Splitsville THE WORLD HAS NEVER SEEN READERS AS GREAT AS YOU!

The Fawning Newsletter for Fans of THE SPLIT

Old joke:

It’s 1959. A man is in the lobby of the Fontainebleau hotel in Miami Beach. Suddenly a woman—a Jewish mother, in fact—appears and cries, “Make way for my son, Sheldon, the doctor!”

The man looks up and sees, descending the grand staircase, a sedan chair held aloft by four beefy guys. In it is a young man in a bathing suit and an aloha shirt.

The man approaches the woman and says, “Is that your son?”

“Yes,” she says. “That is my son, Sheldon, the doctor.”

“Is he unable to walk?”

“Of course he can walk!” she says. “But thank God he doesn’t have to!”

First, watch this. Yes, it’s blood-curdling, but it’s a mere 11 seconds long, and the only thing harmed in its creation was the metaphysical wellbeing of decency itself.

TL/DW (Too Long/Didn’t Watch)? Oh, all right—it’s our inexpressibly corrupt Attorney General, Pam Bondi, gushing to Donald Trump at a two-hour, televised Cabinet meeting that his first 100 days as POTUS have been more glorious, more full of accomplishment, more successful than any other president’s. “Ever!” Note the red hats parked at every participant’s place-setting. Note the atmosphere of either pious reverence of abject terror or both. Note the complete absence of anyone—at the table, hovering in the periphery—laughing out loud or requesting that someone give him or her a fucking break.

Then again, what she says is that his first 100 days “far exceeded” those of others, so maybe she meant, “in brutality, corruption, incompetence, avarice, destructiveness, and sheer malevolence.” But somehow we think not. No, this is real North Korea-style, tongue-bathing-Dear-Leader stuff. It is easy to imagine this kind of opera buffa display of obsequiousness at meetings between Stalin and the Central Committee or Hitler and the General Staff.

This—Trump’s fawning staff and slavishly flattering courtiers—is the topic du jour. Antonia Hitchens has a good piece about it in a recent issue of The New Yorker, and the indispensable Greg Sargent at The New Republic sums it all up when he interviews the magazine’s senior editor, Alex Shephard:

…when Trump actually seems to learn something from the markets and adjust accordingly, like when he dialed back some of the tariff stuff, a bunch of people that he seems to respect on Fox News rush in to provide this positive reinforcement by saying, That was a great decision, Mr. President, in hopes that he’ll learn from that. But then on the other hand, when the news gets really bad like it just did, there’s this intense internal pressure inside MAGAworld to build a wall around Trump and turn the adulation and the sycophancy and the North Korea–level subservience up to 11, which works against the goal of getting him to course correct.

For Trump, being surrounded by ass-kissers is a win-win. On that rare occasion when he does something good and not-insane (like responding to the crashing markets by mitigating his nutso tariffs), he gets applauded by Fox News and cheered by those around him. But when things go pear-shaped (the lowering of the GDP for the first quarter; his nosedive in the polls; a measles epidemic), his honor guard of babysitters and sycophants crank up the flattery. But they do something else.

They shield him from the bad news. He may have access to information about the stock and bond markets, and react to them appropriately, but that’s about all the information he receives about the real world. So if a reporter shouts at him as he boards Air Force One, “What’s your response to your downturn in the polls?” and Trump says, “It’s fake news,” he’s not just dodging the question. He really does think it’s fake news, because his people tell him he’s doing just great, in the polls and everywhere else.

Michael A. Cohen (no, not the former Trump “fixer”; this Michael Cohen is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic Studies) makes this point in his Truth and Consequences Substack. He quotes a recent exchange between Trump and Time Magazine:

The Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that you have to bring back Kilmar Abrego Garcia. You haven't done so. Aren’t you disobeying the Supreme Court?

Well, that’s not what my people told me—they didn’t say it was, they said it was—the nine to nothing was something entirely different.

Let me quote from the ruling. “The order properly requires the government to facilitate Abrego Garcia's release from custody in El Salvador.” Are you facilitating a release?

I leave that to my lawyers. I give them no instructions. They feel that the order said something very much different from what you're saying. But I leave that to my lawyers. If they want—and that would be the Attorney General of the United States and the people that represent the country. I don't make that decision.

This sounds like Trump saying, once again, “I take no responsibility whatsoever.” And it is. But when Sargent interviewed Cohen about this topic, they both agreed it suggests something more disturbing: Trump has no idea what’s really going on outside the White House and Merde a Lardo (SP?). When he watches the markets fall and rise in response to his whims, he has the buffoonish Peter Navarro around to reassure him, “They’ll settle down and start zooming upward once the tariffs take effect.” What he won’t see are all the other consequences of his idiocy—the layoffs, the soon-to-be-empty shelves, the soon-to-be-doubling prices of everything. When he hears the official declaration that we are in a recession, he’ll cry foul, because nobody told him it was coming.

When, previously in these “pages,” we discussed the topic of Trump’s lies, we ended up hip-deep in epistemological conundrums. (Yes, it was quite vexing, but at least it offered us the opportunity to use the phrase “epistemological conundrums.”) We’ve generally been content to frame it thus: Does Trump really believe his lies? If so, then to him they’re not lies. (Say it with us now: “Jerry, it’s not a lie if you believe it!”) But those things he believes are so obviously and unambiguously at variance with the truth that we must conclude, however reluctantly, that he is barking mad. However, if he doesn’t believe them, and he knows they’re lies, then, whether or not he’s nuts, he is evil, which we pronounce the way Alec Guinness does as Obi-Wan Kenobi: “EE-vill.” (E-ville: an electronic town you can download to your Kindle.)

Then, as we read about this Cabinet display of ritual fealty, we wondered: Does he believe the flattery and superlatives his minions are laying on thick? That question, like an atom in a nuclear reaction, splits into two “daughter questions”: Does he believe he is as wonderful as they say he is? And does he think they believe it?

Of course, he wants to believe he is a world-conquering hero. And it would be much easier to do so if he thought they were being sincere. But it’s plain to every eye—including his—that they’re singing his praises to keep their phony-baloney jobs. That’s why he demands that they adore him. “But enough about me. Tell me how great you think I am.” The (White) house euphemism for such toadying is “loyalty.”

So he can’t possibly think they’re being sincere. But that may not matter to him. In fact, he may dig it the most. We heard an expert on authoritarianism once say that one of the things the dictator desires above all is not only to have his underlings repeat lies but to repeat lies knowing they are lies.

(On the other hand, since Trump is increasingly demented, maybe he actually can think they really mean it when they say he’s even better than sliced [white] bread.)

Of course, wondering whether Pam Bondi, or Howard Lutnick, or Marco Rubio, are being sincere when praising Donald Trump is like wondering how many angels can lie about dancing on the head of a pin. Add to that the high probability that Trump, who is fatally allergic to the truth to begin with, is being insulated from it with happy talk and shiny objects, and we find ourselves with a President of the United States who:

• Cannot tell the truth

• Is too lazy or insecure to want to know the truth

• Cannot admit when he’s made a mistake or caused any kind of harm

• Is not allowed to see evidence that he has made a mistake or caused harm

The usual term for this sort of impervious, self-contained, impenetrably subjective frame of reference is a “bubble.” But bubbles are at least transparent, and easily burst. Trump isn’t in a bubble. He’s in a different kind of round object—a bathysphere: opaque, rigid, and resistant to enormous pressure.

Last week we said that Trump’s project (if we can ennoble it with such a term) was doomed to fail because everything he does fails. He can’t win without cheating (he can’t even play without cheating), he can’t make money without grifting, he can’t make deals without stiffing his counterparties. He acts on impulse, he overreaches, he flops. Only then does he get an inkling of what’s actually happening on Earth 1. Now we see with our own eyes (although we heard plenty about it in his first term) that he is literally prevented from knowing what’s going on while it’s going on.

And so those of us who live in Splitsville—which is all of us, stuck in a situation in which two different “nations” occupy a single geo-political entity—find…well, us, residing in and experiencing, for better or worse, the real world, versus the MAGA-Trump axis of stupid, led by a man who wants to lead the world but has no idea about what’s going on in it.

Can he find out what’s going on in it? Can the young doctor in the aloha shirt walk?

Of course he can. But thank God he doesn’t have to.