When I was young, I couldn't wait to be a part of history. I loved the idea that my parents had this transportive power of memory from having lived through an exploding past full of protests, Vietnam, great music, and all those vibes. But I resented them for not participating in it more personally; for not having a more direct relationship with the stuff I was reading about. At a young age, I resolved to participate intellectually and personally with contemporary history as best I could. That's why 9/11 was, primarily, thrilling to my eighth-grade self.
The Trump phenomenon has tested my resolve to remember every little thing about current events. For all the social media expertise Barack Obama (and Howard Dean before him) leveraged to run the first digital-native campaigns, it is Trump that embodies our moment-to-moment digital existence. Life has always been experienced in moments rather than linear time, but never before has a presidency run on meme-time.
There have been a few moments, however, that have rekindled my commitment to be fully fucking here for whatever's going down. This week's events were some of them.
On the same day, Michael Cohen and Paul Manafort plead guilty and got convicted, respectively, to charges very auxiliary to their tenures in Trump's life. Cohen's an idiot, a caricature outer-borough slug ("iss gunna be fuhgin duscussting") but Manafort is by far the more pathetic figure. Deeply indebted after a failed career serving tyrants and murderers, Manafort was in a desperate cash position when he started working for Trump in an attempt to make a comeback. This New Yorker article from today sums up the recent developments pretty well, but this Atlantic article is the more contextual story of how he made money off some of the world's worst people after a lucrative career of bringing American politics to new lows. Few people deserve to rot in prison more than him.
In terms of personal feelings about all this, I suppose I'm moved to put something down to respond to the turgidities of "this is the day everything changed" and "no longer can this American president" do this and that. Liberal media is absolutely giddy over all of this, and I don't blame them; I want to see blood too. But I'm very guarded against premature celebrations and self-congratulation from the ranks of the mainstream Democrats. They've done jack shit to prove themselves any different than the idiots who lost the election, and they've failed to show an aptitude for politics in the present era. I despise HuffPo's vapid McCoverage of Russia. So basically, most editorial coverage of Trump's legal troubles annoys me as much as it makes me hopeful that the US can emerge productively from the Trump experiment.
And it is an experiment. Part of me is really reluctant to see any ending prematurely cascade over a rare moment of true introspection in American politics. This moment is exhausting, and I'm not sure we'll feel like doing it again soon. But here in the shit, we're all accelerationists. This is a moment in which there is no penalty for espousing a real, impassioned political ideology, for taking up ideas that before might have seemed too far away. Ending the whole moment on a technicality via the legal system is not only going to dissatisfy millions of rednecks who don't know how any of our civil infrastructure works, it's going to guarantee the irresolution of the tensions that brought us here.
I despise Trump. On an aesthetic level, the man himself is odious to me purely on the basis of proud ignorance, of his eagerness to pander, of his contemptuous obviousness. Obviously I hate his inhumane and asinine policies, even though to the last one of them, they're all only possible because of what the red meat base has been fed by Fox News. We are really fucked up right now.
But I don't want him to leave before he's kicked out by the social immune system. While in office, he is a ticking chess clock, hurrying any other movement to challenge his default offering of nativist rancor. Out of office, he becomes a martyr. If I were in Congress, yes I would vote to impeach immediately. But a more substantial part of me doesn't want to see him taken down by any of this legal stuff. The Trump Moment needs to go before Trump himself does.
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