Lethality Fashions
La fanciulla del West
Maledictions
Unbidden Bits—September 9, 2025
Does Stephen Miller really not realize that in painting targets on all our backs, he’s also painted one on his own? I can’t imagine being thrilled at the moral certainty that millions of people are wanting me dead. Despite all Miller’s public bravado, I have no idea how he can either.
I suppose sadomasochism has its own logic. I’m grateful I’ve never felt the urge find out how that logic works.
Trumpism’s Unspoken Antecedents
Joachim von Ribbentrop for foreign policy
The East India Company for economic policy
Joseph Stalin for scientific policy
The Taliban for social policy
The Spanish Inquisition for jurisprudence
Louis XIV of France for taxation
The Eastern Roman Empire for internal staffing and administration
Memento Mori
Dear Sir,
You’ll be dead soon. What’ll be the use of all that power and money then?
Will it establish and preserve a legacy? I doubt it—ambitious people will come from near and far to piss on a tyrant’s legacy as well as on his grave. Pigeons will shit on his statues, and the funding he leaves behind to have them cleaned will be reinvested in bitcoin by his heirs.
Will it found a dynasty? Carefully managed, it might, but your sons are morons, and despite what you say in public, we know you find them weak and contemptible—imperfect copies of a perfect original. The less said about your daughters the better. They’re old enough now to be as uninteresting and as greedy as your current and former wives, but not as submissive, at least not to you, now you’ve married them off to potential rivals. I mean, really, what point is there in funding the rise of someone else’s dynasty?
I know Janis Joplin once told us to get it while we can, but she was talking about love, not a commodity you’ve ever had much use for, then or now. Let that be your last thought on your way out of here: when the getting was good, you were busy getting the wrong things, and now you’re out of time.
Unbidden Bits—July 7, 2025
Me: But who’ll pick our fruits and vegetables?
Republicans: We don’t eat fruits and vegetables.
Me: But who’ll work in our slaughterhouses and meat packing plants?
Republicans: We only eat what we kill.
Me: Soylent Green, then?
The End Of the Beginning….*
The Supreme Court has finally finished booby-trapping every legal exit from our national fascist nightmare. For the moment at least, Trump’s Gleichschaltung appears complete. In a country of 340 million people, though, that’s almost certainly an illusion. Only the profoundly ignorant can rejoice in what comes next. Does Tommy Tuberville, for example, realize what his bodyguard bill is likely to look like from now on? Does he imagine that the Republican Party or the Trump administration is going to pay it for him?
*A previous version of this text appeared in the comments section of the Crooked Timber post The end of US democracy, by John Q
Unbidden Bits—June 12, 2025
Checking my web links this morning, I find that J.D. Vance has also been demanding that Governor Newsom do his job. Unfortunately he thinks that a governor’s job is to lick President Trump’s boots, express contrition for not doing it earlier, and to look the other way while the President conducts a Nazi-style armed invasion of his state, sends the most vulnerable of his people to concentration camps outside the country, and gets his propaganda minister to brag about it on Fox News.
No, J.D., that’s not Governor Newsom’s job, that’s not any state governor’s job. As Trump’s Vice-President, that’s your job. You’re the Toady-In-Chief. My advice to you is to stick to your knitting, and let Governor Newsom get on with the job of defending his people against the sociopath you work for.
Opus Dei, Opus Diaboli
Can you tell the difference? Neither can I—and that’s not because I don’t know what I’m looking at….
The Hillbilly Pygmalion
George Packer seems to think J. D. Vance may still have a future.* I’m not so sure about that. J. D. made his bid early on, trading his shuck for Donald Trump’s jive, but he may not find it so easy to reverse the process when he needs to, and given the current state of US politics, at some point he’s definitely going to need to.
Not so many years from now, when Peter Thiel is safely tucked away in his New Zealand bunker, Musk is on his imperial pilgrimage to Mars, and the Donald is dead, the Sons of Trump will surely have no further use for J. D. He’s smarter than they are, to be sure, and he seems to have convinced the MAGAsphere that he’s as big an asshole as they are, but in the end he lacks the Trump boys’ financial resources.
Besides, even Fox News seems to have noticed that a Julio-Claudian-style War of Assassins may already be more in vogue in Washington than the fascist frenzy of Trump’s first hundred days. J. D.’s currency is still good at the Times, the Post, and—Packer’s stylish hit piece aside—The Atlantic, but there’s still many a banana peel left between him and the White House, every one of them with a Trump logo stamped on it right next to the Chiquita sticker.
*The Talented Mr. Vance, in the July, 2025 issue of The Atlantic
The Trump Patrimony
An abused child speaks:
I wouldn’t want to be the last country that tries to negotiate a trade deal with @realDonaldTrump,” posted Eric Trump. “The first to negotiate will win—the last will absolutely lose. I have seen this movie my entire life.”
—Eric Trump, as quoted in “China Called Trump’s Bluff,” from an Atlantic article by Jonathan Chait published online in Apple News, May 12, 2025
We know this movie. It’s the one where the sons submit unconditionally to the cruelty of their father. It appears to be as popular in the Trump family today as it was two generations ago. Elsewhere it gets decidedly mixed reviews. Check out the Bible, or the Taviani Brothers’ film Padre Padrone. (Like the Bible, it’s available in a dubbed version for you Trumps, who still steadfastly refuse to acknowledge that anything of interest exists in the world except America-first assholes and their medieval prejudices.)
Yes Eric, I know you’d rather travel to exclusive game preserves in Africa to shoot large animals than read a book, so it might surprise you to learn that history is made by the sons who defy their fathers, not by those who submit to licking papa’s boots in the hope that someday they might inherit papa’s money and papa’s puissance. (That’s a French word, Eric. Look it up.)
Let me do you a favor, kid. Let me recommend another Taviani brothers’ film to you, La Notte di San Lorenzo. Pay special attention to what happens in the end to young Marmugi, the son of the local Fascist party chief who’d assumed thoughout the film that following in his father’s footsteps was his key to a bright future of domination over everyone in his village. Above all, consider how easily his actual fate could be yours.