Trump's Arrest as Post-Political Crisis
We Live in a Weimar America
If you’re reading this essay it’s obviously Wednesday (or later) and we know by now whether or not President Donald Trump has been arrested. If he wasn’t, you know, that’s fine. My point still stands: We live in a Weimar America.
The curious case is that we never lost a war, we were never occupied, and we never surrendered our constitution to foreign powers to rewrite our privileges and restructure the very nature of our government. The powers that rewrote our privileges and restructured the nature of our government, instead, came from within.
The body of this article will not be a rundown of the myriad analogs our America shares with the Weimar period in Germany, that would be too obvious. A short list will suffice.
Like Weimar, established political parties are proving unserious in their ability to practically govern the country for the people that it exists to govern.
Like Weimar, politically sponsored and protected rioting is allowed and encouraged at every level of government.
Like Weimar, journalists and publishers with the wrong political opinions are harassed by the government and NGO apparatus.
Like Weimar, prosecutions are increasingly targeted at enemies of the regime, classes of people are exposed to a multi-tiered injustice system which is empowered only to crack down on those guilty of wrongthink.
Like Weimar, institutions dedicated to the “study” and proliferation of transvestism as well as the sexual grooming and abuse of minors are sponsored by the urban cultural elite and by the state which are increasingly infiltrating everyday life.
Like Weimar, there is a growing concern about the safety of books being printed, especially those aimed at children, and the values that they contain.
Like Weimar, left-wing paramilitary organizations engage in acts of domestic terrorism against state organs and right-wing public figures with near total impunity.
Like Weimar, a new regime has been imposed onto the population at the behest of interests vested in the gradual decline of the nation. Only now, it is not the Allied powers who are here to impose a new rule on America, but instead it is the transnational cosmopolitan corporate elite who rule our nation for private gain. That new regime is complete, as we now know, with its very own Reichstag Fire.
In this frame, the arrest of the former president is perfectly understandable.
For anyone living under a rock, the particular situation at hand is this: during the 2016 campaign season, President Trump paid a sum of cash to a prostitute whom he had an affair with. The cash was, of course, part of an agreement to keep silent about the affair, not least because allegations around it would be damaging to his political image. Because the damage could be political in nature, this makes the cash payment technically a campaign expense which technically makes it mandatory to disclose on campaign finance documents.
The problem with this is that such documents are public record and therefore disclosing this exchange would defeat the entire purpose of the non-disclosure agreement in the first place— by making public an obvious quid-pro-quo with a known prostitute. Needless to say, such a trivial matter represented not even a drop in the ocean of overall campaign spending in 2016. Also, Hillary Clinton was, as expected, allowed to settle via fine a nearly identical finance violation in regard to her purchasing of the now infamous Steele Dossier.
The particulars of this case matter not because I have any interest in litigating the courtroom proceedings of Trump’s legal defense but instead to illustrate that none is necessary. To use this situation as pretext to arrest the leading political rival of the current regime is prima facie an act of political domination—of state terrorism. I will not entertain an argument otherwise and no one should. If someone pulls a gun on you, you don’t schedule a debate on whether or not it would be okay to pull the trigger. Really though, you can only blame the Democrats so much for this decision.
First of all, from their position, it’s a fantastic execution of the Spirit of the Merchant, a twisted embrace of pure legalism to dominate the narrative and secure political power. Second, they’re only doing what we wish we could. Trump himself led countless chants of ‘Lock Her Up' and threatened to put his first campaign opponent, Hillary Clinton in prison to her face on the Presidential Debate stage. What he did, however, was nothing.
Luckily for Trump, his primary residence, the Mar-a-Lago palace resort, is located deep in the heart of ruby-red Florida, a state administered by the country’s most rock-ribbed Republican governor. Ron DeSantis has shown himself more than willing to use state police powers to protect public order and understands that power must be exercised to contest power. What has been created is a moment of Real Politics, or at least an opportunity for it. Instead, of course, there has been absolute silence. Pedro Gonzalez, whose work I quite enjoy, has gone to bat for DeSantis to defend this course of inaction.
Unfortunately, Pedro betrays a worrying lack of vision on this topic. The problem with DeSantis’ position is not that his Monday morning statement did not go far enough in condemning the Manhattan District Attorney for politically targeting the former president (although certainly he did not condemn enough). The problem is that as the one person in America with the ability to turn this act of banal, administerial tyranny into a political and constitutional crisis, he chose rather to surrender. This is the post-political crisis.
“There are mountain passes and mule tracks that one discovers only after a long ascent. A new conception of power has emerged, a potent and direct concentration. Holding out against this force requires a new conception of freedom, one that can have nothing to do with the washed-out ideas associated with this word today. It presumes, for a start, that one does not want to merely save one’s own skin, but is also willing to risk it.” - Ernst Junger, The Forest Passage, p.23
Our regime aspires to the post-political above all. The realization of the post-political is the total managerial state. Only one class rules, only one elite cadre holds power, and the vision of that power's direction and use is always the same. This does not mean elections are not held, or ballots are not cast; only that the outcomes never change. We are allowed to change our corporate tax rate from 25% to 19% with a corresponding increase in revenue from a Value-added tax. We are allowed to trade the state income tax in exchange for raising property taxes. We are allowed only to tinker. We may pull one lever down and turn another dial six clicks left, but we are never to question the machine or its outputs.
While we tinker, the military industrial complex lines its pockets with blank checks to Afghanistan and Ukraine. While we dial in, migrants invade our borders by the millions to cut down our wages and provide cheap labor to multinational corporations. While we adjust the settings, the good jobs that built our towns and cities are shipped off overseas and our factories are shut down in the name of global integration. While we tinker, Murder rates rise 35% and we empty our prisons. The managers have put these issues behind the screen. They are not issues at all. Meanwhile, Trump's great success always came from engaging in real politics, smashing the managerial screen and exposing the false-consensus agenda to sunlight. Now his arrest gives us another opportunity.
The state terrorism currently being exercised against Donald Trump is unfortunately considered to be, and will continue to be considered by the mainstream press and legacy ‘globohomo’ media, an apolitical action. It is purely administerial: just functionaries pushing their papers forward! Such is the nature of bureaucratic justice.
Only the use of political force to contest that action will render the event a political crisis; surrender does not work. DeSantis has an opportunity to showcase the brutality of the regime, the diabolical machination of their campaign against political dissent - and to seize the narrative for himself and for the political right, to steal real politics from the mouth of the beast. While entire states refuse to extradite illegal aliens for deportation, even after their incarceration for rape and murder, the country’s most powerful right-wing governor will do nothing to stop the political prosecution of his party’s former President. If our political leaders, our governors- whose job it is to govern- refuse to engage in any more than mealy mouthed press conferences about free speech, what is the point of contesting political power at all? The answer: the private gain of those in office, and nothing else.
Ironically, the largest obstacle to such a standoff outside of DeSantis’ own will is that of President Trump himself, whose lawyers have already announced Trump’s intent to fully cooperate with any indictment served to the former President. Unfortunately, this all but ensures the success of any attempt to arrest the most important regime rival and current frontrunner-opponent to Biden’s re-election. In other words, this step is all but normalized. Without the ability to create a crisis out of this moment, it will never become one. Like so many other ‘unprecedented’ steps, it will be internalized by beltway Washington and mainstream conservatives. Con- Inc. will tweet furiously, I’m sure- but opposition will be performative at best. At worst, we must prepare ourselves to endure a multi-week news cycle dedicated to the reframing and ideological capture of opposition to this move safely into the far more regime-safe context of ‘constitutional government’ or Trump’s ‘best arguments to beat the case’. All of which will serve to do nothing but obfuscate the true animus behind the entire charade: power. There will be a concerted effort towards the absolute demoralization of any genuine opposition. This narrative front is already forming, and while offering the appearance of resistance, it will act as a universal solvent to it. Any objection which contends with the world post-arrest and attempts to squabble over the case’s precise outcome or merit is a world which has surrendered the arrest as an event and is therefore already dead. Like the fish who bit the hook, it may get its worm, but at what cost?
“Anyone who has escaped the clutches of catastrophe knows that he basically had the help of simple people to thank, people who were not overcome by the hate, the terror, the mechanicalness of platitudes. These people withstood the propaganda and its plainly demonic insinuations. When such virtues manifest in a leader of the people, endless blessings can result…” - Ernst Junger, The Forest Passage, p.45
The entire failure of everyone, every last soul identifying as "right wing", "new right", "conservative", "dissident", OK even "Republican" ... is crystallized in these few words: "... that one does not want to merely save one’s own skin, but is also willing to risk it.” - Ernst Junger, The Forest Passage. Very sorry, but cannot help but thinking that at this rate, all of us on this political wavelength, we happy keyboard warriors, will still be busy chronicling the final demise of the United States of America when our front doors are splintering under the force of the battering ram.