The Horror

MAGA's Heart of Darkness

I’ll be doing another live chat with Max Read today at 1:30 pm in advance of our holiday break.

My column for The Nation is out — I talk about the groyper future of the GOP.

At long last, President Donald Trump’s grip on the GOP is slipping. There’s no Götterdämmerung, no dramatic denouement, no operatics in the dictator’s bunker. Trump is being dragged down by normal politics: He’s simply unpopular, dogged by a sex scandal and a lousy economy. The laws of gravity, it turns out, apply on Planet Trump. He’s a lame duck, and he’s just plain old. After dominating the news for a decade, he finds himself yesterday’s man. And like the little Nazi in Cabaret, Nick Fuentes and his army of groyper toads are croaking out “Tomorrow Belongs to Me.”

I may have spoken too soon. The decline of Trump seems to hold some dramatic spasms of madness after all. I’m sure everybody has seen that post: Trump’s truly deranged rant in the wake of the murder of Rob and Michele Reiner. If not, here it is.—

We all knew Trump was a terrible person and certifiable, but this actually shocked me. He’s basically implying that, one way or another, Reiner died for his opposition to Trump. “Due to the anger he caused others.” Trump seems to have believed—or fantasized—that a supporter killed Reiner, and he was gleeful about it. Now, he may not be as evil as the monstrous dictators of the 20th century, but he routinely sounds more insane in public than they ever did. Hitler and Stalin were sure to associate their persons with something greater than themselves: the Volk or the march of history. To find an analogy for bloody-minded blather on this level, one has to look to petty tyrants like Idi Amin, who really may be the historical figure who most resembles Trump. It’s a campy sort of villainy: it sounds like the Penguin addressing Gotham, or it’s as if Andrew Lloyd Webber did Richard III.

Anybody who pretends there's something else going on here is willingly participating in a delusion, which is harder to defend than support for the totalitarianisms of the past, because it is all so obviously hollow and idiotic. You cannot plead ignorance: the cards are right on the table.

The word for all this is “horror.” It combines a sense of both fear and revulsion, like lifting a rock to find loathsome creatures all crawling on top of each other, except here we see the swarming hatefulness of Trump’s mind. It’s disgusting. And I can’t help but also think of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and the mad Kurtz. While his intellectual defenders still drone on about “Western civilization,” here is its champion. This post reveals the heart of darkness at the core of the whole thing: utter madness and murderous rancor.

The savagery and unreason extend to the mob of which he is the exponent and leader, of course. A Palestinian student at Brown appears to have been wrongly identified as a suspect in the shooting there. The university took down his pages associated with the school. Immediately, the online mob took this as more evidence that he was guilty. The natural inference is that they were desperately attempting to protect someone from a high-tech lynching. Would the Brown administration—and especially their lawyers—really have thought they could hide their association with a suspect in this way? No one seems capable of basic reasoning anymore. Not just because they can’t, but because they won’t. The MAGA agitators are desperate, absolutely desperate for a Muslim or Arab shooter to spit their venom at, to find a “safer” outlet for the movement’s hate than Jews. The university issued a statement that read in part, “As law enforcement officials stated clearly on Tuesday afternoon, if this individual’s name had any relevance to the current investigation, they would be looking for this individual and providing information publicly.” But of course, this only confirms to the mob that this is their man and there is a cover-up.

Both Trump’s post and this braying mob signify a world without common sense or basic reason, a world that cannot distinguish cause from effect, peopled with grotesques like the creepy-crawlies who showed up to the New York Young Republicans Club gala, a nightmare world. The horror. The horror.