The Fantasy of Trump’s Imminent Demise is the Political Opiate of the Masses

David Pakman makes a fairly stunning observation: Trump’s perseverative trope about immigrants coming from “insane asylums” likely reflects Trump’s utterly moronic inability to comprehend that “political asylum” and “insane asylum,” despite sharing a common word, have vastly different meanings. An average person knows that an “insane asylum” provides respite, comfort and remediation for people who suffer from acute mental illness, while political asylum grants safety to people escaping from violent persecution transpiring in a foreign state. Does Trump respond to meanings or, more primitively, to parallel phonetic stimuli?

Furthermore, “insane asylum” is an antiquated term that fell from grace over a century ago in favor of the less judgmental term, “In Patient Psychiatry.” In Trump’s addled mind, the phonetic sound of the word asylum leaps automatically to a vision of “crazy” people. Trump is too far gone for even nominal nuance – the word asylum delivers him instantly into the nightmare of a Hieronymus Bosch portrait of hell. In a world of vast and confusing complexity, Trump’s insipid, vicious and incoherent blather simultaneously manifests the qualities of genocidal fascism, psychotic illness, and rampant stupidity.

As a mental health worker, I once encountered an elderly, well-educated man, suffering from schizophrenia, who told me, “Haldol means hell to all, and Thorazine means, ‘Thor,’ the hammer of thunder.” While these remarks may come across as both whimsical, and astute in their reference to psychiatric medications as a sort of punishment inflicted upon the victims of the drug industry, the speaker was not a well man.

When psychotic people respond to the phonetic sounds of words, in lieu of the actual meanings, we call this dysfunctional mental process a “clang association.” Pakman suggests that members of the press ought to ask Trump if he understands the difference between political asylum and insane asylum, but our political discourse has atrophied to a point well short of that possibility. The interactions between reporters and the so called president resemble the stilted, perfunctory exchanges involving floridly delusional, aggressively angry people and their reticent family members. The intent may be unspoken, but nearly every reporter strives to get the fuck away from that toxic maniac before he bites their heads off. Pakman can’t possibly believe that Trump could weigh and measure the terms insane asylum and political asylum apart from his subconscious impulse to launch into a Pavlovian fit upon hearing the phonetic provocation. Nor could Trump engage in any sort of introspection, any measure of reconsidered objectivity.

No, Trump would say, “shut up Piggy, you are a horrible person.” While Pakman’s observation about Trump’s confusion displays unusually imaginative scrutiny, he backslides into the idea that the press might hold Trump accountable. Under fascism all institutions have been degraded to the point of self-parody. The interactions between Trump and network reporters ought to be seen as institutional self-mockery. Once we assume that Trump has employed a clang association concocted by his broken brain in the service of genocidal aspirations, all fantasies of regaining “normalcy” ought to be jettisoned in favor of broadcasting a dire warning – we are experiencing a five alarm fire.

There are three fatuous tales about Trump that cling to mass media like a fungal crust: 1) That he is so overtly demented that it will soon be impossible for him to continue his reign 2) That leaks from the Epstein Files will erode all of Trump’s support other than the most diehard members of his base 3) That Trump is at death’s door and will keel over and die in a matter of months. All of these stories nurture public passivity – we have merely to stand aside and happily watch a time-lapse video of Trump evaporating like a chunk of dry ice. A recent New York Times op-ed by Ruth Ben-Ghiat suggested that, historically, dictators like Trump have self-imploded and pursued policies that “backfired.” To which Mike Lofgren responded in Common Dreams as follows:

“While this theory might seem like comforting evidence that history “proves” that dictators will get their comeuppance, it is actually a counsel of passively sitting on our hands and waiting out the authoritarian leader: either to await his death, or hang on till he’s ousted from power by his own miscarrying plans. If history proves anything, it’s that patient optimism is not a virtue.”

At this moment those who oppose Trump engage in a largely unacknowledged debate – some obsessively predict that Trump teeters on the edge of collapse, while others view the moment as being rife with dire urgency. One can choose to see Trump’s mental incapacity as a harbinger of his looming self-implosion, or as a gauge of our decaying empire – our dystopian predicament.

Personally, I see Trump less as a grotesque anomaly and more as a caricature of the US. Trump exaggerates the qualities that cause us to plunge into the vortex of collective anomie and cult violence. We live in arguably the sickest society ever to hurl itself over a cliff. Unlike Germany under the Nazis, we barely require guns pointed at our heads to keep us in line, and unlike the Romans of Nero’s time, Trump’s state invests almost nothing in free entertainment. The fascist government can outsource “bread and circuses” to MacDonald’s, Pornhub and the NFL, and the masses will pay for their own Xfinity subscriptions with barely a whimper.

Trump himself is our gauge of mental decline. He can conflate insane asylums with political asylum, threaten a hot war with Denmark, over Greenland or Iceland (he is not sure which) destroy the economy with tariffs, spend every tax payer dime on military hardware and paramilitary police to round up the laborers who pick our crops, and send half the citizens of our country into a swooning fantasy about his own imminent death. The mainstream press hover over Trump with a restrained air of normalcy.

Cults abound in the US like mushrooms at the edge of a swamp. The billionaire cult dreams of space flights to Mars and underground luxury bunkers (with spas and in home theaters a mile under the Sierras). The Trump death cult luxuriates at the thought of immigrants being cruelly rounded up. Perhaps even those of us who savor the anticipated moment when Trump’s MacDonald’s encrusted arteries will soon deliver the judgement that Merrick Garland would not, might be thought of as a cult – the cult of schadenfreude, the cult of Karma, the cult of passive retribution.

What are the best and worst case scenarios regarding Trump. The best may be not merely unlikely, but insufficient to mitigate our suffering – that Trump dies suddenly, that an Epstein file drop contains a video of Trump that the public cannot “unsee,” that the MAGA base rises up and sends an enraged mob to Washington to reenact January 6th with chants of, “hang Donald Trump.” Does the best case scenario have Trump disappearing and a chastised and cautious JD Vance regressing into a past epic of austerity/free market Reaganomics?

The worst case scenarios requires very little imagination – that Trump simply does many of the things he has threatened to do: seize Greenland, bomb Iran to a pulp, invade Cuba (he already starves the Cuban people with a blockade), invade more US cities, throw US citizens into concentration camps by the tens of thousands, suspend or rig elections, annex Canada (remember the Austrian Anchluss?), take over the Panama Canal, complete the “ethnic cleansing” (genocide) of Gaza in order to build golf resorts. Of course, the VERY worst case scenario involves nuclear weapons. Trump intends to spend $95 Billion annually to “upgrade” all three legs of the US nuclear system. He also plans to spend upwards of $4 trillion to build the magical “Golden Dome” – a fantasy that would allegedly allow the US to initiate WW III without consequences to ourselves. One critic claims that there is not enough money on earth to pay for the “Golden Dome.”

Remember, the man who plans to build a strike force and defensive contraption capable of winning a nuclear war also can’t tell the difference between an “insane asylum” and “political asylum.” The question we should all be asking is this – can we afford to allow this floridly psychotic man to wither away via the fickle mechanisms of time, or should we be disobeying by the tens of millions like our lives depended on it?

Source: https://philmeow.substack.com/p/the-fantasy-of-trumps-imminent-demise