Last week, when HuffPost asked the White House who chose Hungary as the site of an upcoming meeting between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, responded: “Your mom did.” She was obviously trying to insult and delegitimise a representative of the liberal media. But the result was to reveal herself as a gross parody of a professional press secretary. The administration plans to mark America’s 250th anniversary with a UFC cage fight on the White House’s south lawn, an idea that seems ripped from the scabrous 2006 satire Idiocracy.
The Trump gang’s compulsion to debase and cheapen almost everything they touch is far more than a matter of style. Perhaps the most puzzling thing about the second Trump administration has been its attacks on pillars of American strength that pose no challenge to its ideology. It was predictable that the White House would gut support for the humanities, but not that it would defund pediatric cancer research. I expected it to try to eliminate the Department of Education, but not to deliberately wreck the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which helps communities in both red and blue states when they’re beset by disasters.
Some of this slashing and burning can be explained by the old-fashioned small-government fanaticism of administration personnel like Russell Vought, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget. But it also seems like a function of Trump’s abusive insecurity. Part of him wants to aggrandise the country to reflect his own inflated self-conception. And part of him seems to want to trash it out of rage at the limits to his dominance.
In The Emergency, an allegorical novel coming out next month, writer George Packer captures some of the lust for desecration animating the Trumpist right. The book hinges on a conflict between self-righteous Burghers, who live in cities, and resentful, paranoid rural people known as Yeomen. In a narrative turn that appears, in light of Trump’s video, quite prescient, the Yeomen make plans to bombard the Burghers’ city with faecal cannons. It’s as if Packer managed, for a moment, to tune into the president’s wavelength.
“There was something so audacious about it, so inventive and barbaric, so low,” he writes, adding, “It would break through the final restraint, and there would be no going back.”
