Saturday, I was going to start doing a weekly rundown on the news, but there was Trump’s terrorist threats to attend to, you get the survey today.
What to make of the “Trump assassination” thing that went down over the weekend? I dunno. To start, we have no idea what happened other than a guy was busted lurking around Trump’s Florida golf course, armed and, well, armed. We know the guy’s name. We know that the Feds threw some weapons charges on him. We know that, according to one New York Times interview with the guy, he is probably another one of the rootless crazies who inhabit the fringe and whose grip on reality is pretty loose.
The Times interview suggests that gun-owner hanging around Trump’s property is a kook obsessed with fighting against the Russians in Ukraine, a fight he wanted to take on even though he is well into his fifties and has no military experience. He also had a half-cocked plan where he would fly former Afghan fighters to Ukraine to help out, a plan he hadn’t consulted Afghans about.
Though Trump and JD Couch are trying to raise money off of the attempt to hang around Trump’s golf course while armed (no shots were fired), we have little idea what all this is about. Sure, the guy could be pissed off at Trump because Trump is Putin’s main man. Or he could be pissed at Ukraine because his insane plan to be Lawrence of Kiev was ignored, and he was there to “protect” Trump against Zelinsky.
We don’t know. Everything around the “attempt” is too damn murky, the Trump people are too damn shady, and the lurking gun owner’s history is too bonkers to draw any conclusion. And given that we still don’t have clarity on the last Trump “assassination attempt” or the true nature of Trump’s “gunshot injury,” I’m not attaching myself to anything anyone says about “what happened,” and neither should you.
Of course, the murkiness didn’t stop Leon Mush from xwitting a “just asking questions” blurb wondering why nobody has tried to assassinate Joe Biden or Kamala Harris (he since deleted the post), a post which was not really an innocent musing but something like of a provocation. A provocation? Yup, a provocation.
You see, Mush is very tuned into – perhaps even paranoid about - personal security. For years, he’s spent millions annually on security companies providing him everything he needs to keep him safe. Recently, he created his own security company – Foundation. Mush now has twenty people following him around wherever he goes, and many more sweeping streets and securing properties for his arrival. His security apparatus is second among sociopathic billionaires (Zuck is #1).
No one as money-minded as Mush spends that much cash on armed friendship unless they are total paranoids, have dealt with assassination attempts and death threats, or both. Given how toxic and destructive Mush is, I’d hanker that more than a few people have “tried to kill” him, incidents that we don’t know about because they’ve been silenced so that no copycats pop up. I’d hanker that Mush knows that federal law enforcement – whether the FBI or Secret Service – also do not advertise threats or attempts regarding the president, vice president, or cabinet members to prevent copycats. I’d hanker that knowing this Mush used “just asking a question” to provoke, something him and the rest of the far white mooks do as naturally as they brush their teeth.
Talking about lying sacks o’ shit: JD Couch hit CNN’s State of the Nation and proudly admitted that he has no problem “[making up] stories so that the … media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people.” When asked whether the Springfield pet hoax was a story he made up, Couch said, Yes.”
Now, I have participated in art projects that were pretty much (harmless) hoaxes, (obvious) bullshit to bait the media while trying to communicate something bigger (like how easy it is to spoof people and the press) and to have a little fun. But lying about real life in ways that turn people against each other and destroy lives? That’s not pranking. That’s not art. That’s not a literary technique. That’s not politics. That’s a calculated attack on truth and people, an attack that has one goal: To win no matter the cost.
Now, I am not naïve. Couch is not the originator of the bullshit stories tactic. Our history is stuffed with people using propagandistic lies to achieve and cement their power. There’s the whole Trump administration. There’s much of the Bush II administration, especially the War on Terror. Clinton, Bush I, Reagan, Nixon, Johnson, Kennedy, Eisenhower, Truman, Roosevelt: All of them lied to get us into wars or to advance war aims. Nixon and Reagan’s domestic lies are well documented. Go back a couple decades and we have Sen. Joe McCarthy waving around blank pieces of paper, claiming that they were lists of commies serving in government. All bullshit. All propagandistic lies to achieve and bolster power.
I am also not a cynic, so I’m not going to lazily bumble into “They all do it! Politicians lie! Blah blah blah!” Certainly some pols use lies to get their way, but most politicians I’ve known, observed and studied are honest people who shoot straight. Yes, plenty of them fudge facts, but that fudging is more like turd-polishing. They spin, avoid questions, deflect, and/or omit truth – none of which I condone, but all of which I’ve dealt with. And I’ve dealt with that kind of bullshit pretty easily because the bullshit is a minor tweak of reality.
What Couch and Trump are doing is far, far different. As Bush II did with Iraqi WMDs, Reagan and Bush I did with Iran-Contra, Nixon did with Watergate and Vietnam, Johnson and Kennedy did with Vietnam, and McCarthy did in the Red Scare, the Trump/Coach lying is a cynical tactic that distorts reality so that they can get their own way. It’s much deeper, much more consequential, and much different than Candidate Steve saying that they will cut your taxes when they have no intention or power to do so. Why? Because, once they convince say 30% of the population that shit is chocolate, they can challenge the basic things we should accept as real, things like 2 + 2 = 4, injecting bleach into your body is not a good idea, and Dona;d Trump is an ugly motherfucker.
To understand politics is to be able to reject cynicism, resist laziness, and figure out how to navigate in the murk. How do you get through a swamp? With a guide, sure, but you can do it yourself with a strong light and a map. Prepare for the mosquitos, mind the snakes, and more forward. That’s all you need to do to get you towards the truth. That’s also a good enough definition of politics.
Some old news which is really really old news came into my inbox and I mention it because it shows how out of touch very rich people like Trump, Couch, Mush, Zuck, etc. are.
In December 2023, Ron Saich, the founder of Panera, a restaurant chain that relies on paying workers shit wages, announced that his employees are not motivated by stock prices or shareholders’ “needs.” Really? So, Marcus, whose job is to fill paper cups with sugar water, isn’t in tune with the C-Suite? And, though Maria makes a mean sandwich, she gives zero-fucks about finding a way to shave overtime costs so that Saich and friends can buy another summer home? You don’t say. This extremely rich person’s disconnect is nothing new.
From the 1930s into the 1980s, Big Business told us that “What was good for General Motors was good for country” knowing the country they were talking about was Big Business and not the people. They didn’t think that workers cared about maximizing dividends for the shareholders. They knew that workers cared about having a job, getting paid fairly, being treated with respect, working in a safe place, and not having to worry about heath care and retirement – the same things we care about now and have always cared about. And the reason they knew what we wanted is because we organized in unions and we told them. And if they didn’t listen, we shut the machine down.
In the 1980s, that knowledge started to go away. President Ronald Reagan used the federal government to weaken organized labor and destroy unions. Reagan’s crushing of the air controllers’ union sent a strong message that he’d back corporate America’s attack on labor. But that’s not all. While destroying organized labor, Reagan and his allies created something else: America as the Land of Business Heroes.
While Big Business busted unions, they spent heavy on a pro-corporate propaganda campaign. Part of the campaign was the creation of the hero businessman savior. The first prominent hero businessman savior was auto exec Lee Iococca. For decades, Iococca was a steady hand behind Ford. Although he is responsible for the Ford Mustang, Iococca’s hero/savior status came from “saving” Chrysler, one of the Big Four auto manufacturers, one that was “on the verge of bankruptcy.”
And, yes, Iococca did “save Chrysler,” a rescue which those in business school would care about if not for Iococca: An Autobiography, a hagiography that became a template for the “business biography.” Yes, robber barons like Carnegie also wrote impactful autobiographies, but their impact was not as titanic or cultural shifting as Iococca. The early baron-writers also didn’t have a recently corporatized publishing industry behind them. Iococca did.
To drive sales, Iococca’s publisher discounted the book heavily – an industry first – something that they could do because Iococca didn’t need the money. The deep discounts accomplished both Iococca’s and the publisher’s goals: Upon publication, every book store had copies of the book, which drove sales, which put it on the Times best seller list, which had bookstores displaying it front and center, which made it a best seller. All of these things were pretty much unprecedented in regards to business books.
Before Iococca, business biographies were rarely promoted outside the business press. While you saw CEOs in hard news broadcasts, they didn’t appear on mornings shows or daytime talk TV. When bookstores picked them up, they would linger in the business section, which back then were pretty small. A book like Iococca also might wind up in on the transportation shelf, with a history of railroads, a couple books on boating, and some picture books of vintage cars. The sales would have been meager, maybe respectable, but it wouldn’t have made a best seller’s list. Iococca changed all that.
Iococca changed the way publishers dealt with business biographies, the access business leaders had to media, and the way the public saw CEOs. All this created the hero businessman savior celebrity. Through TV, magazines and books – and active PR operations, something else Iococca pioneered - tycoons such as Jack Welch, Akio Morita, and Phil Knight became more than just CEOs. They are icons. Steve Jobs headed a cult before Walter Isaacson wrote Jobs, but it was Isaacson’s soft-shoe that made Jobs a “serious man” and cultural icon, something books will do.
Doubt that last statement? My answer: Donald J. Trump. We look at Trump’s reality TV show, The Apprentice, as his breakthrough, the thing that changed him from a New York annoyance to hero businessman savior. That wasn’t it. Trump’s “serious” turn came with “his” book The Art of the Deal, a book published three years after Icoccoa.
Like Iococca, The Art of the Deal recontextualized its subject, sold a hell of a lot of copies, and influenced the way the media, the people, and our culture talked about Big Business, corporate America, and the filthy rich. Capitalism quickly moved from an economic system to an ideology to a religion to a cult. The One True Way was the way of the businessman. Labor? Certainly not as important as capital. Workers? Wealth, not the worker, is the priority. Sounds harsh? Don’t worry, wealth will trickle down, just work hard and harder and harder…for the shareholder.
Now, this condensed and incomplete history of the business biography and the creation of the hero businessman savior celebrity might be new to you, but if you are a worker and have any bit of self-regard you know for a good damn fact that your bosses’ priorities are not yours and that is nothing new. You also know that Ron Saich figuring this out in 2023 is fucking pathetic. Unfortunately, this is what we are up against: Slow-to-no to catch on Very Rich People who run too much of our lives and too much of their mouths. The good news is that their hold isn’t just economic or political, its psychological and cultural, two things that are much easier to change than money and power, but through which we can change our relationships to money and power.
And that is the news rundown for last week.