One of the keys to understanding the current catastrophe enveloping this country because it chose to make Donald Trump president (twice, so far) is that for no doubt complex sociological and psychological reasons lots of elite actors have to pretend to themselves and everyone else that what is happening is something other than what it is, which is to say complete madness.
Commenter Cereal makes a crucial point about this description in the WSJ of Trump’s totally imaginary 20% toll for ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz:
“Officials had been sent scrambling on Monday after Trump announced the policy.”
That’s not what policy means. Trump sharted out some imaginary brain juice with BIGLY NUMBERS and a bullshit boast and the headless chicken henchmen ran around trying to bridge the gap between his idiocy and some kind of reality.
That’s a concise description of something that now happens on a practically daily basis. The levels of denial here are truly mind-boggling.
First, Trump has no power to impose a 20% toll on ships passing through the strait. To do that, before we even start getting into trivial details such as what the legal or pseudo-legal mechanisms for doing this would look like exactly, the US would have to defeat Iran in a war that the US is currently losing, and quite badly.
Second, even if we enter into a fantasy world in which the US government would have the power to impose such a scheme, attempting to do so would completely destroy the economic viability of using the strait in the fashion it was being used in during the Before Time. Indeed the 20% number is classic Trump: it’s something that he pulled out of his feculent ass because, as Cereal notes, it sounded bigly and powerful, even though attempting to impose such a toll would destroy the commerce upon which it was imposed.
Third, and more globally, this is just some insane bullshit that Trump spewed on social media, which then has to be treated as if it’s something else, because the alternative would be to admit that we as a nation have done what we have in fact done, which is install a demented narcissistic madman as president.
Which, obviously, is not really an option.
. . . Commenter Tzimiskes sums up something that I’ve been feeling in an inchoate way for just about exactly eleven years now:
Trump is really helping me to understand history. If our elites can lie to themselves this much to rationalize their own power, I can much better understand how people in the past thought that some useless inbred king was divinely ordained by God. All that stupid stuff from the past that seemed unbelievable seems so much more plausible now that I am seeing people engage in the same stupidities in real time.
Especially since unlike in the past we had better options immediately available in very recent memory and our elites choose to go along with this insanity anyway. Anything is better than having their authority challenged.
That’s it, right there.