The Road to Splitsville MEINE DAMEN UND HERREN, VE NEED COHEEZHUN!

The Newsletter for Subscribers to THE SPLIT

If, whether tomorrow or in twenty years, the red states really do decide they want to Split off from the blue, maybe some of their citizens will have been encouraged to adopt that view by videos like this. Then again, maybe not. But wait! DO NOT CLICK until you read the Wonkette-mandated Warning below.

WARNING. This video is eight minutes long. It’s from the Claremont Institute, a busy, busy beehive of fascist propaganda, planning, and practice. It’s called, with a straight face, “Trump’s Virtues, Part 2.” (No, we haven’t seen Part I, and you can’t make us.) It is written and presented by Tom Klingenstein, who describes himself as, among other things, a public speaker. By this we assume he means “someone who sometimes says things out loud, in public.” He can’t—as you’ll see when you view the video—possibly mean an orator, or an effective communicator in a lecture-like setting. The very idea of listening to this reactionary slowly drone on about any topic whatsoever, for longer than eight minutes, causes us to fall into a persistent vegetative state.

Okay, you’ve been Warned. See how much of it you can get through.

Back already? We sympathize. As always, after viewing such a monstrosity, your first thought should be, “…and those were the GOOD takes.” Your second thought might very well be, as was ours, “Wait—there’s someone on the Trumpist right even creepier than undead Jewish Nazi Stephen Miller?” Yes, our world is full of surprises.

The video is sparking a lot of response, and no wonder—it goes beyond saying the quiet part out loud, and asserts that a somewhat shopworn metaphor (that we are in a “culture war”) is a literal truth. In Tom Klingenstein’s ploddingly and portentously articulated view, “America” is in an actual war. The enemy is “the woke regime” (i.e., Democrats) and the “globalist elite,” while the good guys are—who else?—the MAGA Trumpists who chant “U-S-A” at the rallies. As an example of stochastic terrorism—a general invitation, to whomever is listening, to consider liberals the enemy and to take whatever steps necessary to defeat any given one you happen to come across—it is, or at least it seems, quite effective.

But is it? One striking thing about this piece of political pornography is its dual, almost self-refuting, nature. It starts out by presenting one argument, but then shifts, abandoning its first thesis (which makes an arguable point) and promoting a second one (that is literally laughable and absurd).

Klingenstein opens with a smack across the faces of lily-livered Republicans everywhere, calling on all of them—even those who can’t stand Trump—to get behind him. Why? Because “we” are in a war, and only Trump can be an effective Commander-in-Chief.  “We shouldn’t much care whether our Commander in Chief is a real conservative…or is a role model for children….or says lots of silly things,” he says.

And there’s something to that (although claiming Trump “says lots of silly things” is like saying that a suicide bomber “expresses his opinion forthrightly”). Trump, as a public figure, has the charisma and the egomaniacal shamelessness to lead lesser men and women against the people they all hate. Klingenstein’s point, at least so far, is that it doesn’t matter if Trump even has virtues. He’s the man of the moment and can get the job done, so shut up, naysayers, and climb aboard the train. It’s a hard-bitten realist’s summons to the doubting and the hesitant to grow up, snap out of it, and join the cause.

But then he abandons that message. He starts to list Trump’s virtues. And that’s when things turn comical.

After scary footage of swarming, poorly-dressed immigrants, Klingenstein intones, “Trump knows his job is to protect Americans—and just Americans.” Was Tom in a coma during COVID? Did he not witness, as everyone else did, Trump’s blithe indifference to what was a world-wide pandemic, how he famously minimized and ignored it?

“Trump has no white guilt—or any guilt, for that matter,” Klingenstein says with his undertaker’s gravity. Presumably by this Tom means, not that Trump is not guilty of committing this or that crime, but that he feels no guilt, whether about being white and privileged, or anything else. Maybe you have to be a billionaire chairman of the Claremont Institute not to realize that that quality is high up on the list of criteria for diagnosing a sociopath.

But wait, there’s more. “He is a businessman, who takes the world on its own terms, and navigates by facts and common sense.” This is particularly hilarious. Trump-the-businessman famously went bankrupt four times owning casinos. Meanwhile, no one who has spent a lifetime cheating (at golf! in the presence of other players and caddies! let alone at business, marriage, and everything else) can be said to take the world on its own terms. As for “facts…” Bitch, please. Trump is not only a big, fat liar, he’s the biggest, fattest liar who ever lived.

It goes on, concluding with a one-two punch of nonsense. When his rally crowds chant USA, “…in these moments, Trump and his audience mutually pledge to each other their fidelity and their sacred honor.” Don’t laugh. Or, fuck it. Do laugh. The idea that Trump possesses (let alone is capable of sincerely pledging) anything close to fidelity is science fiction. As for his followers’ “sacred honor”—is that what was on display at the Capitol on January 6?

One has to wonder, then: Who is the intended audience for this repulsive commercial? Is it the Republican grandees who know exactly what kind of excrescence Trump is, but who have to be convinced to support him anyway? In that case we are in the domain of the right-wing bourgeoisie and the upper classes in Germany during the rise of you-know-who, who knew what a “buffoon” he was but felt they could control him anyway. We saw how that turned out.

Or is it the MAGA rank and file, who prefer that their strongman have “virtues,” and need to be sweet-talked and reassured that Trump is not what every realistic person knows him to be but, rather, is the heroic demi-god that appears in the jaw-droppingly idiotic paintings of Jon McNaughton?

Can it be both? That seems unwise. The VIP’s will roll their eyes at (and feel lied to by) the isn’t-he-wonderful section, and the MAGAts don’t need convincing. Klingenstein and Claremont could have saved a lot of time and production expense by just calling on all “real” Americans to, as they used to say in the Third Reich, “live TOWARD the Fuhrer.” Then again, this is a creation by far-right conservatives. We already know they can’t make art or entertainment. Small wonder they can’t make effective 8-minute political ads, either.

NB: For a different, and scathing, discussion of this video, read Nina Burleigh’s response here.