I honestly don’t know how the Onion is going to beat this.
Heck, I don’t know if future students of history are actually going to be able to believe the history books about this decade, should they be written with any sort of accuracy… Reality’s jumped the shark.
Some 30-35 years ago there was a commando of (mostly child) soldiers running around naked because it makes them invulnerable, or so their leader claimed. Then he went on forcibly apologizing to people whose family members he’d killed and/or eaten. Oh and he’s an evangelical street preacher.
Oh, I know, but most of the time they’re remembered for only one or two things. I have no idea how the history books are going to handle the shear number of unhinged things Trump and co have done.
They’ll gloss over a lot of it just like they do with Hitler. You hear about the big things like the beer hall putsch, maybe the street fighting, the Nuremberg laws, kristalnacht, maybe the nighr of long knives, the concentration and death camps, the blitz, the attacks on western and Eastern Europe, and the seige of stalingrad. That’s a lot, so they often don’t address stuff like the bizarre structure of nazi command (it was far more about who could claim to have the ear of who than a rigid structure), the fact that Goering was an opiate addict from the time he joined the party to the time he was hanged for it, the fact that the party was super anti drug and Hitler and his wehrmacht were on meth, the fact that anti semitism basically gave the united states nukes thanks to brain drain, the insistence on spreading efforts into many super weapons rather than committing to a small number given all the resources they could possibly need, the fact that Himmler was a weird nerdy loser whose power came from being the least obviously threatening option to many party members…
Or we could go to WWI Germany, because Kaiser Wilhelm was barely discussed in my history classes other than just him being in charge and having been largely led by the actually competent Bismarck, but this guy was a weird crazy little motherfucker. And I mean that in a “this guy was attracted to his mom” way.
Ooh or you could look at the Roman Empire, the whole empire is largely glossed over with a bit about the Julians then Constantine and Justinian and the fall of the western empire. But like, a decent portion of the roman emperors were some variety of bonkers according to the history (but roman historians are much more like highly partisan propagandists than dutiful recounters of happenings).
In short, people already forget his scandals from a year ago, much less last term. Many books will be written about him, but ultimately his primary strategy is “flooding the zone” ie keep doing controversial shit that gets your name in the news so nothing is able to stick, and if it does then who cares, that means nobody’s reporting on your current bad thing. The internal crackdowns will be condensed and simplified to major turning points and the external aggression will be condensed and simplified similarly. And in that way the next fascist movement will involve the “you’re exaggerating” for years before it becomes “yeah, so what”.
I honestly don’t know how the Onion is going to beat this.
Heck, I don’t know if future students of history are actually going to be able to believe the history books about this decade, should they be written with any sort of accuracy… Reality’s jumped the shark.
Some 30-35 years ago there was a commando of (mostly child) soldiers running around naked because it makes them invulnerable, or so their leader claimed. Then he went on forcibly apologizing to people whose family members he’d killed and/or eaten. Oh and he’s an evangelical street preacher.
Reality has never been not weird.
Of course they will. Political leaders in the past have done many many bizarre things.
Oh, I know, but most of the time they’re remembered for only one or two things. I have no idea how the history books are going to handle the shear number of unhinged things Trump and co have done.
They’ll gloss over a lot of it just like they do with Hitler. You hear about the big things like the beer hall putsch, maybe the street fighting, the Nuremberg laws, kristalnacht, maybe the nighr of long knives, the concentration and death camps, the blitz, the attacks on western and Eastern Europe, and the seige of stalingrad. That’s a lot, so they often don’t address stuff like the bizarre structure of nazi command (it was far more about who could claim to have the ear of who than a rigid structure), the fact that Goering was an opiate addict from the time he joined the party to the time he was hanged for it, the fact that the party was super anti drug and Hitler and his wehrmacht were on meth, the fact that anti semitism basically gave the united states nukes thanks to brain drain, the insistence on spreading efforts into many super weapons rather than committing to a small number given all the resources they could possibly need, the fact that Himmler was a weird nerdy loser whose power came from being the least obviously threatening option to many party members…
Or we could go to WWI Germany, because Kaiser Wilhelm was barely discussed in my history classes other than just him being in charge and having been largely led by the actually competent Bismarck, but this guy was a weird crazy little motherfucker. And I mean that in a “this guy was attracted to his mom” way.
Ooh or you could look at the Roman Empire, the whole empire is largely glossed over with a bit about the Julians then Constantine and Justinian and the fall of the western empire. But like, a decent portion of the roman emperors were some variety of bonkers according to the history (but roman historians are much more like highly partisan propagandists than dutiful recounters of happenings).
In short, people already forget his scandals from a year ago, much less last term. Many books will be written about him, but ultimately his primary strategy is “flooding the zone” ie keep doing controversial shit that gets your name in the news so nothing is able to stick, and if it does then who cares, that means nobody’s reporting on your current bad thing. The internal crackdowns will be condensed and simplified to major turning points and the external aggression will be condensed and simplified similarly. And in that way the next fascist movement will involve the “you’re exaggerating” for years before it becomes “yeah, so what”.