I think the orange boob may have recently poked two previously slumbering bears ‒ one of which will now awaken and bite him on the arse ‒ and neither is the nation he just threatened, bombed the crap out of and earned a ceasefire that will likely end with a negotiated deal similar to the one Trump pulled the US out of in 2018.
Bear No 1 in this context is the general decency of most Americans. Two weekends ago, after a student at our local high school was deported, hundreds of his fellow students staged a walkout in protest, carrying signs such as “Education not deportation” and chanting “We’re heartbroken, we’re angry and we’re not staying silent”. The next day, one of the 2000 “No Kings” marches in protest against what President Trump is doing to our nation (on the day of his US$45 million military parade) was at Leisure World, a nearby senior community we made fun of a lot as kids but not so much now we’re eligible to live there.
Bear No 2 is the solid isolationist chunk of his America First Maga base, who watched for weeks as their daddy figure lavished attention on other countries such as Israel and Iran.
So they sent Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson out to throw media hissy fits about it. Trump bombed Iran anyway because no matter what happens, one of his few true gifts is he still thinks he’s the greatest thing since what he thought of himself last week. That kind of unassailable, if false, confidence, honed from years of masking the largest meteor of insecurity to ever sit behind the Resolute Desk, combined with an inability to feel shame or remorse for every horrifying thing they’ve ever done, would be most people’s twin crippling personality disorders. But somehow we got the one guy who’s so unself-aware they’ve morphed – with help from a twisted media ecosystem and uncurious electorate – into political assets.
Fox News pundits claim he’s playing four-level chess. I think he’s an overgrown child who’s got his way his entire life and has a special desire for anything someone says he can’t have.
This all, regrettably, validates at the highest level of power one of my theories about people, which goes simply: “We never really ever get out of the eighth grade.” How’s this for adolescent pettiness? Senator Rand Paul said he wouldn’t vote for Trump’s “big, beautiful bill”, whose name is as unserious as its provisions are dire, so Trump uninvited him and his family – including his 5-year-old grandson – to the White House picnic. Worse than adolescent, that’s a kindergarten-level power play.
I’ve long said the two weapons in the social arsenal of a little kid are: “You’re not my friend” and “You can’t come to my birthday party.” Paul got the latter, and in a big way Elon Musk got the former, even after he tried recently to make nice. Musk is a fellow man-child who, like Trump, had a toxic father and in-the-background mother. Trump was sent to military school, Musk to a boys’ survival camp, all adding up to some easy armchair psychology: both have huge holes in their souls they keep trying and failing to fill with money, power and attention from everyone, especially women. No matter how much they get, it’ll never be enough, and millions will suffer because of it.
But a solid wedge of the American people ‒ even a measurable Maga slice ‒ is moving closer to having had enough of Trump’s autocratic chaos at home and abroad. Harvard’s Erica Chenoweth studied a century of responses to authoritarian regimes and found: “Nonviolent protests are twice as likely to succeed as armed conflicts – and those engaging a threshold of 3.5% of the population have never failed to bring about change.”
In the US, that would mean 11.5 million people. Estimates of the “No Kings” nationwide crowds were about 5 million. Looks like we have some work to do.
