What I Learned at This Week’s White House Press Conference
“Every boat we strike saves the lives of 25,000 Americans,” says Secretary of War Pete Hegseth. Wouldn’t that be something if it were true! How simple the problems of our post-imperial US world would be!
The White House press conference of October 23rd centered on the President, sitting on a golden chair between Ken and Barbie. His staff of beautiful women and slightly eggheaded men all articulately competing to flatter the President for his brilliance, his boldness, his courage, his caretaking commitment to the United States. He commended his staff as “most talented” at what they do, “naturals,” he said, reading my mind when I had assumed they were made of plastic.
I personally like to watch and listen to President Trump, his tenor, his expository confidence and an accent that mixes New York City with something else I can’t explain. The content of what he says is also a lot of fun, and he has wholly rejuvenated the world of adjectives and fish stories. I love the many Trump impersonators who recognize this, and use it to entertain us around the world.
Trump took a moment to lecture a Democrat legislator for using the F-word seven times in one sentence. Trump advised that Democrats do what he does: Use the word only in every seventh contact with the press. Using the F-word is a tool, like all things, to be leveraged, as Trump sees fit.
Nixon’s War on Drugs melded long ago with Bush’s War on Terror, and with this, the latest half century of American empire is cemented by this collective understanding of the US state, and its only purpose. A flexible, seamless bodysuit of war, designed by the Military Industrial complex and their equity and bankster partners, has been sewn up by a Congress of miseducated seamstresses, and delivered to the Executive Branch for a pittance and a pat on the head.
American visionary Randolph Bourne understood that war is the health of the state. Americans tend to assume the question was settled by Bourne’s Columbia University professor John “we are all pacifists who just need one more war” Dewey. War has become the health of America specifically, war is now America’s special power, and we the people today demand only that it be more deadly, and more efficient, that it benefit us more rather than less.
When asked if he would request a Declaration of War from Congress for his ongoing war for Venezuelan oil and regional supremacy, Trump answered in the negative. He said, no, we are just going to kill people. Trump – speaking for the executive branch and Americans in general – is simply going to kill people. That’ll work, right? As Dewey and the war for peace crowd would say a century ago – and as Bourne would correctly reject and counter today – it’s just the pragmatic thing to do.
Later in the same press conference, Trump actually brought up the unacceptability of politicians threatening to kill people, whether political enemies or not. Trump ridiculed and condemned threats to kill opposition leaders, and their wives and children, made by American politicians, bringing up the Jay Jones situation in the Virginia Attorney General’s race.
Jay’s problem, and the problem for many on the left, is that only the king is allowed to kill his enemies. Thus, their challenge is to find another Obama-like figure to charm and inspire the “democracy” in order to gain the Executive branch and rule at will.
The brutalist Obama Library, opening soon, offers the true architectural face of the State. Obama, the master of illusion, must have preferred this design in an odd transparent moment. His true self, his very Peace Prize-winning soul, always vibed to brutalism. Self-awareness in humans, in families, in businesses, and in states, tends to create self-doubt, and reduce confidence. The possibility of being wrong, immoral, or evil, if recognized, can raise good questions, that in turn shape decisions in a way that goes beyond mere pragmatism and short-lived emotion.
Yet, to pose as the President of the United States, and to exercise empire on behalf of that monstrous government, demands an overly confident front man, vulnerable to flattery, desirous of unearned advantage, trusting blindly in his own dark soul, in high hopes of staying on top – not boldly pursuing truth and justice. Men and women who can and will naturally obfuscate, who can view the ethical and moral chasms within and around them as modern art rather than warning signs, who enjoy the power to kill any enemy they choose by right, on no other authority than rage or envy – these are the Presidents of the United States.
This executive progression is so normalized today that Trump increasingly says the quiet part out loud. For this we are indeed blessed, as younger generations will be well equipped to challenge the sclerotic state with the innocent wisdom of youth, as Randolph Bourne did in 1918, or as Etienne de la Boetie did in 1552. Both died at age 32, and yet both are vividly alive today, their observations and perceptions educating the planet that the state’s necessary evolution, its incessant march to mass murder and tyranny, exists solely to be exposed, ridiculed, disobeyed, and ultimately altered or abolished, to use the words of Thomas Jefferson in 1776, age 33.
The state has little use for men like Bourne, Del La Boetie, or Jefferson, but the people do.
Today, Trump threatens, tariffs, embargoes, insults and bombs the world, for the good of the state. His ally Netanyahu, with the shortsighted support of 80% of Israelis, seeks to physically and spiritually erase his enemies – within and beyond Israel’s legal borders as popular and pragmatic policy. Trump’s vassal Zelensky and a band of NATO bureaucrats and other accidental comedians seek war for the sake of killing people, within and beyond their borders, to solve the political crisis of elite rule among European substates, something the US itself chose Trump to address at home, thus far being gravely disappointed.
Some critique what they claim is a rise of death cults, as if somehow these cults have taken over the state, around the world, making them warlike, unreasonable, immoral, and bent on slaughter. Instead, we can increasingly see that the state itself is the cult, parked on the six sigma of nature’s norm. Self-aware only to the degree of knowing it holds but a minority stake of society, economy, and faith; jealous and enraged if even one person remains uncowed and unwowed by its ridiculousness.
Well, that’s what I got from the latest White House press event. How about you?