Re: <nettime> Kim Darroch's article Url

[Ted Byfield via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

This is a pretty solid piece, but like most institutionally oriented analyses it misses one key thing. "Barring personal catastrophe," as the author said (or something like it), Trump won't lose. That's not to say he'll *win*, just that we can be sure he'll dramatically escalate the chaos in order to pre-bury his losses, whatever form they may take. Last time, the crux of those efforts came after the election. This time, I think, they'll come before it.

Biden has all kinds of electoral issues, sure, but what we're seeing now is new. Much of it is the obligatory quadrennial Democratic bed-wetting, which is intimately related to the party's bizarre incapacity to be derisive. Trolling and triggering Trump into committing electoral seppuku on a near-daily basis would be easy *if* the Dems could do it: mimic him, mock him, tease him, torture him, goad him over anything and everything involving size. And I mean e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g, like the last time he got laid and how long he lasted. But the logic of US progressivism makes that impossible, because the pearl-clutching armies of the new-new-new lefts would descend on anyone who really went for his jugular.

The bulk of the US left has been desperately earnest for decades, so that problem isn't really new. What *is* new, or least newer, is the US media's metastasizing, nihilistic hunger for spectacular self-destruction. The NYT is a good proxy for this, in part because it's far too influential to be understood as merely a proxy. It's like saying a towering wall of Marshall amps cranked up to 11 are a "proxy" for an electric guitar — uh, yeah, no, maybe not the best way to understand things.

Over the last several weeks, there have been some seismic shifts in how the NYT covers Biden and Trump. For Biden, they've become a 24/7 noise machine about the supposed problem of his age, and their "legitimation" of that pseudo-issue has consumed their reporting and opinion — to such a degree that a few weeks ago even the *Daily Mail* said WTAF. With that has come a deep but subtle shift in how they cover Trump: he's morphed from a major news figure into something more like a shadow president, like an Avignon pope. It's gotten to the point where, going by their front page, any reasonable person would think Trump is president and Biden is the challenger. Their immense role in shaping the US media landscape should go without saying.

For now, that's mostly a highbrow critique, but think that'll change in pretty predictable ways. The chances that Trump will manage to evade *every* cinsequnece of *all* of the judicial processes aimed at him is nill. And each setback will erode support for him in key demographics *outside of the MAGA base *and drive an (inevitable, imo) pendulum swing toward Biden as the election nears. So, as it becomes clear that Trump is sailing not to electoral victory but right over the edge of his flat earth, how will he respond?

My guess: he may well try to pull the plug on the election itself by arguing that it's all a sham, conspiracy, hopelessly corrupt, and that Republicans should actively *delegitimize* it by refusing to vote. Result: He won't lose, the Dems' victory will be hollow to a degree we've never seen before, and the MAGA insurgency *within* the government, mainly in the courts and at and below the state level, will continue to ramp up their efforts to unravel governance itself, largely on the grounds that they're the "real" elected government. It doesn't need to make sense to work; indeed, the less sense it makes, the more potent it is.

And, as they say, the NYT will be there for it. They already are.

Institutionalist analyses are fine, except (a) when the institutions themselves are collapsing, and (b) when some of the institutions in question are the media itself or themselves or whatever. That'll continue to happen regardless of who "wins" and "loses" the "election," because those words will mean less and less.

And, on another level, that's where and how the piece fits in. Far from being a neutral overview, it's better understood as one of many speculative texts on which the GOP's LLM-like logic is being trained. The Heritage Foundation's blueprint for 2025 is another. The growing recognition that rightist judges and migstrates use their rulings to signal and even invite fake engineered cases and arguments is another. There are many, manny more inputs, and they all get shoved into the maw of the rightist hallucination machine.

Cheers,
Ted

On 3 Mar 2024, at 12:47, Patrice Riemens via nettime-l wrote:

> Sorry, forgot it:
>
> https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/world/united-states/65040/trumps-return-are-we-ready
>
> Ciao Ciao
> -- 
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