Any Questions?
Published on http://www.counterpunch.org
– Susanne K. Langer
The President has a defensive skill in handling Q&A. He often asks “Who are you?” Let the questioners identify themselves. As these questioners are most often members of the Press and the President has vilified the Press in the eyes of his followers, the question is then “rigged,” coming from a “Trump Hater.” He doesn’t fear questioners or their questions because he can brazenly refute and shut down what is or might be a question that scores a point against what he is saying, which very often are contrary to facts, evidence and our human factual knowledge base.
This prompts the question “How did we get here, from George Washington to Donald J. Trump?” How indeed did we wind up with Donald J. Trump, not once but twice?
I have no answer to that one. Certainly, we’ve had some rehearsals leading to Trump: Joe McCarthy and Roy Cohn are in there, as is Lee Atwater, Newt Gingrich, Ralph Reed, Dick Armey, Tom DeLay, all on the road to the mean, loudmouth, grifter politics Trump perfected. But now they look like Pollyannas compared to our Trump.
Our Trump has been beaten up in the courts and in elections; he’s suffered the attacks of House Democrats, the Fourth Estate, the Deep State, and the Woke. That’s what about half of Americans believe. He may grope women on his way to treasonous insurrection, cut off international food aid and medical relief, send 19 year old Big Balls in to tear down government agencies, send the military into cities based on false charges, remove habeus corpus because you can’t give it to everybody, and so on and on. BUT, he brings the needed voters to the Republican Party so they can win elections and keep the maybe one day “redistributive” Democrats offline.
This crew will never leave Trump as long as unenlightened self-interest lives. The MAGA crew has a cult-like attachment to Trump. He has the magnetism of Jonestown Jim Jones, Branch Davidian David Koresh, Hale Bopp’s Marshall Applewhite, and has his own Trump Family, violent on January 6th as the Manson Family was on August 8th.
For both these Trump crews, Q&A is either always already weaponized, or just another way to preach to the choir.
I need to mention another weapon in his Q&A arsenal. It’s what Cyrano called the aggressive attack in which slurs, invective, insults and expletives fly against those who cross him. Trump also uses the “Common sense, Everyman” response,” very engaging and undeterred by spouting claims publicly debunked for months or even years.
Because I believe, as Langer does, that the question raised is the hard task, I offer my questions in a search to find the questions we should all be asking now. I offer likely answers as stimulating, not definitive. This goes beyond AI’s relating what is known; answers here are interpretive/hermeneutical and not expository.
Question: Can truth ever lay a glove on our President?”
A: If truth can reach the minds of Trump’s followers, then he’d vaporize. We wouldn’t within any rational calculus have such a president.
We have been putting up with a mockery of truth since Trump was first elected. How to know anything based on facts and evidence in order to reach common understanding has already vaporized in the ranks of enough voters to elect Donald J. Trump president twice.
Removing what mocks how to know what is true in the absence of those ways of knowing describes where we are at with Donald J. Trump. We are without a path of knowing, lost in a state of aporia.
Q: When Trump goes, will MAGA go with him?
A: MAGA as a cult can’t go on headless. See Branch Davidians et al.
Project 2025 can only go on if its manifesto occupies executive and Congressional power after Trump’s departure. It’s a manifesto more pataphysics than neither Capitalism nor Democracy can live with.
Q. What was the vacuum in American politics that Trump filled?
Firstly, Nature didn’t create this vacuum. Thievery and compliance engineered deliberately were at play:
Liberals hadn’t attended to the working class and their kitchen table issues since LBJ’s Great Society, except for ACA of Obama. They abandoned the Labor side in the Labor vs. Capital struggle.
Wealth and political leverage moved away from the middle class while at the same time solidifying a top 20% or so who enjoyed and used such leverage. A slow creeping frustration and anger developed as life for many was like lived in the shadow or memory of better times, or times in which pensions, benefit and long employment tenure was what parents and grandparents had. There was and is no way for Market Rule/Profit to Shareholders to relieve this immiseration.
Not declaiming or comprehending Market Rule politics, but still entrenching them, Trump found a different path into the minds and hearts of those who filled the ranks of MAGA. Trump played their anger into fear and hate, positioning himself as the People’s Justice. A sense of great loss from what America had been was accommodated by Trump, not by recouping what had been lost, but vituperatively pointing to who had stolen America from them. He gave names. Ironically, he’s put a stopper on naming names in the Epstein degeneracy.
A vacuum created by theft had occurred, Democrats abandoning the working class wage earner, and Republicans thieving the fruits of that work, transferring it to the wealthy, where it compounds and continues to do so.
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Q. Why do so many voters of religious persuasion support a man who has been divorced twice, married three times, found liable for sexual abuse, and guilty of 34 felony accounts?
A. In a proudly self-declared Christian nation, a nation that had three or four Great Awakenings of evangelical spirit, the Democratic Party went solid behind heterodox issues. Although liberal causes claim a moral sense, it seems distasteful to any flavor of Western Christianity.
Trump, however, is recognized as a sinner, perhaps repenting and seeking forgiveness. Secular agnostic Liberals do not see themselves as sinners needing forgiveness. They vow under Reason, not God. Thus, they are outside a Christian frame while Trump is not, although Liberals defense of victims of prejudice and hate, a list Trump adds to every day, reveals a moral purpose in their politics. That is absent in Republican and Conservative Right Wing politics. Trump exhibits a vile meanness toward others that should horrify his religious supporters but does not. He does unto others who cross him. Moral integrity unfortunately is not a sine qua non of religious faith.
Q. Are post-Trump conservatives engaged in holding on to Trump’s MAGA supporters?
A. Claimants to the throne are finding varying ways of maintaining a Market Rule/Profit to Shareholder world while at the same time offering sops to the many who have not benefited from Market Rule. This is a mission that can only succeed if lies and bullshit continue to hold the stage.
So, we have Oren Cass of American Compass, or Dark Enlightenment adopting the disingenuous family and worker focus of a post-Trump Conservatism.
We have Curtis Yarvin who holds that American democracy should be replaced by an accountable monarchy similar to the governance structure of corporations.
We have Patrick Deneen who in his latest book, “Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future,” proposes replacing the current liberal order with a “postliberal” one that would prioritize conservative and religious values over individual rights and liberties.
Most likely, none of these will snare MAGA, mostly because it’s discourse and not personality and passion. MAGA will either burn out or blindly burn what angers them. A politics of passion far removed from anything reasonable follows the mercurial path of passion. Such a politics tied to an iconic leader who dies, dies with him. I see no St Paul ready to make clear on social media the miraculous post-Trump redeeming message for us all.
Q. What recourse is there if Trump orders his Justice Department to suspend 2026 Congressional Election results and initiate investigations of the Democratic Party’s involvement in what he will declare a rigged election?
A. If the House is retaken by Democrats by wide margins, but those results are declared rigged by Trump, certain angry backlash will be met with the declaration of the Insurrection Act.
No doubt, future domestic war planning strategies are now being modeled by all in the event of such. Far too many possibles and probables to venture further. Trump has an attack plan; let’s just hope some will have counterattack plans.
Q. Is the Worker Co-operative Movement a challenge to Market Rule and Profit to Shareholders?
A. Yes, it is but it’s not represented or supported by the Duopoly. This is understandable with the Republican Party but incomprehensible with the Democratic Party.
Worker co-operatives diminish the power of Capital in the Labor/Capital divide by elevating workers to ownership status. In no way does this economic arrangement undermine electoral democracy or inevitably slip into some form of State control. Start-up capital can be invested in one co-operative by another. Mondragon, a federation of worker co-operatives, is the seventh-largest Spanish company in terms of asset turnover and the leading business group in the Basque Country.
Q. Will the Republican Party reconstruct after Trump, and will the Democratic Party reconstruct after Woke?
A. First to consider is that the Republican Party is clear in its upholding of Market Rule with limited intrusion by the Federal Government. Trump is not a break from that. Globalized financialized capitalism as well as a burgeoning Simi Valley tech AI crypto capitalism will fit nicely within the Republican Party tent. There’s an attractiveness to this burgeoning tech and crypto that will attract voters on MAGA levels.
Democrats on the other hand may go back to issues Zohran Mamdani has brought up, and Sanders before him, and FDR’s Bill of Economic Rights before them, basically New Deal issues leaning toward social democracy, and thus hope to recapture wage earners who Trump and Republicans, oddly enough, now own. Unless the techs co-opt Democrats on global warming issues, conservative Right denial of these matters will put them offline while pushing environmentally concerned Dems forward.
Q. What charges could be made against President Trump if a third impeachment was begun by the House?
“The evidence is clear that the second Trump administration is a powder keg of corruption scandals, influence-peddling, and profiteering from public service. The American people are the ones bearing the costs of Trump’s self-enrichment and selling of access and influence to the highest bidder.” Issue One
“When a president acts beyond the scope of his constitutional powers, members of his administration and the other branches of government must step in to stop him, lest the nation face not just a constitutional crisis but also the dismantling of American democracy. Congress has thus far failed to serve as a check on executive overreach, perhaps out of fear of political retribution. Thus, it is falling to the courts to robustly fulfill their constitutional role in policing the executive branch when it violates the Constitution and the laws as enacted by Congress.”
Center for American Progress
If the House is won by Democrats in 2026 but not the Senate, no charges brought against Trump will lead to a conviction in the Senate. However, if Trump’s voter support dwindles, his power over the Senate also dwindles. Without fear of his leverage among voters, cowed Republican Senators might follow the evidence and convict. Some, as Trump would say, might like Trump’s destruction of their legislative powers.
Q. In a post-Trump era can Americans expunge conspiracy theories?
A. Conspiracy fabrications, like viruses, catch hold in a compromised immune system culture. Our defenses against lies and bullshit, conspiracies and fantasies are now daily assaulted without being decisively dismissed. Alongside a Trump era we are in a post-Truth era and how that is amended/rectified has yet to be written.
When Pandora opened the jar and evils and miseries were released, hope only remained captured inside. Today what has been released is distrust and skepticism regarding what is real, what is true, what words mean, and so, the path to common understanding is branching into every corner of cyberspace, what is fast become total Dark Web.
A practical solution would be educating competent readers and grading that competence from primary to advanced levels. If you start with “Tony Has a Pony” and ask what Tony has, you have an answer based on fact, not opinion. Proceed to the U.S. Constitution and all Amendments to it.
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Q. In seeking a peaceful end to the Ukraine/Russia war can there be any justification in conceding to what the invader, Russia, demands because it is winning on the battlefield?
A. Ukrainians have made it clear that they will not accept peace at the price of sovereignty, which is the price to be paid to Russia in all territory that would be conceded to it.
The EU sees nothing good coming out of rewarding the invasion of a sovereign country because the invader is winning on the battlefield. The precedent here, not only in regard to Putin’s Russia which retains the ambitions of Stalin’s Soviet Union, but in regard to China which can invade Taiwan and win on the battlefield.
Trump’s U.S., by which I mean Trump’s will is presently unopposed by any prior checks and balances, has no fear of the precedent the EU fears. For the strong to subjugate the weak is not a problem to Trump’s U.S. as he goes along with a strongman view in which strong leaders get their way and the weak in the natural order of things are crushed. And so, Putin has all the cards and Zelensky must be pounded in the Oval Office to understand he is holding no cards. The dying in Gaza or in the Ukraine do not urge Trump to push hard against Netanyahu or Putin. In the U.S. the weak and powerless are shuffled off to Alligator Alcatrazes. The innocent are presumed guilty, immigrants and the home-grown.
Wrapped up in this profile is also Trump’s attention to his MAGA base. Being instrumental in bringing about a peace agreement between Ukraine and Russia would assure him, in his mind, of a Nobel Peace Prize. That prize would appease MAGAs who are opposed to any entanglement in anything “foreign,” including Ukraine, and also deflect attention from the “Epstein Matter,” which Trump is running from as hard as Oedipus running from Corinth. Tragedy awaited.
By selling weaponry to the Europeans who can then pass them on to Ukraine, Trump can also demonstrate his “transactional” art, (read: make a profit) to his MAGAs. The fact that U.S. foreign policy is now embedded not in progressive, humanitarian values but profit and “we need to be paid first” is just part of the deterioration of the U.S. image worldwide.
If the Europeans get Trump to take a hard line with Putin, which means Trump would be identifying not with the Strongman Putin, whom he admires, but with the EU, founded in Trump’s view, to “screw with the U.S.,” Putin’s wining position on the battlefield as well as at home, where angry veterans of the Ukraine war as well as disappointed oligarchic elites, may amend a peace plan Ukraine and the EU could accept. A hard line against Putin may push him to nuclear response but more likely a hard line would push Putin toward threatening to expose Trump with whatever Putin has on him. Michael Wolff conjectures what Putin knows about Trump he got from a meeting with Epstein. Putin may also be pushed out of power if the U.S. and the EU muster overwhelming superiority on the battlefield.
Q. What is in the Epstein files that Trump fears?
“…a handful of dust.”
