The Dumpster Fire of the Vanities

America descends into a flattery-failure doom loop

Busy day, so brief post

On Memorial Day the New York Times published an article with the headline “Trump is the only person who can save America, according to his cabinet.” The article offered a quantitative analysis of senior-official sycophancy. As the article notes, Donald Trump likes to hold long, televised cabinet meetings. In these meetings, according to the Times,

On average, at least one of every six sentences either flattered Mr. Trump, gave him credit or criticized his political opponents.

This “Dear Leader” treatment is unprecedented in American history. Regardless of how successful, no previous president has been showered with this kind of obsequiousness and deification.

Outside the MAGA bubble, Americans are increasingly seeing Trump as the loser he is. He has failed on every front. Manufacturing employment is down, inflation is outpacing wages, consumer sentiment is at a record low, mortgage rates are up. Trump’s war of choice has led to utter humiliation. According to current polls, Americans are giving Trump extremely low approval ratings, both overall and on every major issue — even border security:

Inside the MAGA fantasy bubble, however, Trump’s reign is hailed, almost literally, as the Second Coming.

Some of this reflects Trump’s own personality. His inner self is obviously a bottomless pit of insecurity. He self-medicates by demanding Pyongyang-level flattery, destroying national monuments and replacing them with garish, vulgar trash, persecuting critics and comedians, and starting stupid wars.

But Trump isn’t the first public figure to seek self-aggrandizement in an attempt to fill his inner emptiness. The important question is why the American right — not just his pathetic cabinet, but the whole movement, including the 6 extremistsRepublicans on the Supreme Court — has been so willing to empower him. And that’s a question much bigger than Trump himself.

The truth is that the right wing attempt to build a cult of personality around a deeply unpresidential figure, while it has reached new levels of absurdity under Trump, isn’t new. Republicans tried to do the same thing for George W. Bush. Remember this?

And readers of a certain age may recall that the right’s canonization of Ronald Reagan began while he was still in office.

It’s tempting to dismiss personality-cult theater as trivial, but it isn’t. When prominent people in a republic act as if they were living in a monarchy, the republic increasingly becomes a monarchy in reality.

Beyond that, influential Republicans have substantively granted Trump more personal power, more ability to act as a monarch, than any of his predecessors. Republicans in Congress have abandoned their role as an independent branch of government. In a recent post on X, Mike Johnson, the speaker of the House, sounded just like Trump’s cabinet members:

And the Roberts Supreme Court has gone most of the way toward giving Trump dictatorial powers.

Right-wing legal thinkers have increasingly embraced “unitary executive theory,” under which the entire executive branch — including agencies Congress has designated as independent — answers personally to the president, who can hire and fire officials at will. The Roberts Court hasn’t explicitly endorsed this theory. But the Court has given presidents absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts — effectively placing Trump above the law. And Roberts has declared that the president is “the only person who alone composes a branch of government,” which, combined with the subservience of both Congress and the Court itself, does in effect make Trump a dictator.

Why has the modern American right abandoned the idea of a constitutional republic and embraced rule by strongman? Good question — and one I’ll try to answer another day.

For now, let me just point out that while it may seem ironic that so much praise and power has been lavished on Trump, America’s most incompetent modern president, the combination of flattery and failure isn’t an accident. It is, in fact, a self-reinforcing doom loop.

Trump needs and demands sycophantic praise and unfettered power in part to compensate for the fact that he’s such an objective failure. And while his manifest unfitness is part of the explanation for his failure, his policy disasters also have a lot to do with the bubble that surrounds him. Nobody dares to tell him when he’s wrong. Nobody can stop him from indulging his whims, not matter how disastrous their consequences.

The point is that the dire state we’re in — the leader of the free world has turned against freedom, the greatest power the world has ever known is self-immolating before our eyes — isn’t just a matter of Donald Trump’s personal failings. It’s the culmination of decades of right-wing sabotage of everything that made American great.

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