Billionaires, Holocaust deniers, far-right fanatics, tyrant politicians, people with unfinished business. The team recruiting the next American president seems straight out of an episode of The Simpsons
We’ve seen this movie many times before, it’s a classic Hollywood plot: the protagonist, who is usually an outlaw with a shady past, wants to rob the central bank or a big casino, take revenge on a gangster or undertake a suicide mission. . To do this, he recruits a gang with the best (worst) from each house, a handful of amoral and unreliable guys, each with a specialty: one handles explosives, the other knows how to open safes, this one hacks the security systems, this other He is the king of camouflage… He contacts them one by one, convinces them in exchange for a big reward, until he brings together the “wild group” he needs .
This is pretty much how Donald Trump’s casting for his next government goes: he wandered into the (upper) underworld of capitalism and the far right to recruit a group of scoundrels with whom to attack the United States, and at the same time, splashes on the rest of the planet: billionaires, Holocaust deniers, far-right fanatics, intransigent politicians, people with pending causes. As I say, the best of every house, without any pretension.
If they told you this a few years ago, you wouldn’t believe it, it sounds like a team straight out of an episode of The Simpsons: a far-right debater (and accused of child abuse) as as attorney general, a Fox anchor (and also accused of sexual assault) as head of the Pentagon, an anti-vaccine wizard as health secretary, an oil executive and climate denier at the Department of Energy, a xenophobic for immigration policy, a pro-Zionist who accuses the UN of being anti-Semitic will be ambassador to the UN, and of course Elon Musk, the richest man in the world and interested in contracts and public regulation, at the helm of a “Government Efficiency” office that he will co-direct with another millionaire.
What a panda, eh. And they all have in common, in addition to extremism, controversies and a healthy current balance: they are loyal to Trump, they will support him to the end, whatever the mission. A Trump who will control all powers: the executive, the legislative with both chambers and the judiciary with a Supreme Court with a conservative majority. We would say that very bad thing about “enjoy what you voted for” if it weren’t for the fact that those of us who didn’t vote will also “enjoy what you voted for.”
The joke is precisely this: if they voted for Trump, he got out of the polls. His electorate is buying these appointments from him, just as they bought his campaign nonsense, his insane proposals or the memory of his first term. The oft-repeated saying that if he went out on Fifth Avenue to shoot people, people would still vote for him, has gotten old. Now they would continue to vote for him if, in addition to shooting innocent people, he tortured them for a period of time before dying.
Trump is not the incarnation of evil, but of malism, a brilliant term coined by Mauro Entrialgo in his book of the same title, which I highly recommend. Entrialgo, who is a master of appellation political (“regres”, as opposed to progressives, and “mysterious Nazis” are other of his discoveries), defines malism as this “propaganda mechanism which consists of the public display of traditionally reprehensible actions or desires in the aim of obtaining a profit. “social, electoral or commercial”. It is practiced by politicians but also by companies, brands and cultural products. Presenting yourself as a bad guy gets votes, audience and sales, his book is full of examples. Here we have the Ayuso/Miguel Ángel Rodríguez couple, a successful example of political macarrism.
It is inevitable to remember our witch Avería, precursor of all these malistas, shouting “Long live evil, long live capital”, and always adding with a laugh: “how bad I am, but how bad I am”. Same thing for Trump. Long live evil, and above all long live capital, these far-right punks are still millionaires and representatives of economic interests.
