freedom, individual goods and the common good. Conversations that can't be had at the level of shout or a roar. Conversations that just feel uncool to someone in the grasp of the fires of rage or vengeance or greed or lust. And then we need for those conversations to be common enough to influence decision-makers. It feels impossible right now, but all fires do burn out eventually...I am just so sad about everything that may be destroyed in the process.