The Real Trump Brand

Some very smart people have written some very smart things about Trump's national emergency, and I'm sure more will be forthcoming. But I think that the most insightful thing I have to say is this: who cares? Had this happened two years ago, I might have taken it as a sign of impending fascism. But with each passing day, it becomes harder and harder (to the point of impossibility) to maintain this position. Instead, it seems pretty obvious that we have an incompetent, and just downright stupid, president, and one who can't accomplish even the most basic of his goals. And failing to achieve his idiotic goal of a wall through any other means, such as convincing a Republican Congress to get on board or pressuring Democrats with the longest government shutdown ever, he's resorted to a last ditch attempt, because he's a president who's desperate for a headline. And so, rather than the "glorious" act of a "fearless leader," this whole thing stinks of failure. Maybe this national emergency gets a wall built, and maybe not, but if I were a betting man, I'd put my money on failure yet again. And this is the real Trump brand - failure. And I think that much of the country feels the same way too.

Which brings me back to my original point: who cares? I don't mean to suggest that I'm oblivious to the suffering this President has caused, but only that I think that as time passes, fewer and fewer people have been able to take him seriously. Marx once wrote that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy and the second as farce, and which he wrote as an account of Napoleon III's 1848 rise to power. And many of us saw this as a prescient explanation for Trump's rise. In both cases, despite their farcical natures, wide swaths of the French and the American populations bought in. In the French case, it took over two decades for the joke to be revealed. But in our case, we started laughing in one tenth the time.