I have wrapped my head around everything with two vocab words and a quote. Neither of these words are ones I had been comfortable using prior to the Trump Administration. Both of them give me a handle on things, maybe they will do the same for you. The quote we'll save for last.

The first vocab word is kayfabe. Let's use it in a sentence, courtesy Wikipedia:

I remember the guy who would bring our jackets back to the dressing room. Every time he did, someone would yell "Kayfabe." ... Then one night, the guy decided to stand up for himself and told the whole dressing room: "I don't mind the yelling, but I want to let you know that my name is not Kayfabe. It's Mark." ... What he didn't know is that wrestlers called people outside of the business "marks"—that's why we were yelling kayfabe in the first place.

Apparently nobody knows where the word came from, which is apt. Words without etymology end up as words without clear definitions, which is perfectly appropriate for kayfabe. Fundamentally it's a performance with no clear audience. It's a shared consensus unreality for purposes of career advancement - sure, "entertainment" but if your career is a pro wrestler and if your career is advanced by never taking off the tights, it's no longer about entertainment.

Kayfabe is the act of intentionally forcing a consensus illusion in order to bind group affinity. The performers adopt a framework of behavior they know to be false so that the observers can adopt a framework of observation they know to be false so that both can inhabit a world different than the one everyone else belongs to. Sure, wrestling is fake and sure, a million and a half people tune into WWE Raw every week. Those are pathetic numbers, by the way. Keep that in mind. Six million people watched The Voice and you'd forgotten that shit was still on the air. A million and a half people is Battlestar Galactica numbers. Fuckin' five million people watch Greg Guttfeld.

The second vocab word is shibboleth.

And the Gileadites took the passages of Jordan before the Ephraimites: and it was so, that when those Ephraimites which were escaped said, Let me go over; that the men of Gilead said unto him, Art thou an Ephraimite? If he said, Nay; Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan: and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand.

It's become popular to use "shibboleth" as "some deeply-held truth or phrase used as secret knowledge" but it's not, not at all. A shibboleth is a cultural touchstone used antagonistically against outsiders. The ones we have up here are "Puyallup" and "Sequim" and if you don't know how to say those words we will mock you. In LA it's the ground truth that In'n'Out burgers are delicious, rather than basic, and that there are no ants no matter how many you see. Sure, there are hispanic-root words that the wypepo all mispronounce the same way (lookin' at you, Los Feliz) but that shows you're white, not local. Shibboleths are cultural weapons. They are the things that the in-group agrees upon without question for the principle purpose of setting them apart from the out-group.

The whole of the Trump administration is Kayfabe. They know none of this shit is true and they don't care. They play the game this way so the audience plays the game that way and by binding each other to common knowledge exclusive from the majority they grow stronger. Wrestling is a cult; you're in or you're out and we're all out. The Trump administration is likewise a cult. You're in or you're out and holy shit, there's a lot of ex-wrestlers.

Their shibboleths are numerous but they start with the winner of the 2020 election. Disagree and there fell at the time of the Ephraimites.

THE QUOTE: I've never seen it anywhere else but in Postwar, Tony Judt credits Woodrow Wilson as telling Harry Truman "you can have justice or you can have peace. You can't have both." Here's a fun book that lays it out chapter and verse - fundamentally, the United States, under the Marshall Plan, reconstituted the whole of the Nazi industrial complex and blessed it with a Cold War star. We pay lip service to the crimes perpetrated by IG Farben and IBM but with zero exceptions, opportunistic Nazi Party members were given slaps on the wrist and allowed to retain all of the wealth they confiscated from Jews, built on the backs of Jews, and used to murder Brits, Americans and German Jews. De Jong does touch on the fact that most of the billionaires weren't genocidal maniacs, they were opportunists who saw which way the wind was blowing. Hanna Arendt made the point that Eichmann wasn't a genocidal maniac either, he was a bureaucrat who was good at bureaucracy and that he experienced extreme moral pangs from being good at his job. But he didn't stop doing it. Neither did Gunther Quandt.

Neither did Mitch McConnell.

Put the Reichstag Fire at 2016. On a nazi timeline it's 1942, the year they started gassing Jews. Or maybe we subtract the Biden years? It's 1938, then, the year of Krystallnacht, the Munich Accords and the Four Year Plan. Either way, it wasn't the Nazis that fucked the world, it was the failure of the rest of Germany to stop the Nazis. Because a lot of them knew that they'd either come out ahead? Or face no real blowback.

The kayfabers with their shibboleths are a tiny percentage of the playing field. The problem is that everyone else knows that serving as a Director of IG Farben while it's making Zyklon B is the quickest way to serve as a Director of BASF when the unconditional surrender comes through. So they smile and say Trump won 2020, that vaccines cause autism and that it's all gonna be just fine. 'cuz for them it will be. One way or another, 2028 will be like 2027 will be like 2026.

What I hang on to? Is the fact that (A) it's a tiny cult (B) that has ground everyone competent into the dust (C) being headed by a venal, senile sloth (D) who is mostly interested in praise and self-enrichment. Hitler was a true believer. He felt that if the Jews beat him they would be morally bound to exterminate the Aryans. Hitler was a zealot, Trump is a harlot. A harlot who has gotten what he wants, in every possible way - Much like McConnell overturning the Supreme Court, Trump's cup runneth over. His legacy has been cemented. What he's got is a bunch of remoras with their own agendas. Compare the past week to the first week of Trump 1: it was all about kids in cages and closing the airports to shithole countries. None of that stuff really stuck, either, it was opportunistic zealots using the momentum of the inauguration to push as hard as they could, as fast as they could, before opposition crystallized - a political "tush push" (I hate that phrase) to get the ball as far down the field as possible before everyone figures out how they feel about all this shit.

It isn't Germany. It isn't 1933. You know what it feels like? It feels like 2000, when the Supreme Court decided to give the country to the Republicans so we could all "heal." Them fuckers definitely believed that just handing shit to GWB would be better for "the country" as in, "republican country and the people who get along with them." Who's worse, Scalia or Alito? Tough call. None of this shit is great.

Mostly I'm annoyed at how Fourth Fucking Turning everything feels. At the same time, we've gotten through them all. I really don't like how often I've resorted to rationalizing how little this will all affect me because this is how Gunther Quandt happens but fuckin' hell, they voted for him. "The government you elect is the government you deserve."