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Trump’s Flash-Bang Fakery, and the CEO who was the Master of
Disaster
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My big worry for Dems at the moment is not the danger
of the wrong response to the LA protests, but getting mired in the return of
deported Salvadoran immigrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia. If Abrego Garcia does turn
out to have spent the last nine years transporting undocumented migrants from
Houston to Maryland, rather than minding his own business as a family man and
sheet metal apprentice (who, uh, abused his wife, according to her two
petitions for protection, a revelation that gave me my first moment of unease
about Abrego Garcia), then he’s an unfortunate poster boy for ICE overreach.
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Due process, a bedrock of American civil liberties, is
also, sadly, a pointy-headed legal term that just doesn’t cut it in today’s
raucous political playing field. If the details of the Abrego Garcia indictment
are true, ire about his treatment starts to guiltily slip away, and we are back
in that arid no man’s land of first-term impeachment trials, looking at the
pursed mouth of then-Congressman Adam Schiff banging his gavel, or listening to
professorial rants from esteemed Congressman Jamie Raskin, a noble defender of
the U.S. Constitution, who I just wish- unless he has an effective game plan -
would shut the fuck up.
Which untapped communications genius can make these vital points of
Democratic principle sexy when we are living in a new ratings-spiked episode of
Trump’s reality show every day? His absurdly unnecessary National Guard
call-out is, as the Atlantic’s David Frum says, Trump's dress rehearsal for the midterms, seeing how
much mayhem he can stir up and then supposedly quash as the party of law and
order. (I hate to invoke the H word here but the LA conflagration is just a bit
reminiscent of the Nazis’ still-debated false flag operation, setting fire to
the Reichstag in 1933 and blaming it on Communist saboteurs in order to
consolidate Third Reich power.) Like any good entertainment producer, Trump
knows location is key: He doesn't need to be told that deep-blue Los Angeles, a
city of immigrants and a place of historical protest, with an ambitious,
mane-tossing governor and a mediocre mayor most recently derided for being MIA
at the start of the inferno that burned down some 12,000 LA homes, is the
perfect setting for his military mise en scène. Now, just as he hoped, the
mayhem is spreading.
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The problem is that the Trump show runners, as I think
of his circle of charlatan advisers, are so fast and inventive, it causes Dems
to make mistakes. (Remember that raft of august signatures from the Biden
national security apparatus in the first term, claiming the info on Hunter
Biden’s laptop was a phony Russian plant?) Either pausing to consider how to
correctly approach a problem while Team Trump races ahead, or jumping too fast
on what seems like an exploitable political asset, can be a strategic elephant
trap for Democrats. Will upstanding Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen’s April
trip to El Salvador to lobby for Abrego Garcia’s release and sip coffee with
him at a San Salvador hotel feature in Van Hollen’s 2028 campaign ad? Or will
the senator’s morally correct attempt to win due process for his working-class
constituent be more effectively weaponized in a sneering Republican mash-up
about Democrats’ love of immigrant criminals? If the people-smuggling charges
against Garcia are proved to be wrong, there’s nothing Trump is better at than
doubling down on a lie.
In his first term, Trump was prevented from deploying
active duty forces to put down the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests by his
Defense Secretary Mark Esper and then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Mark
Milley. (Esper has recalled Trump musing to him and Milley, “Can’t you just
shoot them, just shoot them in the legs?”) But now, all the grown-ups are gone
and we have the excitable, chisel-chinned Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and
Homeland Security babe Kristi Noem competing for daddy’s approval by egging him
on. It’s a strategic nightmare for Democrats, but by the time they have argued
amongst themselves and figured out a way to present their own argument, the
Trump show will be on to its next hit episode.
Watery Doomsday
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If you are in masochistic search of more moneyed arrogance in full cry, I
recommend Titan: The OceanGate Disaster, the new documentary airing on Netflix tomorrow, about the doomed 2023
submersible mission to take four affluent thrill-seekers paying $250K apiece to
dive to the wreck of the Titanic, and which met the same tragic fate. OceanGate
CEO Stockton Rush is the personification of ignorant conviction. A scion of one
of San Francisco’s most prominent families, with a Standard Oil fortune in his
pedigree, he is surrounded by competent, qualified, and increasingly alarmed
professional engineers, who warn him that the Titan’s engineering flaws could
make it a floating coffin. (The amplified recordings of cracking and creaking
sounds in the straining carbon fiber and titanium during test dives are
something to haunt your dreams.) Stockton’s response is to blow them off on the
grounds that industry regulations stifle innovation. It is clear Rush fancies
himself a mini Elon Musk, for whom rule-breaking for the hell of it is the sine
qua non of being in the big boy club. (In the doc, OceanGate bookkeeper Bonnie
Carl says Rush “referred to guys [like Musk] as big swinging dicks, and he
loved that term.”)
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One of the heroes of the film is the salt-of-the-earth
Scottish former director of marine operations David Lochridge, who bombarded
Rush with memos about the submersible’s deadly engineering flaws and got fired
for his pains. When Lochridge took his case to OSHA (the Occupational Safety
and Health Administration), OceanGate tried to drive him into financial ruin by
suing him, and, agonizingly, the OSHA investigator, who had a pileup of other
pressing cases, dropped the ball.
I came to loathe Stockton Rush with a passion and would
be only too happy he imploded if he hadn't taken four trusting passengers with
him. Genetically blessed with a Marvel hero jawline and crown of heartthrob
silver hair, Rush’s unfounded belief in his own expertise resonates horribly
with the utterances of another entitled fool RFK Jr., who just fired all
seventeen experts from the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization.
