TrumpinSloMo: Seeing The Chaotic Good (Sometimes) In What Trump Does
There's progress in the chaos. You can see it, if you don't drink ideological/party Kool-Aid. Trump Deux is all part of The Purge.
The emergence of TrumpinSloMo began days after the election.
Since I didn’t vote for either party, I was disappointed in accordance with the plan.
My inbox immediately filled with Substack newsletters commenting, observing, and speculating on the national mindshift. It was Morning in America again, which usually only dawned on new Democratic administrations. Even us ex-pats felt it. Though we knew the Republicans had taken both houses, that Project 2025 was devised by Christian crazies, that the malignant psychopath with no concern about re-election would be a thousand times more dangerous…
January 20th seemed a very long time away.
Once you move past the OMFG in the unconstitutional maelstrom Trump has wrought, you find a glimmer of hope—for down the road. Way down.
TrumpinSloMo
Woke had finally broke, like a high fever. The sharks circled, sensing weakness.
Even before Trump began conveyor-belting executive dis/orders to restore ‘free speech’, women’s rights, plastic straws, English, et al, we normies reclaimed our power from the woke. People spoke out and praised Trump and the Republicans, even those who hadn’t voted for them.
“I’ll restore women’s rights to all-female sports teams,” he promised, and we cheered. That was the 70%’s hope for Trump II: That he would at least dial back the horrific excesses of ‘progressive’ authoritarianism. Fascist, indeed. It takes several million to know one.
He vomited Executive Orders. He unleashed a rabid Muskrat on the federal government chasing waste in the blindest, most unstrategic manner possible. The Medicaid system failed, briefly. Thousands of federal employees hurriedly updated their resumes. Trump started speaking first sort of jokingly, then more seriously, about taking over other countries.
It’s been mass chaos, and abjectly terrifying for those already suffering from hardcore TDS, especially the low-information kind.
For the nuanced who look for multiple views, who want to know if Trump is really that bad, if he’s really serious about this or that, or if he can really do what he says he’s going to do, we look for the good that comes from any of this.
Often, the discoveries are slow-moving. Trump expresses or does something batshit crazy, and we’re horrified. OMG he can’t be serious about that, can he???
Then later you find the shitbar that makes you smile. That’s the TrumpinSloMo. “Wait for it!”
The TrumpinSloMo of Gaza
One night I checked CNN just before going to bed—always a bad idea. My eyes nearly popped out of my head. “He’s gonna do WHAT with Gaza? Is he trying to start World War III???”
The next morning I woke up, knew that dumbass Mar-A-Gaza plan was never going to happen, and then thought, “Hmmmm. Trump’s right about the real estate. It’s beautiful, or it would be if Hamas wasn’t there to schedule regular death and destruction with or without IDF help. Why don’t the Gazans do that themselves? Maybe not turn it into the French Riviera but as part of the Holy Land they could build a huge tourism industry. With yeah, great hotels and swimming pools. They get to make the rules, decide whether to allow bikinis or serve alcohol. If only—”
—If only they weren’t batshit crazy themselves, with too many unwilling to share the land with Israel and handle their own state and affairs, but if they did it right they could become self-sustaining.
The Gazan shitbar was Trump’s perfect point that the Gazans are sitting on a gold mine. He doesn’t want them to run it, of course. He wants the riches for himself. But point taken. He revealed the question we all needed to voice: Why don’t the Gazans do this?
Apparently, Trump got the Egyptians a-thinkin’ the same thing. They’ve proposed their own very rough draft for Gazan self-sustainability that doesn’t include Hamas or Trump. The Arab League likes it. We’ll see if it goes anywhere. But it’s a good start, and it started with Trump.
The Trumpenfreude
When Trump realized who he was dealing with—the Gazans, ffs!—he spoke vaguely of moving them somewhere, location unspecified, where they’d build a beautiful new place for them, it was gonna be the best, like no place anyone had ever seen before, and they’d be very very happy there. This was his Plan B since Egypt and Jordan were like, when he suggested they take them in, Are you out of your fucking mind? Those people are big-T Trouble wherever they go!!!
The Gazans, he planned, would be rounded up like cattle in cars (yes, deliberate Holocaust imagery) and taken off to—someplace else. “Ethnic cleansing,” his vehement critics called it. “Not genocide,” he insisted.
The smile returned to my face. How does it feel to be on the other end of the ethnic cleansing wank dream, habibis?
“From the river to the sea…Ahhhhh—”
Trumpenfreude.
There are two kinds. One is when ‘progressives’ find themselves—or their highly questionable friends—treated the way they’ve treated others. Like when their free speech is suppressed. Like when they get cancelled for saying something fascist. Mar-A-Gaza Trumpenfreude is when antisemitic progressives and their single-mindedly violent Islamofascist friends are made to feel the fear they’ve caused so many others.
The other kind is when Trump supporters get what they voted for.
Breaking down the DOGE shitbar
Trump designated Deputy DOGE to run his Muskdozer through the federal government.
It’s been horrifying, except for the part where they eliminated DEI. That was no shitbar, that was a nice yummy go-fuck-yourselves-you-blacksplaining-racist-grifters chocolate-and-vanilla ice cream dessert that said, “You’ve already got lots of equality and diversity. Now go update your LinkedIn profile, Sparky!” My fellow ex-Dem rebels and I smiled to think of DEI ‘experts’ on the unemployment line, finding there are no longer any positions available for professional bigots.
After the shock wore off, I saw the glimmer of the objective underneath: Increasing government efficiency. Bear with me here, because I don’t justify how they’re doing it.
I asked myself, What would the Democrats have done if they’d won?
You know the answer. Fuck all.
Cleaning up government waste has never been a priority for them, and had the voters named it as their top priority for the next President, the Dems would have done a one-twentieth-assed job at best.
They’d have politely approached, trimmed the rainbow-frosted doughnuts budget for privilege acknowledgement diversity sessions with their manicure scissors, and called it a day. “Nothing more to see here! Behold our sleek and svelte operationally-efficient federal government!”
In many of Trump’s craziest acts, and his looniest suggestions, and his most deranged plans dreamed up in that suspiciously overcooked brain, there is almost always something that makes us normies smile, even as we feel horror and anxiety at the way he’s destroying what’s left of America and democracy.
So what has Trump’s Fearless Weeder found so far?
We don’t know much. Musk doesn’t document well, and many of his fraud claims have already been debunked, or put into context, by fact-checking organizations. We don’t know. The ‘savings’ we allegedly have come directly from the White House and DOGE, and without documentation, they could be fiction. They found waste and fraud, for sure. But they’re breaking everything in the process. Chainsaws aren’t any better than manicure scissors.
Elon Musk Archives - Factcheck.org
Elon Musk Articles - Snopes.com
We’ll only find out later, probably much later, exactly what they got right and wrong when and if adult supervision ever returns to the U.S. government.
DOGE doesn’t even know when to stay put and handle a big fat enchilada when it sees it.
The Muskrat’s Bratzkrieg mucked around in the U.S. Treasury Department for about fifteen minutes and got expelled from the databases, quite rightly. They moved on to less combative quesadillas. But Treasury is the hugest enchilada, whose fraud and waste the GAO (Government Accountability Office) estimated costs taxpayers an eye-watering $233B to $521B in taxpayer money every single year.
Instead of doing some real good, Musk prefers to Trump-et the nonsensical Pride and DEI expenditures he found.
Many good agencies and departments in the government exist for very good reasons but have become bloated and definitely need some Jenny Craig. Musk doesn’t know how to conduct proper cost-cutting efforts; look at the mess he made of Twitter.
He and Trump are men of action; not rational strategy. Trump needs results now, to show his base he’s not some stinking Democrat who can’t get anything done—a not-unrealistic perception based on a lot of historical Democratic inaction, incompetence and inability to make hard decisions because someone, somewhere, raises a fuss.
But there’s the TrumpinSloMo. As poorly implemented as it is, the TrumpRat is exposing a lot of fault lines in the federal government. It may take years to fix but it’ll probably work much better.
The Trumpenfreude will arrive shortly when Americans begin to see and feel the pain of the ridiculously irresponsible way these two are destroying highly complex service systems that many Americans don’t realize how much they critically depend on. If the MuskRat MAGAs succeed in cutting Medicaid, millions of Americans, already budget-strapped and suffering from tariff-induced Trumpflation will have to scramble to keep their parents and other aging relatives off the street. Many of them will have voted for this.
The plan could be to privatize everything, the ultimate historical Republican wank dream. Democrats have been warning for years that government-provided services are much cheaper. Republicans have denied that, saying privatization is cheaper. Who’s telling the truth, the bureaucrat-pushing Democrats or the pro-capitalist Republicans salivating at raising service prices on a whim?
Hope you can afford fire department and police services.
The Trumpenfreuders won’t let the chumps who voted for it claim they didn’t know he’d lie to them during a campaign which will be his last. They all knew exactly who they were voting for. They boasted about ‘voting for the convicted felon’. They rubbed it in libs’ faces.
MAGA voters are Trump’s bitches.
Trumpenfreude.
If you’re a Dem who’s sitting there with your arms crossed with an unpleasant smirk on your face experiencing Harrisfreude, just remember: You campaigned hard for this, too, with the worst candidate and campaign platform in several epochs.
To sum up
We’re in a Crisis, and it’s actually—natural.
The TrumpTrain and similarly wider anti-immigrant election victories in Europe and elsewhere signal a global change—a purging, if you will, of the old guards.
It’s beginning to make sense, as I work my way through Neil Howe’s The Fourth Turning: What the Seasons of History Tell Us About How and When This Crisis Will End. This is the most recent edition of the book, in which Howe describes a time period called a saeculum, which is roughly a human lifetime, 80-100 years. It’s divided into four orderly eras or ‘seasons’. Each season takes 20-25 years, the length of a human generation.
Howe traces this evolution through the last 500 years of history. He claims we’ve completed High, Awakening, and Unraveling, and have already entered the Fourth ‘Crisis’ Turning, a highly dangerous time of civic upheaval, traumatic and transformative. I’m about two-thirds through. According to the inside blurb, the book states that the “polarization, the growing threats of civil conflict and global war—will culminate by the early 2030s in a climax that poses great danger and yet also holds great promise, perhaps even ushering in America’s next golden age.”
The last great Crisis was the world war in 1945. Then we entered a period of growth and stability (High). Then Awakening and unrest (the Sixties and Seventies). Then the Unraveling, when individualism triumphs over institutions (!), and now—the purging of the old ways. Do the math.
I suspect it’s a mass purge of the failures of both liberalism and conservatism, capitalism and socialism, a bitch-slap to everyone who thought the problems were brought by others, not themselves. Some or none may re-emerge in ten years. Whatever does won’t look the same.
What we’re seeing now is the worsening, and it will get much worse before it gets better. And it may be global.
I’d like to think if we just sit tight for 7-10 more years this will all pass away like the world’s worst collective food poisoning, which would be comforting except that few lived comfortably through the horrors of World War II, when they hadn’t even processed the collective mass trauma from World War I, and now we have the potential for nuclear war.
Maybe Trump is the purge we need. Or the poorly chosen road.
It helps to understand it’s all kind of cyclically reincarnative—‘This shit has happened before and it will happen again’. Trump, Putin, and JinPing may be our historical Ex-Lax, or they may be writing humanity’s concluding chapter.
We’ll have to wait and see. Keep watching for the TrumpinSloMo, which may be the harbingers of better times.
Here’s a final TrumpinSloMo.
Trump just offered us normies a new yummy dessert not unwrapped in shit: He’s threatening to cut off $5B in aid to the antisemitism factory Columbia University if they don’t knock it off with all the Jew hate.
He’s fighting antisemitism, which the Democrats would NEVER have done.
I can’t find a goddamn thing wrong with that. Hamaslove is why we hate the progressives.
Purging. Trumpenfreude. TrumpinSloMo.
It’s good for you, but it also may kill you.
Brilliant insight about Gaza. Why don’t the Palestinians develop it?
Because their raison d’etre is to destroy Israel. They traumatize their children by taking them to ceremonies where babies’ coffins are displayed on a stage. They throw people who are opposed to Hamas off rooftops.
The few good people in these communities are terrorized into silence.
You called them on it.
Alright let’s try this again. An interesting article to be sure, Labia! I half agree with it and half disagree with it. I would agree with you President Trump is doing more than the out of touch and incompetent Democrats would’ve done if they were in power right now.
They made absolute fools of themselves at President Trump’s address to Congress. Al Green acted like a total horse’s rear end and got kicked out of Congress. Two Congress members walked out when President Trump brought up the price of eggs. They were totally disrespectful and were all on their phones when President Trump shouted out a volunteer firefighter who raised multiple children, Laken Riley’s family, D.J. Daniel a little boy who survived brain cancer, and a girl who suffered a brain injury competing against a Trans athlete.
It just goes to show you what we would’ve gotten had Kamala won. A party that virtue signals rather than takes action, doesn’t care about optics, is totally out of touch with the American public, and does nothing but talk a big game but can’t back it up. Or how about these sanctuary city Mayors who got absolutely annihilated by Republican Congressmen and women at a recent hearing for harboring illegal immigrants including criminals and terrorists in their cities? The Dems are totally incompetent and corrupt.
Donald Trump has wasted no time at least trying to get positive things done on behalf of the American people rather than just play games like the Dems are doing. He is kind of like a bull in a china shop but in a good way-taking a wrecking ball to the political establishment in this country. I’m very impressed with many of the policies he has enacted.
Signing the Laken Riley Act, banning gender-affirming care for minors, banning Trans people from competing in women’s sports, securing our Southern border and deporting the millions of illegal immigrants who snuck in, restoring Mount McKinley’s correct name, appointing an excellent cabinet, pushing the Europeans to pay more into NATO and rearm, and negotiating ceasefires in Ukraine and Gaza are all huge wins for our country and the world.
At the same time, this is not to say I agree with everything he’s done. I don’t agree with his tariffs, abolishing the Department of Education, pulling out of the Paris Accords, banning the Associated Press from the Oval Office, banning all illegal immigrants from getting Social Security, and repealing LBJ’s executive order on affirmative action for example. I support the President but I’m not going to be a sycophant for him.
I wouldn’t go as far as to say he’s crazy. To be sure he is provocative but that’s just how he governs. He’s certainly not the first President to be accused of being unstable. People said the same thing about Andrew Jackson and Richard Nixon. That they wanted to be a king or a dictator, were crazy and paranoid, that they were reckless and didn’t know what they are doing, etc. Also, there is a method to Trump’s madness, he does everything with a purpose.
The tariffs he put on Canada are in response to taxes they’ve put on American products, to redress trade imbalances and pressure the Canadian government to help stop the flow of Fentanyl coming across the northern border. I’m skeptical of the claim only 0.2% percent of the drug comes through there as the media claims. In Panama, he didn’t really want the Panama Canal. He was putting pressure on Panama to pull out of China’s Belt Road Initiative which they did. The last example I would use would be Trump has no intention of having the U.S. run Gaza or transfer its population. What he’s trying to do is to get Egypt and Jordan to handle the situation in the region themselves.
It’s also worth noting that what Elon Musk and the DOGE are doing is nothing new. In the 1990s, Bill Clinton fired 377,000 government employees when he was in office and Barack Obama launched an initiative called “cut wasteful spending” during his Presidency. I would agree that Musk and the DOGE haven’t always gone about cutting government waste the right way. But overall what they are doing is all to the good.
I hear you though about being vigilant about Trump’s actions. If he goes too far or enacts a policy that is wrongheaded or misguided, I will call him out and use the power of my vote to make that clear to him and the Republicans. For example, if they cut Medicaid I would definitely heavily criticize the President for that, e-mail my elected officials and make my voice heard in favor of protecting Medicaid. I will push the President to stay true to his oath of office and stay on the straight and narrow.