LET THE GAMES BEGIN

Donald Trump, Leftist? Let the Games Begin Joe Klein Nov 27   To ancient Romans, gladiators were not ideals of masculinity, or of heroism. In ancient Rome, gladiators served as entertainers, albeit on stages with very high stakes. —Melanie Racette-Campbell in The New York Times I went to see Gladiator II—I’m a sucker for swords and sandals—which turned out to be a metaphoric experience. Not because of the movie, an entirely unsurprising sequel, but because of the seats—which pitched and rolled and jolted and squirted water and jets of air, and punched me in the back…an unsuccessful attempt to coordinate with the action on the screen. It was disconcerting to the point of nausea. Worse, it interrupted, in the most annoying possible way, the sacred bond between viewer and film. It was like having the hot dog guy at the ballpark come to your seat and block your view just as something memorable was happening on the field. Only this hot dog guy would not go away, and he kept spitting on my popcorn. No doubt, this will go down as the stupidest theatrical innovation since Smellovision. But the metaphor was obvious: This is our fate for the next four years with Donald Trump, foolish extravaganzas, bread, circuses, sharks, misdirection, masculinity, blood and gore. The bumpiest of rides. One thing did strike me, though: The oath Roman soldiers swore as they went off to war: strength and honor. Again, the presidential election of 2024 was about the appearance of strength and the illusion of a certain perverse patriotic honor. Trump’s supporters assumed something Democrats never could: that they owned the American flag. It is pathetic to watch various Dems elide that fact. Their post-mortems have been predictably ridiculous. Another thing the 2024 election was about was showbiz and hucksterism. Trump sees his presidency as a reality-TV series. This is season two. You start the first episode of the second season with a head-snapping bang: Matt Gaetz!!! Meanwhile, in the commercial breaks, he’s selling Bibles, golden sneakers, electric guitars—if Fuller brushes were still a thing, he’d be peddling those too. And a discombobulated sensory overload, like those seats at the movies, as esteemed old-colleague Matt Bai writes in The Washington Post: Taken together, Trump’s roster of appointees represents a government that is contemptuous of military brass, intelligence agencies and federal law enforcement; that believes America is too bellicose and should negotiate with foreign dictators; that wants to stamp out the influence of pharmaceutical and agricultural companies; and that plans to protect American industries with sweeping new tariffs. Not so long ago, that’s what we would have recognized as a radical leftist agenda But there is a laser-focused discipline to Trump’s early moves as well: He seems absolutely intent on delivering on his campaign promises, especially immigration and the mistaken belief that the threat of tariffs will lower prices. That, and the aggrandizing of oligarchs, home and abroad. This is something new from Agent Orange: discipline amidst the misdirection. And yet, the poor, perpetually deluded reactionary progressives maunder on. Oh, let us worship at the altar of the working class! Oh, let us pretend to mourn the economy, which is only the best in the world! Oh, let us skewer the rich people! (Imagine that in the United States, years after the collapse of socialism as an operating philosophy. The Bernie Bros still think the “working class” is angry at rich people. Quite the opposite: it admires the wealthy, without any discretion. that’s why we elected a showboat faux-billionaire as our next president.) The left’s misapprehension of people who punch payroll clocks remains farcical. There is this delusion that if Democrats keep talking about the economic plight of the working class, they can get away with not talking so much about the cultural baggage—we don’t really need to dump DEI, do we?—and interest groups that lose them elections. A flat-screen TV in every family room! A smart phone in every fist! A souped-up pickup in every driveway! Oh, wait a minute: the folks already have those things. How about offering $500 in free bets from MGM or wherever, along with the free eyeglasses for seniors? Desperate times call for degenerate measures. The utter cluelessness of Demo-mortems can be summed up in a single headline: Democrats Should Appeal to their Base, Not Swing Voters in The Guardian by someone named Steve Phillips, who obviously has been living in some other country. And then, there’s the ever reliable Perry Bacon, who suggested today in The Washington Post, among other things, that members of the resistance should join Democratic Socialists of America, a blatantly anti-Israel (and sometimes flagrantly Jew-hating) group of militant anachronists. This after Bacon wrote a column about education as a bipartisan issue without even mentioning either teachers unions or charter schools. He is opinionating from a basement room without windows. And then, there’s the casual corruption: I thought Trump had a corner on that, but the Kamala campaign gave a $500,000 donation to Al Sharpton’s National Action Network just before she did an interview with the Reverend Al on MSNBC. Sharpton has made major strides in recent yeas toward respectability on issues like crime, wokery and education, but Al, you just can’t take money from someone you’re going to interview. I’ll have more to say about the intellectual desuetude of MSNBC soon, but I tuned in the other day and saw Princeton’s Eddie Glaude, who is not stupid, opining about the Middle East, about which he knows nothing. There’s too much of that; MSNBC’s corral is far too small for the rodeo. The network is said to be offering Rachel Maddow a nine-figure deal. That should lower the level of smug pomposity! There are exceptions, usually among those, like Benjamin Wallace-Wells, who actually undertook reporting trips to the hinterlands: In September, as part of a profile of J. D. Vance, I spent some time in Ohio, where, among other things, I was interested in what had made the state move, in the course of two decades, from slightly Republican to convincingly red. My assumption had been that the key was economic anger, over the displacement of manufacturing jobs to China and the long-tail effects of NAFTA. But the Republican officials I met, when asked to explain Ohio’s turn toward right-wing populism, tended to emphasize the opioid epidemic rather than jobs. “For folks around here, it really is protecting the southern border from drugs,” Mark Munroe, the longtime chair of the Mahoning County G.O.P., told me. [Italics mine—the standard mistaken Democratic default position revealed!] I suspect Trump’s actions against the cartels will be rather dramatic. But there is some good news on the immediate horizon: Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill, two of my very favorite House Democrats, are running for governor in Virginia and New Jersey respectively. Spanberger was an undercover CIA agent. Sherrill, a Navy helicopter pilot—and one of the founders of the bipartisan military caucus, For Country, which I support as a member of the With Honor PAC advisory board. Both are excellent.