The shape of the bruise

December 3, 2024

Female Pileated woodpecker, December 1st

On the phone, in the woods

Thank you for your patience the past few days. I hope you were able to enjoy the familial warmth of Thanksgiving and that all travelers arrived and returned home safely.

One of my guides for The Daily Rhubarb is that if I don’t sense I have anything of value to add by writing and sending, then I shouldn’t bother you with it. Sometimes life only asks one to gasp and cup the mouth. There’s even a certain eloquence in being unable to assign words to an experience in which one of the worst (or best) things you can imagine actually happens. In the event of the former, the expletives should be whispered. That’s where I’ve been lately, and for reasons previously expressed—becoming awake in the dark, flinching at the realization that the core values of our aspiring democracy have been vandalized.

I’ve had several lengthy phone calls and visits with friends and family over the past month and have opened the space and time to reflect upon them. One thing is clarion clear: Those of us experiencing a deep sense of alienation, spilling into betrayal—because roughly half of American voters cast their lot with someone who is a damaged and damaging human being—are not alone with these intense emotions. This was no lone gunman, off his meds, dumped by his girlfriend, walking into a school with an assault rifle. This was the measure of us, on an early November day in 2024.

As a friend of mine registered during a long call this weekend, this is different than 2016. Anyone paying attention would have been put on notice about the crazy, repulsive, immoral dungeon of the Trump Show: the demonizing of non-white immigrants, the shameless grifting, the thousands of lies, the incompetence that led to hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths during the Covid epidemic, the inexcusable fomenting of divisiveness and, ultimately, insurrection. The felony convictions and civil adjudication (guilty) of sexual assault on E. Jean Carroll followed his term in office, as did his vows for “retribution” and plans for purging the government of civil servants insufficiently loyal to him. As a matter of record, what we know to be true about Donald Trump would disqualify him from leading a village litter patrol. Yet, a working plurality of our fellow Americans voted him into the Oval Office. Again…

I’m a journalist, but journalism is unsettling in these times because the conditioned objectivity of both-siderism obscures the societal collapse at the heart of the matter. With important exceptions (i.e. Pro-Publica) we’re conditioned to make news cupcakes from a molded formula that can distort our focus and blur reality. In the manufactured ambiance of our routines it can read and sound like elevator music for the apocalypse. I remember a fake headline in The Onion (at least I think it was The Onion) several years ago, “Four Middleboro women missing as Japan sinks.”

I’ve noticed, this fall, that the Seattle Times (which is one of America’s better newspapers) has run at least two stories about the growing ambivalence of Seattle-area Tesla owners. This because of how Elon Musk has not only cozzied up to Trump with over $100 million in campaign donations, but now behaves as though he is on track to become co-president.

Here’s the most recent headline, from last week: Once a must for wealthy Seattle liberals, Teslas feel an Elon backlash. It’s a long story, obviously newsworthy, and heavy on the details of Tesla sales declining in the Puget Sound area, owner regrets, changes to other brands of electric vehicles, and the efficiencies of electric v. gas-burning cars. What was missing, though, is the depth of the avarice in the Trump/Musk bromance and the underlying devil’s bargains. For a broader context, I would have included Trump’s recent admonitions to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to “go crazy” on health care for Americans, but to stay in his lane as Trump’s choice to head up the huge enterprise that is the federal office of Health and Human Services.

Speaking at a campaign rally in late October, Trump said, of Kennedy:

“He says, ‘We’re going to make it a healthy country.’ I said, ‘Good, Bobby, but do me one favor: Don’t touch the oil and gas. Let me handle that. I’ll handle the oil and gas.’ We’re not going to let him [Kennedy] get involved.”

If you want to read up on the widespread health effects of climate change due to the “liquid gold” that Trump wants Kennedy to avert his eyes from, you can read the federal Center for Disease Control’s primer here. It’s fair to surmise that Kennedy—if he’s confirmed to head up HHS—will also be instructed to avoid touching coal. What’s noteworthy about that is when he visited Spokane 13 years ago Kennedy marked himself as a victim of mercury poisoning caused by the ingestion of fish contaminated with mercury due to the mass burning of coal.

So, yes, it’s a worthy story that liberal Tesla owners in western Washington feel betrayed by Musk. The reporting is level and prosaic, and that’s part of the problem—without the larger context it still circumvents and averts the madness and shock of the historical moment.

I could cite other examples. But I think it best to change the subject and conclude with Jane Mayer’s latest investigative journalism for the New Yorker, which does reflect on the gaping absurdity of Trumpism and its mind-bending endorsement by a plurality of Americans.

It’s the Pete Hegseth “Secret History” story, that of the former soldier and Fox News weekend personality whom Trump has proposed to be the next Secretary of Defense. You may encounter a paywall at the New Yorker but a synopsis of the revelations (debauchery, chronic alcoholism, devastating fiscal mismanagement of two non-profit organizations, etc.,) is available here.

Prior to Mayer’s article, Trump’s choice to lead the U.S. military had already come under scrutiny after his lawyer confirmed Hegseth had paid off a married woman who’d accused him of sexually assaulting her at a convention gathering in Monterey, CA seven years ago. (Hegseth doesn’t deny having sex with the woman, but claims it was consensual).

Today’s essay is free to all readers, but please consider a paid subscription to The Daily Rhubarb at the link below…tjc

But Mayer’s reporting is head-spinning in its details, with both documentary and corroborative witness interviews that portray a profoundly-warped person on par with Matt Goetz, whose reported drug abuse and alleged involvement with under-age sexual partners recently sank his nomination by Trump to be the Attorney General of the United States. In her investigation Mayer uncovered a “whistleblower” report on Hegseth’s alleged misconduct as the leader of a now defunct, conservative veterans group “Concerned Veterans for America.” (C.V.A.) One of the witnesses for the report told Mayer: “I’ve seen him (Hegseth) drunk so many times. I’ve seen him dragged away not a few times but multiple times. To have him at the Pentagon would be scary,” adding, “When those of us who worked at C.V.A. heard he was being considered for SecDef, it wasn’t ‘No,’ it was ‘Hell No!’” One of the emails that surfaced before Mayer’s piece appeared Sunday night is one from Hegseth’s own mother, Penelope, published late last week by the New York Times It reads, in part:

I have tried to keep quiet about your character and behavior, but after listening to the way you made Samantha feel today, I cannot stay silent. And as a woman and your mother I feel I must speak out..

You are an abuser of women — that is the ugly truth and I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around, and uses women for his own power and ego. You are that man (and have been for years) and as your mother, it pains me and embarrasses me to say that, but it is the sad, sad truth.

(The Times reported that Hegseth’s mom now regrets the email and that she has since apologized to him for sending it.)

There is apparently much more to come. In an interview with Rachel Maddow last night, Mayer said that since her story was published “my phone has been ringing off the hook” from additional witnesses coming out of the woodwork with more disturbing Hegseth tales.

None of this should surprise us by now. It’s reasonable to assume that anyone who willingly chooses to enter into orbit around Trump is either in on the grift or wants to be. Stories like Goetz’s, and Hegseth’s, and Robert F. Kenney Jr., etc., etc, are inexorable because that’s what Americans (albeit by a slim margin) have voted in: a rogue’s gallery of scoundrels who offer their fealty to a convicted fraudster and sexual predator.

I think I get the rationale from Trump core voters who’ve come to support him as an extension of their expressed allegiance to evangelical or fundamentalist churches. However expressed, it’s something along the lines that Trump may be a bully and a liar but he’s an instrument, nevertheless, for their values and beliefs.

Can I get some scripture on that? Where does Jesus say it’s okay to flock to a charlatan and a thug if he sins while waving a Bible? Is that in the Trump bible? Does the banner at the gates to heaven read “above all, own the libs”?

Just curious.

In purely secular form it’s a simpler algorithm. Might makes right. Deal with it. Or as Judge Antonin Scalia said when questioned about the Supreme Court’s intervention in Bush v. Gore, “get over it.”

What I fear most is a chaotic turning point, backed by an obeisant Supreme Court, that cuts deeper into the fabric of our democratic values (equality, justice, civility) than shorter-lived inflammations like the Tea Party movement. It sure feels as though the biome of American populism has been consumed with a vibe culture of conspiracies, misogyny and race-baiting that will be difficult to supplant or uproot.

All I know is we have to resist it. We cannot bend a knee in its direction.

It would only encourage them.

—tjc