Tag: Trump

The left should stop hoping that the right will play by the rules

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The next Prime Minister of Italy may well be Silvio Berlusconi, the four-time premier and tycoon who is in many ways the prototype for Donald Trump. Although Berlusconi was banned from elected office for life in 2015, he is currently appealing to the European Court of Human Rights on a technicality. He is being represented by the same British law firm which includes Amal Clooney. After all, everyone has the same human rights, even if (as in the case of Berlusconi) they’ve been convicted of tax fraud, wiretapping political rivals and paying for sex with underage prostitutes, and are planning on forming a government with the political descendents of Mussolini.

Meanwhile, Democrats in the US are falling over themselves to condemn Senator Al Franken for the incident in which he groped a colleague in 2006. A few weeks ago condemnation of Harvey Weistein was universal. No one claimed he had been set up or that the charges were ‘fake news’. On social media many progressives are proud that they condemn all wrongdoers, no matter which side of the political divide they line up on. They are waiting in vain for the right to reciprocate and/or congratulate them.

The abstract principle that everyone has the same right before the law and must enjoy the same access to justice is a fine one. Similarly, it is of course essential that those who have done wrong must be brought to justice and the hypocrisy of those who only pay lip service to universal principles when it suits their political agenda exposed. It is noble of liberals and the left to stand up for such principles.

However, there’s clearly a problem: the right is neither grateful nor impressed. If Berlusconi is successful, he will pay off his lawyers, bribe his way back into power and set about ripping the constitution and the rule of law to shreds. (Italy’s recognition of the European Court of Human Rights may well be at stake.) In much the same manner, no Republican in the US will turn round and thank Democrats for preserving the human rights of all Americans by berating itself for ‘allowing’ some of its leading figures to get away with abusing women. The idea that the right-wing will suddenly learn a valuable lesson about hypocrisy and renew its commitment to democratic values is morbidly mistaken.

Right now all over the world the right is abandoning its commitment not just to the rule of law, constitutional precepts and human rights, but to the very notion of a shared reality. There is no fact or value that they will not deny whenever it is expedient to do so. Whether this takes the form of Michael Gove in the UK decrying the work of experts, politicians in the US rejecting out of hand careful research documenting the pedophilia of a Republican senatorial candidate and the overwhelming evidence of regular sexual abuse by the President, or right-wing pundits from Fox News to the Telegraph openly lying about climate science to protect corporate interests, the savage nihilism of the new global right-wing movement is beyond anything we have encountered in the age of democracy – with a couple of notable exceptions.

That doesn’t mean that the right will not, drawing upon seemingly inexhaustible reserves of cynicism, use the tools of democracy, including the media and the courts, to suit their purposes. At this moment they are busy weaponising every element of our civilisation to attack liberal values and entrench their power. That includes not just the notion of women’s rights in order to purge opposition politicians and liberal celebrities, but also movies, computer games, children’s cartoon characters and other cultural icons, from Ghostbusters to Gamergate and Pepe the frog to pizza and cow’s milk. Their commitment to literally building up their armories is no accident – what we are witnessing is the equivalent of a psychopath grabbing everything he can as a tool to beat his victim to death. (The most powerful weapon nowadays is, of course, the Internet.) That means they will happily employ the notion of free speech and the discourse of human rights when and where it suits them. No Republican or fascist will ever insist that those rights also be granted to their political opponents, and they will never turn such weapons on themselves.

This does not mean that we abandon our commitment to honouring universal values. Rather it’s a question of priorities. Just as the right to free speech does not mean that everyone can demand access to mass and social media audiences, liberals and the left must not prioritise causes established and exploited by the far-right. With the very real threat of fascism bashing down the door of democracy, this is not the time for human rights lawyers to be defending budding autocrats like Berlusconi, and in much the same way, while it’s right and necessary to condemn the Louis CKs and Harvey Weinsteins and Al Frankens of this world and disown anyone who casts aspersions on their victims, the left must not spend so long howling in the desert at its own hypocrisies that it lets the real enemy off the hook. Democrats did not facilitate abuse by those men in the same way as the Republicans are for Moore and Trump.

In the meantime, while doing all they can to expose and annihilate the far-right agenda, US progressives would do well to study Italy’s dismal history of vapid and hapless post-Berlusconi governments to learn an instructive lesson in how mere neoliberalism managerialism, committed to no values beyond GDP growth targets, inevitably leads back to yet more right-wing populism – or something even worse.

(Based around a conversation with @ChiaraLiguori.)

Trump ‘devastated’ by Franken revelations: ‘How could anyone treat a woman in such a way?’

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US President and Commander-in-Chief Donald Trump is said to have been ‘profoundly shocked and disgusted’ at the revelation that Democratic Senator Al Franken briefly groped a female colleague during a TV stunt over eleven years ago.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, a White House insider said that neither his staff nor his family had ever seen President Trump as downbeat as over these last 24 hours. He is said to be profoundly shocked that anyone, particularly someone in a position of responsibility, could even think of treating a woman in such a way.

President Trump spent Friday away from TV cameras and was not present on social media all day. Aides reported that he was ‘heartbroken’ upon reading the reports of Franken’s behavior. He is believed to have spent the day in consultation with close female friends, including a number of noteworthy feminists who have been seeking to bring him up to speed on the depth and extent of sexual abuse of women in the US. The President is said to have been ‘humbled and horrified’ by what he has learned.

President Trump is known and respected for his dedication to the furtherance of women’s rights. He has said on several occasions that protecting women from sexual abuse is the single biggest motivating factor in his becoming involved in politics. He used his inauguration speech in January to call for a ‘new feminist dawn’ in America, and has been consistent in seeking to ensure that any woman who does report untoward conduct by men in any area of life is given a full hearing by the justice system and that the right of all women regardless of their age or political affiliation to live free of sexual harrasment is respected at all times and in all places, ‘from hotel elevators to TV studios to the back stage areas of beauty pageants’. In return, he has been universally heralded as the country’s ‘first female president’, and rumors are now spreading that he may be awarded the Nobel Prize For Feminism And Never Having Been Recorded Boasting About Regularly Molesting Women FFS in Stockholm next month.

In other White House news, President Trump’s daughter has been appointed to lead a global task force to investigate the sexual abuse of women by political figures, while his son Barron Trump is to head a commision of inquiry into the mounting problem of Fake News and will also take charge of the Government’s response to the opoid epidemic, negotiations with North Korea, hurricane relief and healthcare reform. Finally, Julian Assange has been appointed Australia’s ambassador to the United States, replacing a woman who had been variously referred to by President Trump on social media as a ‘stupid aborigine slut’ and a ‘fat bich whos too ugly to even rape, lol’.

As long as Trump plays ignorant, his supporters will too

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The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan came up with the concept of the ‘subject-supposed-to-know’, an impersonal and intangible entity which carries knowledge on our behalf. As I understand it, this relates to the conscience. When we feel morally guilty, what authority is it that knows we have done something wrong? For many, the answer is an omniscient god. Lacan’s insight is that we all in a sense believe in God whether we like it or not.

This raises two questions for me. In a heavily mediated society where even our most intimate thoughts and gestures are mediated back to us even while we think and act, could a mediating institution play such a role? Or perhaps a political tyrant, as George Orwell posited? Social media could well come to embody the two, in that so many of our experiences are thought of in terms of their value, evaluated as potential cultural capital, and also because the affordances it offers to directly repressive regimes are boundless.

The other thing that concerns me ( in fact I now see that the idea actually came from Slavoj Žižek) is what we can call the subject-supposed-not-to-know. For example, most of us have grown up in the light of terrifying facts regarding the climate which, were we to take them seriously, would compel us to transform every aspect of our lives*. Instead, we deal with the question as we do with death, pretending it’s not real and dealing with each instance of it as though it were occasional and incidental, with no implications for how we ourselves should think and act. There is clearly some sort of (as Lacan calls it) ‘Big Other’ that embodies and excuses our lack of awareness, an authority which, unlike us, is truly ignorant of the problem. Here we can see that these tools are particularly useful for understanding the role of mass and social media in our lives.

The other pressing instance of the subject-supposed-not-to-know is directly related to this: supporters of Donald Trump. In a way unerringly similar to that of a cult leader, Trump acts out their ignorance and thus allows them to continue with a kind of hysterical blindness. This is true not just of the climate, but also of his own behaviour. If we want to understand why they are so resistent to acknowledging his failings while so ready to blame others, this provides an answer. As long as he pretends that the allegations (including admissions he has himself made in the past) don’t exist, it’s as if they’re not real. He is aided in this by partisan media outlets and social media platforms which facilitate tunnel vision/amplify our blind spots and enable wilfull ignorance of that which their participants do not want to acknowledge. Trump’ s supporters embody an increasingly prevalent condition which affects us all, just in a more extreme form: they and we are effectively, as José Saramago pointed out, blind.

*The now-ubiquitous term ‘triggered’ (as in provoked) actually describes an effect of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. What else is this trauma which we’re so keen to avoid addressing that we displace our fear and stress onto substitute targets, eg race?

The world’s most infantile cult

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Trump’s tweets about ‘making friends’ with Kim Jong Un, complete with exclamation marks more befitting an eight-year-old, confirm once again a level of naivety about world affairs which most people, judging his role and the background to such statements, will regard as both terrifying and contemptible. But his online supporters (presuming there are some who are not automated) seem to lap it up, insisting that his appeals for everyone to get along be taken at face value. Their insistence that the most superficial aspects of world affairs – reports of personal conversations between individual world leaders – are the only defining ones also explains their (faux?)-naif response to his statement about Putin’s ‘response’ to his (apparently pretend) questions about election meddling. For one thing, the theme of lying is too adult to acknowledge; for another, they appear to be too deeply embedded inside a particular worldview to truly care about what’s true or false, or, as Reza Aslan wrote last week, ‘Trump has been spectacularly successful at getting his supporters to believe his blandishments rather than their own eyes’.

It’s common to see Trump supporters on social media extol love and friendship, and denounce the ‘hatred’ and ‘negativity’ of his opponents. I’ve written before about the sentimentality of tyrants. With his gold bath fittings, made-up golf trophies and puerile insistence that such tokens of his success – his toys – be explicitly acknowledged and admired, Trump resembles a more insecure version of the man who will inevitably, in the next few days, become his new BDF (Best Dictator Friend): Rodrigo Duterte of (as it’s correctly spelt) the Philippines, who combines unmitigated brutality and obscene outbursts with teen-like melodrama, especially when it comes to karaoke. There is a long history of autocrats seeing their subjects and counterparts in a mawkish light; there’s also a Michael Jackson element to both Trump’s worldview (and that of his immediate family members) and his appeal, which it’s fair to suspect may suggest similar predilections. Maybe some Trump supporters think that Roy Moore, like the King of Pop, just wanted to play innocently with those children, and would react just as nonchlantly if it were revealed that their hero does too.

I’ve long contended that such naivety is a symptom of a retreat to a less complex and frightening world in the face of the changing climate. The infantile depiction of the world of Fox News and the bogeyman worldview of Infowars are cases in point. There are a number of factors that account for the success of such propaganda. For me, such a retreat to a world of fairy tales is a response to our inability to discuss the environmental consequences of our way of life responsibly. If you can deny the facts of global warming, you can (be persuaded to) deny anything. Once confronted, acolytes of the new right habitually deny everything we try to use to counter them: reason, the experiences of others, universally-agreed upon historical fact, intellectual and scientific authority, even what they themselves have just said. This last is telling: owning one’s own statements and the logical consequences thereof is a habit one acquires as one matures. Instead, faced with truly incontrovertible evidence that their argument is based on false premises, both children and self-declared supporters of Trump repeatedly try to shift the blame by changing the subject, and when that doesn’t work resort to insults. I find most of the time that I have no response but to plead with such people to grow up.

Trump supporters and their equivalents elsewhere may perceive and behave in accordance with a cartoon version of reality, but it’s not a innocent or harmless one. It encompasses the cruelties of children: spitefulness and bullying, including racism of the most puerile kind. Read, for example, this exchange between two adult Trump supporters as reported by Kyle Griffin. Then there are phenomena like the trans bathroom controversy and the building of a wall to keep out outsiders. It is not a world defined by and for adults.

Social media exacerbates this. It’s a playground in which it’s extremely easy to discard the standards of reasonable debate. Bullies and political manipulators were much quick to recognise and mobilise its radical potential than defenders of progressive values. I suspect that as fascism takes hold across the planet, meaningful resistence will not be centred on social media in its current form.

Children often begin to distinguish themselves from their parents by forming gangs. Some join cults. I think it’s essential to take seriously the notion that Trump’s base is a cult. Thus in trying to turn the tide – and, Canute-like or not, we have no choice – we need to turn to the wisdom of deprogrammers and those who know how to counsel individuals caught up in the cult mindset. Trump (etc) supporters behave and argue like children, because that is the mentality particular to their cult. The critical question is: given that their childish retreat into a more reassuring world is partly a symptom and result of our own failure to begin to address very real problems which, Trump or no Trump, threaten our continued existence, what do we have to offer them which is better than the comfort blanket they are so attached to? How do we engage with them without getting drawn into a cartoon-level battle of good versus evil? Should we even treat them as adults, or as children? I have no idea whatsoever. I think it’s time to read up on how cults work.

I suspect that Trump is starting to wish he’d lost

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There’s been a remarkable dearth of speculation on what would have happened #ifTrumphadlost. In the run-up to the vote he gave numerous hints that he was prepared to reject the result and mobilise his supporters for violence. He may well be now thinking in similar terms, even though his room for manoeuvre now appears to be more limited.

I was mistaken in thinking that he would quickly succumb to the pressures of the role. Although, as one astute commenter pointed out, his skill set is extremely narrow, one gift that he has in abundance is tenacity. Reports from throughout his career as a glorified real estate PR man emphasise that even in the face of humiliating catastrophe he would be back in the office every morning in a suit and tie ready for battle. His resilience is an easily-overlooked asset, one that combines with his possibly psychopathic instincts for self-promotion to stand him in very good stead as a politician. Thus my suggestion that his manifest incompetence and unsuitability would mean he would be hastily bundled off stage was wrong. I also misjudged the willingness of the Republican Party establishment to sacrifice democracy to stay in power. Thus he has weathered the storms whipped up by the already countless gaffes which have confirmed the extent of his ignorance, recklessness and callousness, such as directly offending Gold Star families, clearly not giving a shit about Puerto Rico and actually trying to start a nuclear war for little more than his own self-aggrandisement.

Nonetheless, he is clearly suffering. In the light of the indicments, without a clue what Mueller has on him and the rest of his team, his strategy of deflecting and projecting everything said of him onto Clinton is falling apart. Although he has a very solid ‘base’ which shows every sign of having consolidated into the world’s most deluded and heavily-armed cult, his primary audience for his demented rants – his own sense of legitimacy – seems to be crumbling.

There are numerous symptoms of this, but I want to focus on three. They may seem random but the narrative they suggest is one that I find compelling.

The first is a Freudian slip which he made during an interview last weekend. In trying to discuss economics, a subject of which he has no meaningful adult grasp, he let slip the word ‘psychotically’ instead of ‘psychologically’. This suggests to me that all the speculation about his mental state is playing on his mind. I don’t know what it means for a psychopath to learn that they are a psychopath or a psychotic to have their condition explained to them. Most would, I suppose, brush it off. But for someone of that mindset to be repeatedly and massively told that their behaviour was typical of a particular mental condition and to be the subject of speculation by hundreds of millions of people must create a particular kind of pressure.

The second is not something he but rather his media lackey Sean Hannity said. Last night in one of his diatribes Hannity revealed that he sees Hillary Clinton as president. This deserves to be taken very seriously. Trump’s attempts to keep the attention of his ‘base’ on his former opponent relies on an illogic so fundamental that even his chief supporters are unable to sustain it. Fox News’ disavowal of current events in obedience to an agenda which denies even the central fact of Trump’s victory is openly psychotic. No one who has not actually drunk the Flavor Aid would be able to take it remotely seriously. Yet this line of attack is now the only one that remains. Trump has always seemed immune to humilation, but denying his own victory in order to stay in power is another order of magnitude altogether.

Finally, there is Trump’s own tweeted exhortation to someone, somewhere to ‘DO SOMETHING’ to protect him. Making such a call gives the lie to the idea that he is, despite all his haplessness, in control of events. It reveals a level of isolation which suggests he sees himself as locked in a bunker and desperately needs reinforcements to come and free him. If, as seems highly probably given the legal circumstances, his Twitter freedoms are curtailed, his means of comunicating with his ‘base’ will be cut off. In various ways, and despite his staggering insistence on his right to go golfing just as often as he likes, his freedom to do and say whatever he wants is much more restricted than it would have been if he’d lost.

Rumours that he has asked an aide for information about the procedure for resigning are probably just that. I don’t think someone of his peculiar mindset would commit suicide in any form. But if he does, we can only hope that it’s political suicide rather than an explosive pique which takes the rest of us with it. Of course, anyone who thinks that Trump’s departure would resolve the world’s problems at a stroke is themselves deluded. His success is a morbid symptom of our catastrophic failure to develop an alternative to an economy built upon inequality, racism, misogyny and genocidal levels of environmental wastage. Nonetheless, anyone with any concern for democracy can see that his continued presence accelerates exponentially the trajectory towards fascism and world war. Anyone who thinks that the same could have been said of Hillary Clinton needs their head removing for examination almost as much as Trump does.

21 questions for Donald Trump

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In 2009 the Italian newspaper La Repubblica started to publish a daily set of ten questions to then Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. The questions related to numerous allegations of corruption and Berlusconi’s evasive and inconsistent responses to them. The questions were never answered.

Although Berlusconi has been compared to Trump in terms of his populist appeal, his explicit corruption, his gaffes, vanity, sexual venalities and ongoing hairline issues, he was a much more astute and wily operator than Trump. Berlusconi was malevolent and arrogant, but not stupid or mad; Trump appears to present a perfect shitstorm of evil intentions and mental and emotional instability, together with profound and wilfull ignorance of the world, his role in it and how he is regarded by all thinking people.

If Trump were to be posed a similar set of questions in relation to his own crimes and the lies he tells to disguise them, he would struggle to understand the questions. His limited vocabulary, inability to concentrate and lack of attention to detail don’t appear to allow him to deal with matters of any complexity or depth, and his stupidity is such that he appears to have very little awareness of how his staggering dishonesty is apparent to all, for all that he is given a free pass by his supporters*. He is, to an extent, aided and abetted by those sections of the media which have sought to normalise his presidency, treating him as a legitimate holder of the office and – partly thanks to the understandable need of media organisations to maintain cordial relations with and thus access to the White House – rarely holding him to account for the outright lies that he espouses. Nonetheless, many have speculated about what might happen if he were to be truly put on the spot. I therefore present these questions – none of which, I feel with some certainty, he would be able to answer in a meaningful way – in an attempt to plumb the depths of his ignorance, for it is within that dark, dismal chasm that we now all dwell.

1. What is the capital city of Iran?

2. Which country is your present wife from?

3. What are the opening words to the US Constitution?

4. Can you name 3 presidents before Kennedy and give their terms of office?

5. What does the term ‘balance of payments’ mean?

6. What is the name of your predecessor’s autobiography?

7. When did you last see your grandchildren?

8. What is the current population of the United States?

9. When did Kim Jong Il die?

10. What is the address of the White House?

11. Why was the American Civil War fought?

12. Can you name any one of the four soldiers who died in Niger two weeks ago?

13. What is ‘Leaves of Grass’?

14. Who composed the national anthem?

15. Can you name three leading US newspaper columnists?

16. Can you describe how climate change is supposed to work?

17. What is the name of the current Prime Minister of Canada?

18. What is the name of the athlete who inspired the #takeaknee movement?

19. What does the word ‘nuclear’ mean?

20. What is the territorial status of Puerto Rico?

21. What do you remember of the Oath of Office?

*Of course there will always be a hard lump of supporters who will never abandon him, maybe best thought of less as deplorables and more as unflushables.

Curb Your Enthusiasm: That joke isn’t (as) funny anymore

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Although the title ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ was apparently randomly chosen, given that the show depicts the tribulations of a rich, white, straight man in a world where, to coin a phrase, Others’ Feelings Matter, perhaps an alternative title – one more in keeping with the world in 2017 – could be ‘Check Your Privilege’. While I’ve long been a huge fan of the programme, it’s sometimes felt like a guilty pleasure as I’ve noticed that it’s much more popular with male friends than with female ones. Similarly, ‘Larry David”s enjoyment of life is often constrained by the need to exhibit respect towards people different from himself. I was looking forward to the new series but judging from the response in The Guardian, from Limmy, and from a friend who’s somehow seen the first episodes (I’ve only seen assorted clips*), enthusiasm for the show is waning.

As a bluntly-spoken New Yorker living in California (not to mention something of a schlemiel), Larry constantly triggers fault lines among people who appear primed to take offence. In each episode he either gets stitched up or manages to stitch himself up as the bit of social fabric he has (often inadvertently) torn up tangles itself around his ankles. Adam Kotsko’s essay ‘Awkwardness’ addresses programmes such as ‘Curb’ and The Office’. He argues that although their protagonists are mostly affable and largely well-intentioned, such shows demonstrate that the process of adjusting to a post-1960s world ostensibly built on mutual respect is inherently problematic, and therefore, in an exaggerated form, excellent material for comedy. They show that the imposition of rules around language and etiquette leads to constant clashes, given that such rules are mostly unstated and thus can appear arbitrary and unfair. The fact that Larry David and Michael Scott seem to be emotionally stunted, often sociopathically reckless, selfish, egotistical, and grudgeful does not render them monsters. Rather, their fallibility represents our own vulnerabilities. This is a complex, messy world and we all behave or seem to behave like assholes from time to time. As Phil Harrison puts it, ‘there’s an exquisite agony about the finest episodes that stem from the suspicion that everything happening to Larry could probably happen to you on a particularly bad day’. Their plight is a universal one.

Thus, ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ was never a resentful diatribe against political correctness per se, but rather an intelligent satire. It is not demanding that the edifice of post-60s respect for other identities be blown up. There are limits on individual honesty and the satisfaction of our impulses, and sometimes our encounters with those limits are awkward and lead to more hurt feelings. That doesn’t imply we should all join the NRA and look up the quickest route to Charlottesville. Or, as the article puts it, ‘Maybe the world has changed without telling Larry David. Maybe Larry now simply feels too much like a rich, straight white man lumbering around shoving his demented, free-ranging privilege and entitlement in everyone’s face?’.

The extent to which curmudgeonly white men are no longer on the back foot is once again demonstrated, with unerring and dispiriting predictability, in the comments following Phil Harrison’s article. Their tone is largely resentful and humourless, anti-intellectual and personally spiteful, expressing fury against the media itself and the individual journalist as though the free press has no right to cover culture. Some of the commenters seem to regard the piece as an example of #fakenews.

The fact that the article calls the new series ‘catchphrase and slapstick’ put me in mind of a stage show I saw recently about the life of Benny Hill. Although I found it trite and distasteful, the rest of the audience, people mostly in their 60s and 70s, lapped it up. Tastes in comedy change very quickly, especially from generation to generation. The funny bone changes shape in tune with changing social mores. Butts of jokes turn out to have their own perspectives, to want to explain their own actions and maybe make their own jokes. Although Larry David is the same age as Donald Trump, he’s certainly no fan and his show is – or has been so far – much too sophisticated for your average deplorable. Nonetheless, there is something of Trump’s appeal in David’s comedy. (Plus his indiscrimate targetting of Muslims/Arabs/Iranians may explain why Steve Bannon apparently finds it so entertaining.) Thus in 2017 his particular shtick doesn’t make us laugh as it did five or ten years ago. As someone else who used to be amusing and is now little more than a source of embarrassment once sang, it’s too near the bone and it’s too close to home. Tl;dr: Crotchety old white men are not as charming as they used to be.

*Anyone unhappy that I’ve written this without watching the whole new series is welcome to track down somewhere I can stream it in Italy.

Murder on the Trump Train Express

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The release next month of a new version of ‘Murder on the Orient Express’ may be, as we’ll see, timely, but I doubt the movie will have the same impact on me as the star-studded original did when I half-saw it while hiding behind the sofa at the age of eight or so. I found the film so upsetting because it’s a multiple murder mystery – the plot shows that the victim was such an abhorrent bastard that pretty much everyone he came into contact with had more than enough motive to stick a dagger deep into his guts. But how, you might ask, does that make the movie timely? Well…

Robert Reich yesterday posted the transcript of a conversation he had with an old friend, a Republican former member of Congress. His friend bemoaned the situation that so many Republicans find themselves in: on the one hand, they’re pretty much all fully aware that Donald “President” Trump is out of control and beyond all reason, a perfect human shitstorm of insanity, stupidity and evil who could, on a momentary whim in response to the merest slight his befogged brain might perceive via ‘Fox & Friends’, unleash a planetary catastrophe of unprecendented proportions – or, even worse, damage the mid-term prospects of the Republican Party. The bind that the poor Republicans find themselves is that although they are aware of all the above, and would – in at some least some noble cases – prefer the human race to survive, they also really, really want to give themselves a huge tax cut, and so are disinclined to disembark from the Trump Train for the time being. You can imagine their frustration. (Not for nothing did Noam Chomsky call the GOP the most dangerous organisation on the planet.) Then there are individual Republicans who have been betrayed and/or publicly humiliated, some of whom happen to combine a history of violence with proximity to their tormentor: former soldier John McCain (who’s going to die soon anyway); John Kelly, who has been wearing an army uniform and carrying a loaded weapon since the age of 3; erstwhile oil baron/mass-murderer Rex Tillerson; and Ayn Rand-worshipping psychopath Paul Ryan. All of whom happen to be firm believers in the primacy of the 2nd Amendment and thus subscribers to the notion that political violence can be both righteous and redemptive. The list of those insulted by Trump also includes: the entire populations of Mexico, Qatar, Iran, North Korea and Puerto Rico; pretty much all NFL and most NBA players; 800,000 DACA recipients and their friends and relatives; the families of the four soldiers killed in Niger last week; the entire surviving US military and anyone who respects the Stars and Stripes; all journalists and everyone with regard for the freedom of the press and the First Amendment; anyone who might need healthcare and/or isn’t a white supremacist; all those of us who care about our children; every single human being who doesn’t want to die in a nuclear holocaust; anyone who doesn’t share his profound contempt for the entire human species; Rosie O’Donnell; all women who are not Rosie O’Donnell, plus, obviously, Rosie O’Donnell again; Russell Brand; and, why the hell not, just for good measure, me.

Speaking of me, this is what I wrote last November:

The US Republican Party is now faced with the conundrum of managing a situation which is to all intents and purposes impossible. There may already be whispers in the arras that he could be forcibly removed…few rational people living or dead would be all that opposed to a good old-fashioned off-stage poisoning or stabbing. Or possibly an air crash? I sincerely hope that 1) there are still some Republican leaders out there who still have some measure of faith in the values they profess and the integrity to implement them and 2) that they have left no options off the table.

It’s also worth noting that at the end of the film, Monsieur Poirot (played by Albert Finney) gracefully declines to arrest the twelve people responsible for ridding the world of such a repugnant beast, declaring (with a knowing look to the camera) that he has the ‘honneur to retire from the case’ – after all, the victim had been ‘deservedly murdered’. I hope that whoever dons the pince-nez and the twirly moustache in the 2017 version is able to deliver such lines with similar panache and make its implicit message of blithe impunity clear to all those with the means to respond accordingly. As for the motive, everyone who’s not catastrophically deluded and/or criminally complicit has more than enough of those. As with that other ‘elderly, malevolent American’ ‘Samuel Ratchett’, no sane human being would mourn the more-than-timely death of Donald Trump.

 

How to speak better English than Donald Trump

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https://youtu.be/9CvKu5y5I_o

Would you (or your students) like to speak better English than a “native speaker”*? Wouldn’t it be great if your command of the language could be superior to that of the most powerful English speaker on the planet? Granted, Donald Trump is not noted for his articulacy. Possibly as a result of a degenerative brain disease, his fluency, coherence and range of vocabulary have deteriorated considerably over the years, as this 1992 interview demonstrates and this article explains in detail. He used to be able to follow a train of thought; now listening to him is more like witnessing a syntactical train crash. Half-ideas cascade chaotically like carriages piling up on top of one another, deafening explosions of total incoherence reverberate down the track while anyone with any regard for their personal safety runs away screaming.

The very latest indication that Trump’s mastery of standard (or, rather, sane) English is slipping out of his tiny grasp came yesterday, in the tweet he posted in the wake of yet another NRA-sponsored massacre**. His tweet offered his “warmest condolences” to the victims (and, obviously, no condemnation of the culprit – Trump hasn’t expressed any anger at the killings). Cue howls of ridicule across social media: why? Well, no one talks about “warm condolences”. You might offer warm congratulations to a friend who’s just found a job, or sincere or heartfelt condolences to someone who’s just lost a loved one. But the adjective ‘warm’ just doesn’t go with the noun ‘condolences’. Or, in other words, it doesn’t collocate.

How do I know this? Well, I’ve spoken (and, more importantly, read) English all my life (and taught it for nearly 20 years). I’ve never seen or heard that expression before. The fact that Trump thought that ‘warm’ was an appropriate word in response to a mass shooting may be some indication of how such events make him feel deep down. But it’s also an indication that he’s not in control of what he’s saying. Maybe the fact that he boasts of never reading books has something to do with it.

So, how can you acquire a better command of the language than him? Well, you could buy yourself a collocations dictionary, which will tell you which adjectives are commonly used with which nouns, which nouns collocate with which verbs, etc. (Better language coursebooks also put a great deal of emphasis on what many now call ‘word grammar’.) Or, you could use this website. As you can see, it has a really simple interface, and is free. I urge all my students to use it, and it has an immediate and dramatic impact on the quality of their writing in particular. A smattering of collocations can easily raise any IELTS score from 6.5 to 7.0, for example. I’m sure Trump would struggle to write a coherent 250-word essay; he probably hasn’t composed anything longer than 140 characters since he was cheating his way through college. (As for writing in a foreign language, he’s probably barely aware at this point that such things exist.) In the speaking test, he’s probably get a 4.0: links basic sentences but with repetitious use of simple connectives and some breakdowns in coherence; can only convey basic meaning on unfamiliar topics; errors are frequent and may lead to misunderstanding and/or nuclear war.

*This is in inverted commas as it’s a highly problematic term, its use punishable by stoning in some quarters.
**Trump is also sponsored by the NRA, to the tune of more than $30 million.