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seymour-butz-stuff · 3 years

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redictable as ever, conservatives are gearing up to defend their increasingly extremist voter base in the wake of the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection by trotting out their timeworn “bloody shirt” trope—you know, the one that “makes a victim out of the bully and a bully out of the victim”—even as government officials try to grapple with the fallout from the manifest reality of a far-right-wing insurgency on our doorsteps. As always, the problem isn’t far-right seditionist violence, the problem is the people calling it out and trying to reel it in.

Right-wing pundits are currently attempting to repeat the travesty of 2009, when conservative media claimed a Department of Homeland Security memo warning of an increase in far-right organizing and recruitment, particularly directed at military veterans, was proof of plans to persecute conservatives. This time, they’re directing the same sort of self-owning complaints at the military’s announced efforts to root out far-right extremists—the kind who would participate in an armed insurrection—from their ranks.

In the aftermath of Jan. 6—and the realization that one in five of the riotous insurgents arrested for their roles in it were military veterans—the Biden administration, led by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, announced that it would tackle the long-running issue of radicalization within the ranks of the U.S. military, first by ordering a 60-day stand-down in all six branches of the service to attempt to assess how far-reaching the problem really is. Exactly how those orders will play out remains up in the air, but leaders at every military base are currently figuring that out.

However, some conservative pundits are already jumping to sound the alarms over the early iterations of the anti-extremist training being provided to the troops:

At PJ Media, J. Christian Adams hysterically claimed that the Pentagon’s “shocking” new training materials are “targeting conservatives.”

The Family Research Center’s Tony Perkins chimed in with the claim that the program is intended to “drive conservative and Christian members of the military either underground or out of the service altogether.”

The right-wing Washington Examiner asked Pentagon officials if conservatives were being targeted, and obtained a denial—which was then denounced in the same piece by QAnon-loving Colorado Congressman Lauren Boebert as a “political litmus test.”

As researcher Jared Holt observed, Adams’ article “says more about the author than anything else.” Notably, its thesis deliberately erases any line between far-right extremists and mainstream conservatives, saying the military’s materials contained “warped characterizations of fellow citizens who believe in constitutional principles.” It also directly identifies attempts to root out extremist members as “part of a radicalized political agenda.”

At one point, he describes it as a “racialist agenda”:

And if there was any doubt, the presentation makes it clear the armed forces are to be integrated into the Biden administration’s racialist agenda. “If we don’t eliminate extremist behaviors from our Navy, then racism, injustice, indignity and disrespect will grow and keep us from reaching our potential.” The materials do not cite a single instance of racism, injustice, indignity, or disrespect. Those are left to the imagination.

Actually, there is no need to leave anything to the imagination here. Not only was the problem of far-right infiltration into the ranks of the U.S. military a serious and mounting issue well before January 2021—with multiple documented examples of servicemen turning their military training into organizing neo-Nazi terrorism cells, for instance—but several of the arrests made in the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection itself provide clear illustrations of its manifestation:

One U.S. Army reservist charged in the Capitol siege, Timothy Hale-Cusanelli, was widely known among his colleagues at a New Jersey-based naval facility as a white supremacist, one who openly discussed his hatred of Jews in the workplace, according to federal prosecutors.

Jacob Fracker, 29, was an infantry rifleman in the Marine Corps, according to the Pentagon, who deployed to Afghanistan twice, and served in the Virginia National Guard. He also was a police officer in Rocky Mount, Virginia—until he was fired for his participation in the insurrection.

Air Force veteran Larry Rendall Brock Jr., was wearing a military-style helmet and tactical vest carrying flex cuffs aimed to “take hostages,” prosecutors claim. He posted on Facebook that he was preparing for a "Second Civil War," and in the weeks after Joe Biden's victory, Brock posted that "we are now under occupation by a hostile governing force."

Another insurrectionist arrested for invading the Capitol is a 35-year-old Marine veteran who once was crew chief of the presidential helicopter squadron at the White House named John Daniel Andries.

Overall, one in every five persons arrested for their roles in the Jan. 6 insurrection served in the U.S. military.

Adams also misleads his readers by claiming that the military’s warning in the anti-extremist briefing material—namely: “Speech that incites violence or criminal activity that threatens to undermine our government and Constitution is not protected by the First Amendment”—is “flatly wrong.”

Adams claims that “speech that ‘threatens to undermine our government’ is completely protected by the First Amendment. The Pentagon’s grotesque characterization of the law is borrowed from the criminal codes of dictatorships,” adding that the “whole concept of ‘undermining’ is the flimsy legal standard that sent millions to the Gulags and guillotine.”

He may be correct about this when it comes to ordinary citizens, but the Pentagon materials are directed entirely at serving members of the military, for whom in fact “freedom of speech” is entirely circumscribed, and has been so for most of its existence—with the full support of U.S. courts. Both the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) and Defense Department Directives can and do place strict limits on soldiers’ speech. The UCMJ, passed by Congress in 1950, includes such “Punitive Articles” as “Contempt Toward Officials” and “Failure to Obey Order or Regulation,” as well as “Conduct Unbecoming an Officer and a Gentleman.”

Near the end of the piece, Adams lets his transphobic flag fly, complaining that a ban on “liking any material that promotes discrimination based on … gender identity” means that “if you believe in biological sex, you might be involuntarily separated or court-martialed.” He also claims that references to constitutional equal protection for transgender members are “full of legal errors. Again, the Fourteenth Amendment says nothing about biological males who consider themselves to be women, yet the training says otherwise.”

Adams wraps up his screed by assuring military members that “the materials are imaginary bunk. It is a part of a radicalized political agenda to undermine the basic principles of the nation—equality before law regardless of race, and treating people impartially in tribunals or day-to-day affairs.”

Some may recall Adams’ initial foray into national media as a conservative darling in 2010, when as a Bush holdover in the Obama Justice Department, he began claiming that prosecution of a voter-intimidation case against the New Black Panthers Peoples Party was derailed because of anti-white racial discrimination, and resigned in protest. That would-be right-wing scandal fell apart when Adams' claim that the Voting Section didn’t intervene on behalf of white voters was proved conclusively false.

Since then, he’s gone to work for the right-wing Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF), and was appointed to Donald Trump’s ill-fated “election integrity commission,” where he was known to talk about an “alien invasion” at the polls. He created an uproar in 2017 when PILF released a two-part report titled "Alien Invasion" that identified 5,556 voters as non-citizens, on the basis of having their voter registrations cancelled at one point over citizenship concerns—even though fully half the voters who had been called out were currently active voters who had fixed their registrations. More recently, Adams testified before Congress that mail-in voting invited fraud, and that voting-rights restoration represented a power grab by the federal government.

Tony Perkins’ attack on the military is similar in nature, casting the Pentagon’s anti-extremist training as “an excuse to silence speech.” He says “it's only logical to assume their definition [of a hate group] is even broader—including every Bible-believing Christian and conservative.”

Perkins also asserts that the Pentagon’s motives are clear: “to drive conservative and Christian members of the military either underground or out of the service altogether.” He concludes: “The tentacles of religious hostility run deep in this administration. Anyone who doesn't embrace the Left's ‘new morality’ will be a target, including the men and women fighting for the freedom they want to deny us.”

And the Examiner cited Boebert—who not only is a QAnon conspiracy-cult follower, but has been targeted for investigation by her congressional colleagues for her behavior around the insurrection, though the story mentions none of that—as a critic of the Pentagon’s training plans.

“This is nothing but a political litmus test of our brave men & women. It is obscene & dangerous to use soldiers who risk their lives for America as political pawns,” tweeted Boebert, described by the Examiner as “a gun rights advocate.” “We can hardly be surprised by these political litmus tests given Biden’s political vetting of the 26,000 National Guard troops in DC for his inauguration.”

The Capitol arrests provide startling examples of a disturbing trend within the ranks of both enlisted military members as well as veterans—namely, the increasing presence of far-right extremism and ideologies frequently connected to domestic terrorism (and most recently, a mass insurrection). Perhaps its most disturbing aspect is how easily it has grown within those ranks because of a high level of tolerance—if not outright sympathy—for it, both within the broader military culture as well as among the higher-ranking officers responsible for overseeing it.

This extremism runs in a spectrum, from the overtly threatening white supremacists and neo-Nazis who both infiltrate military ranks and are sometimes recruited and radicalized from within them, to the seemingly more temperate “Patriots,” militiamen, and “constitutionalists” whose ideology and rhetoric embrace a surface kind of patriotic jingoism that at its core is violently antidemocratic and seditionist. As we saw on Jan. 6, it can be no less dangerous in terms of the kind of terroristic threat it poses, not just to the public but to the nation’s democratic institutions. All of them pose a potential but real national-security threat.

The role of vigilante groups such as the Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, and Proud Boys in the insurrection also points to a significant gap in the military’s current policy regarding far-right extremists. The wording of the prohibition on such activities in the military focuses primarily on participation in hate groups that discriminate against minorities—such as white-nationalist, neo-Nazi, or skinhead organizations—but does not come close to including the far-right conspiracists of the “Patriot” movement and their antidemocratic activities.

Cassie Miller, an analyst for the Southern Poverty Law Center, noted to Daily Kos that “currently, the military does not ban troops from participating in antigovernment groups and militias.”

“There are regulations that ban members of the military actively participating in groups that discriminate based on ‘race, creed, color, sex, religion, ethnicity or national origin,’ but they are clearly poorly enforced,” Miller said. “Not only are new screening procedures and regulations sorely needed, the military also needs to enforce the regulations it already has.”

Terrorism expert Zakir Gul explained the particular nature of the threat posed by “Patriot”-style extremists for Homeland Security Today:

The number of radicalized individuals within the ranks of the U.S. military may not be known even by Pentagon officials unless the individuals showed some signs of their violent extremist ideology. The number of such individuals, however, is a minor issue for two reasons. First, the ideology is so toxic that a small number of individuals can spread and influence others and quickly turn those small numbers into big numbers. Second, these individuals are highly trained, well-equipped with the skills and knowledge needed to plot violent acts, and have easier access to military vehicles and weaponry than other terrorists. Even a small number of such individuals, therefore, are capable of committing mass killings and causing significant destruction of buildings and infrastructure. In one sense, an individual with these characteristics is like a one-person army.

A good example is Timothy McVeigh, a Gulf War veteran and the recipient of several military-service awards—and the person responsible for bombing a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995 that left 168 people dead and numerous others wounded and became the deadliest homegrown terrorist attack in U.S. history. For a fictional example, imagine this: An F-35 fighter aircraft pilot who adheres to a violent extremist ideology and is filled hatred of the United States terrorizes, attacks, and kills a massive number of people with that single aircraft. Such a catastrophe would be no different than the tragic 9/11 attacks and their consequences. These highly trained individuals are not and should never be put into the same category of threat assigned to ordinary terrorists.

Left unchecked, such one-person armies could damage the reputation of the most trusted institution in the United States—the U.S. military—for generations and be difficult to rebuild. Some might even find it appropriate to attach fascist label to the U.S. military, hindering its ability to effectively defend one of the world’s leading democracies. It is essential, therefore, that the U.S. military and the federal government work to prevent the actions and consequences of violent extremists and to respond swiftly should any of these groups breach the military’s carefully crafted preventive measures.

As former Marine Corps Commandant James L. Jones wrote in The Atlantic:

States armed services and their counterparts in allied countries must close off all means by which white supremacists, anarchists, or fascists enter our national institutions and social mainstreams. The members of the U.S. armed forces have an obligation to defend our nation from all enemies, “foreign and domestic”—including those who would divide us from within.

Retired U.S. Army Colonel Jeff McCausland, in a piece for NBC News, noted that the lack of attentiveness to the problem has originated at the top and filtered down. In 2018, for example, the Defense Department found only 18 members of the 1.8 million Americans serving had been disciplined or discharged in the previous five years for engaging in extremist activities—and then used those low figures to justify deprioritizing it.

But there is no internal law enforcement task force monitoring extremist networks or generating comprehensive data within the military at all, and sharing of intelligence on such groups across federal agencies is extremely limited. A former Defense investigator described the U.S. government’s lack of a concerted effort to gather intelligence on extremist groups as a black hole. Another observed: “Every year they get a report based on what they were never looking for.”

Daryl Johnson, a former DHS analyst who authored the 2009 bulletin, told USA Today that conservative attacks back then created a missed opportunity to raise awareness about radical white supremacist groups looking to recruit within the military culture.

“For one of the few times in recent American history, we had accurately predicted a threat, given ample warning and people just ended up bickering and fighting about it and the message got lost,” Johnson said. “We’ve suffered the consequences of that.”

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tarralin · 6 years

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Job Done

Fox Hunt, Chapter Three

(Board gifted by @under-sengoku-skies)

Find links to Master List, Ao3, and Ko-Fi in blog bio!

Enjoy!

~☆~

The meeting dredged by antagonizingly slow. Report after report after report was recited to the group and detailed discussions were had on everything from ration availability to civilian morale. MC had refilled everyone’s tea cups twice by the time they finally moved onto the subjects of troop training and battle tactics.

“We have the numbers to stand against any attack,” Ieyasu eyes turned downcast as he continued his report. “But the men are discouraged, and morale continuously slips day by day. Masamune has explored several options to keep their spirits up to no avail.”

“When were they last given time off?” MC hadn’t meant to voice her inquiry but suddenly her troop management instincts reared into gear. Unfortunately, they decided to activate during a male only council and the meeting halted to stifling silence. “My father was a general in my homeland's army and I thought I had an idea. I’m sorry for interrupting.”

“Did your father ever ask for your council?” Ieyasu’s harsh question grated on her nerves like nails on a chalkboard but still she held her tongue, not wishing to draw any more negative attention.

“Ieyasu,” Nobunaga snapped at the fawn haired warlord before turning eyes back to MC. “What do you mean by ‘time off'? We are preparing for war, there is no time for laziness.”

“But what happens in the middle of battle when the men forget what they're fighting for? When exhausted and surrounded by death, does it not seem easier to wish for your own demise instead of fighting? Give them two days off a week and I guarantee you'll see their spirits lifted.”

~~~

Mitsuhide couldn’t believe the troops in front of him were the same men that had been here since recruitment. When he last saw them, no one of this group had managed to land a single hit on target after weeks of training and practice. They had indeed become dispirited and Mitsuhide knew they had given up no matter the encouragement they received.

Those were not the men in front of him. These men strolled into camp ready for the day and struck each of their targets on the first shot. And the second. Granted, they all failed to hit center but at least the trees had been spared the onslaught today. So… progress.

“Fire,” Mitsuhide commanded. Ten bullets blasted into the ten targets, sending a flurry of hay in the air to mix with the haze of spent gunpowder.

“Excellent!” The riflemen scrambled to their feet as the booming voice of their leader, Nobunaga, signaled his approach from across this field. “Mitsuhide, I swear you could turn even the talentless into marksmen!”

“And here I didn’t think you were one for flattery. Careful or it’ll go to their heads,” Mitsuhide smirked as he nodded to the men still ramrod straight at attention.

“Relax and reload,” Nobunaga barked to the group as he threw a glance over his shoulder. “Satisfied? Or do you wish to patronize him as well?”

“Satisfied,” MC sidestepped into Mitsuhide’s view. “But not impressed. If I sounded patronizing earlier, then I guess I wasn’t clear enough in my insults. I’ll have to remedy that in the future.”

“Ah, dear Chatelaine,” Mitsuhide grinned at Nobunaga’s obvious chagrin. “Come to view the fruits of your input?”

MC rolled her eyes in that delightful way he was beginning to enjoy. “I already knew what the positive outcome would be, but Nobunaga insisted on stealing me from my castle duties today so I’m making him pay.”

“After causing him so much strife at the last meeting? If I had known you enjoy inflicting pain so much, I would have suggested our Lord place you in the dungeons as an executioner.”

“I’m considering it after the morning I’ve had with her,” Nobunaga mumbled. “She did not cause me strife.”

“You argued with her in front of the council.”

“We were debating…”

“Until you were blue in the face?”

“It was a heated debate!”

MC remained silent during their back-and-forth, her gaze narrowed intently on the targets in the distance.

“Oh, here it comes…” Nobunaga murmured.

“Our Lord said these men have been practicing for nearly three months and yet he hasn’t witnessed any of them come close to the target until today. Exhausted or not, they should have nailed the bull’s-eye at least once… even if by accident.”

“Is there a point in that statement I’m not aware of?”

“Simply causes me to question the abilities of the instructor.”

“Oh,” Mitsuhide could feel his lips pulling into a sneer as he waved to the rifle line. “Please, dear Chatelaine, feel free to improve.”

He hadn’t meant for his words to come out as growl more suited to a wild beast, but that one comment of hers had greatly disrupted his inner calm he struggled so hard to maintain. The little harpy! One lucky contribution and now she thinks herself an expert of warfare? What does she know of it?

He also hadn’t meant for her to take him up on his sarcastic offer.

Confidently, she marched over to the rifle line after only a moment’s pause to square her shoulders and lift her chin, clearly insulted at the unspoken implication that she would shy away from such a thing.

“What’s the waif doing now?” Ieyasu questioned as he sauntered from the archer’s line.

“Mitsuhide’s job apparently,” Masamune laughed as he took up Nobunaga’s other flank. The gathered four observed the Chatelaine intently as she spoke to the riflemen. Her hands flew like butterflies in a flurry across the men’s bodies to correct their stance, gun position, and even instructed a new method on how to sight the target. It would be a lie to say Mitsuhide wasn’t intrigued more than he should be. She really did sound like she knew how to shoot, which begged the questions of how and where?

“Fire!” Her sharp command drew Mitsuhide from his inner musings. As a unit, the ten rifles released their bullets in unison… and hit dead center. For a brief moment, time seemed to stand still as the stunned silence seemed to ring louder the gunshots did. The riflemen were first to recover from the momentary shock once they realized where their bullets had landed and turned to congratulate each other before bowing to the Chatelaine.

Masamune broke into such boisterous laughter that he became incapable of speech. Nobunaga simply released an exasperated sigh. “They’ll be no living with her after this…”

Mitsuhide had been left speechless only twice in his life. The first time being his mother’s murder. The second instance when Nobunaga asked him to join the campaign.

This was now a third.

Mitsuhide wasn’t so uneducated in the cultures of the foreign lands as he allowed all to believe. He had gleaned a great deal of information from the western traders that arrived several times a year; mannerisms, political ideals, and even domestic concepts being among them. Many of the traders he interacted with believed women possessed a frail mind and weak constitution. Which, in turn, lead to the westerners keeping uneducated daughters until they could be married off. There was no societally accepted way this pilgrim should be as accomplished as she proved to be.

In the extremely short time since her arrival, she had changed the flow of the castle completely by whipping the maids into more effective workers, setting up consistent deliveries from the local farmers, even reorganizing the guards rotation to ensure complete coverage at all times. A woman of the highest nobility and prestige wouldn’t have been able to accomplish half of what MC has in such a short time.

Then there was the raw power the woman exuded. Always standing tall with squared shoulders and sharp blue eyes that seemed to withhold the ocean’s fury itself. Mitsuhide had witnessed for himself just yesterday the devastating scolding she inflicted upon one of the township's policing samurai after she caught him bullying one of the street children, only to turn around and soothe said child with a mother's coddling. It really was no mystery how her very word became an instant command.

No, he concluded. She is no pilgrim.

#ikemen sengoku fanfic #ikesen fanfic #ikemen sengoku #ikemen series #ikesen #akechi mitsuhide #mitsuhide #mitsuhide fafic #fanfic #fandom #ikesennw reblog

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noicon · 7 years

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It’s Already Happened Here Trump is a familiar figure, a manifestation of deep-seated will-to-Yurugu-male power

Sarah Kendzior is a journalist and scholar of authoritarian states.

It was 1855, and Abraham Lincoln was in a mood. “Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid,” he wrote to his friend Joshua Speed, describing the rise of the bigoted, anti-immigrant Know-Nothing party. “As a nation, we begin by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal, except negroes.’ When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ‘all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.’ When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.” As he characterized an American republic convulsed with heated debates about race, immigration, and political representation, Lincoln delivered an oddly prescient diagnosis of America in 2017, as we witness another series of bigoted, know-nothing assaults on our national unity.

How did it happen, pundits wonder, that a 240-year-old democracy has descended into the sort of authoritarian ethno-nationalist rancor normally associated with antidemocratic states like contemporary Uzbekistan or infamous totalitarian regimes like Nazi Germany? How did a “nation built on immigration” come to propose a ban on Muslims and mass deportation of Mexicans? Why are White House cabinet posts now filled with executives seemingly selected to destroy the agencies they lead? Why are our legislative and judiciary branches on the verge of caving in to a power-hungry executive branch that resembles, as Daniel Webster wrote, in an 1832 warning of his own, “nothing else but pure despotism”? And, um, who is really running that executive branch anyway?

As I write this, Donald Trump has been president for seventeen days, and on the surface, our country seems to have taken a radical departure. We now have rogue national parks services, regular nationwide protests, and a series of impending humanitarian disasters that include the loss of health care for millions, the opening of new legal avenues into unfettered corporate corruption, unhinged aggression against both foreign adversaries and allies, together with assaults on freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, and other core constitutional rights. There’s also an ongoing inquiry into whether our election was and president is corrupted by Russia. “Make America Great Again,” the dear leader bleats and tweets, as millions wish for America to simply resemble America again.

But as Lincoln’s letter reminds us, this has always been America. We have always vacillated between lofty precepts on paper and the refusal of why?te men to apply them in practice. This refusal has resulted in slavery of African Americans, genocide against Native Americans, internment camps for ethnic minorities. It has also systematically denied most of the population the right to vote over most of our history, rationalized discrimination against and banning of immigrants on racial and ethnic lines, and shored up segregation and Jim Crow. Today, this same white male authoritarian outlook fuels a prison and police system that disproportionately targets non-white citizens.

These are American authoritarian policies, hypocritically upheld until contentiously overruled, and documented best by those whom they target: “But opportunity is real, and life is free/ Equality is in the air we breathe// (There’s never been equality for me/ Nor freedom in this ‘homeland of the free’),” Langston Hughes wrote in 1935. The specter of American authoritarianism has been waved away in polite circles of opinion with the mantra “It can’t happen here”—to name-check Sinclair Lewis’s political satire of the same year showing that indeed it can. And more to the point, it has happened here—just never so fast and so flagrantly. Americans are used to their leaders cloaking their anti-democratic and inhumane policies under the pretense of patriotism, instead of, like Trump, openly denigrating the country, its citizens, and its laws.

Since Trump’s insurgent presidential run started gaining serious traction last year, scholars have searched for parallels between Trump and foreign leaders, and have found them in dictators and demagogues abroad—Hitler, Milošević, Putin, Niyazov—and in predecessors at home, racist paranoiacs like George Wallace and Joseph McCarthy. But the search for just the right forerunner to explain the Trump phenomenon has ironically blinded us to just how familiar a figure Trump really is. For starters, he rose as all authoritarian demagogues do by exploiting the weak points in beleaguered democracies: exacerbating racial tension, manipulating the media, making exorbitant economic promises, and proffering himself as an exemplar of a nation whose best days are in the past.

That was Trump the candidate, whose nativist populism transformed, over the year, to a platform of open white supremacy, backed by neo-Nazis and the KKK. His campaign strategy was always to pull the fringes to the center, to make the extreme mainstream. As president, he shuns both the desperate pleas of citizens and of the law itself; he is taxation without representation, applied to our collective moral aspirations. But for all that, he’s nothing all that new on the American scene. Trump exemplifies the economic white privilege that viciously preyed on American civil liberties throughout our history. This pathologically destructive outlook is now turbocharged by a lack of shame, which feeds on the fierce, unapologetic resentment of anything deemed “politically correct.”

Those asking “Why?” as they seek to understand the motivation of the leader and his lackeys are better off asking “Why not?” There is little ideological coherency behind the Trump administration other than sadism, expressed most acutely through racism and xenophobia, and a kleptocratic desire to strip the country down and sell off its spare parts. Trump and his inner circle of trusted advisers will do what they like, regardless of what the law decrees—unless they are stopped by it. To understand what the country is facing under Trump, one needs to look beyond him to the administration, whose varying motives highlight the manifold ways democracy can be destroyed. If “Trumpism” is an ideology, it is a malleable one, suitable for opportunists ranging from neo-Nazis to corporate raiders to authoritarian theocrats.

Born into considerable wealth and privilege, Trump spent his formative adult years befriending the worst Americans he could find. As he launched into the Manhattan real estate business, his dearest friend was Roy Cohn, the brutal, unprincipled legal aide to Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon. Cohn taught a young Trump in how to bully, lie, and steal with impunity in the 1970s and 1980s. An anti-Semitic Jew, a homophobic closeted gay man, and a lawyer who abused the law, Cohn died bragging of tax evasion. When Trump found out Cohn had AIDS, he promptly abandoned him, prompting an anguished Cohn to declare that Trump “pisses ice water.”

In short, the student had become the master. Others have found Trump malleable as a provisional ally or business partner over the years: the mafia, the media, fellow corrupt millionaires and billionaires, politicians needing publicity, and oligarchs of the former Soviet Union, who frequently funded Trump’s flailing projects. But Trump typically emerges from these deals (artful or otherwise) as the self-promoting winner.

This is largely why the most powerful man in the world is, by all accounts, a person without any close friends. It’s also, in all likelihood, why his presidency is already marked by the routine breaching of traditional constitutional norms, from the assaults on the authority of the courts to his refusal to disclose his tax returns, or seriously address any of the conflicts of interest they would likely document. For someone mentored into adult business life by the likes of Roy Cohn, all that matters is the basic drama of individual conquest, replayed over and over again, in any available setting. And now, alas, the theater of conquest opening up before the Great Leader Trump is the world at large.

Meanwhile, in another classic authoritarian maneuver, the outsized ego at the heart of the Trumpist seizure of power has surrounded himself with an obliging retinue of enablers and quisling yes-men. Trump likes to divide people between “haters and losers”—a cheap shot that is actually a fairly useful way to categorize his own team. Haters, or string-pullers, include people like Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, and other Cohn associates, as well as Steve Bannon, who apparently promoted himself into a position on the National Security Council without Trump’s knowledge, and whose white supremacist, accelerationalist goals—he has bragged, repeatedly, of a desire to destroy the United States—remains a severe threat. Fellow bigots—racist Jeff Sessions, Islamophobic Michael Flynn—fit the “haters” mold: powerful players who disregard constitutional principles in order to force a narrow and cruel vision of America into practice.

The losers comprise the bulk of Trump’s cabinet appointees, who have each been assigned an institution about which they either know nothing, actively want to destroy, or both. Their inexperience is useful: one is less likely to fight against the violation of rights when one does not recognize them as under threat in the first place. The majority of the GOP, who bow to Trump even as he personally insults them, are behaving as lackeys in authoritarian states generally do, dutifully rubber-stamping policies and wondering when they will be let back in the loop.

At the center of all this executive-assured destruction, there is Trump, both a hater and a loser. Desperate for applause and enthusiastic about abusing executive power, he is driven by narcissism and need. His paranoia and megalomania is typical in foreign authoritarian leaders, yet Trump is a native archetype: he is the conman, the showman, the “Confidence Man” of Herman Melville, the President Stillson of Stephen King’s The Dead Zone. Unlike his products, Trump is made in America, and we have dealt with his kind before.

His bigotry, incompetence and intolerance were of the sort that better Americans, like the future president Lincoln, saw as a domestic threat. But never has such an execrable individual been given such power in our government, and never has a president been surrounded by so many who view America as little more than a playground for punishment and plunder. With this marauding manifestation of America’s deep-seated will-to-white-male power—steeped so deeply in the uglier American canons of self-assertion, exploitation, and plunder—our “progress in degeneracy,” centuries in the making, may have reached its peak.

Sarah Kendzior https://thebaffler.com/blog/its-already-happened-here-kendzior

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