Alexander Karn
🧵
You don't have to observe Trump for long to see how unprincipled and inconsistent he is.
You never know from one minute to the next where he stands on key issues. He changes his position paragraph by paragraph and sometimes within the same sentence.
He often rides the fence and refuses to commit himself to any side, or he extends his sympathy to "both sides."
He's a hollow man in this regard.
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Alexander Karn
When Trump threatens us with the dissolution of the nation, i.e., you won’t have a country, he is always talking about difference and the politics of pluralism. We can’t accept diversity or multi-vocality because all disagreement and dissent is lethal to Trump’s vision of America. America can only be secure where there is a single, unchallenged order to things. Security requires adherence to one center of power. Any deviation from this is a recipe for disaster. Obedience or death.
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Alexander Karn
By contrast, when Trump invokes or imagines a new golden age, he is always talking about enforced unity. One perspective that governs and eradicates all others. It’s the authoritarian core of MAGA politics, and it always carries the potential for repression and violence. For America to be secure, for America to prosper, power can brook no difference, no dissent, no challengers or opposition. That’s what’s happening right now with the purge of the military, and the FBI, and the DOJ, etc.
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Alexander Karn
America is not yet a dictatorship, but that’s the MAGA North Star. It’s not so much a legal theory of a unified executive as it is a fantasy about totalitarian control.
We should prepare accordingly.
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Alexander Karn
That hollow quality appears clearly (or seems to) when Trump nods to the future.
Or, rather, when he gestures to America’s TWO POSSIBLE FUTURES.
Depending on his mood, or where you catch him in his rhetorical swerving, we are either headed for total disaster or a return to mythic greatness.
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Alexander Karn
With Trump, we’re always suspended somewhere between
“You won’t have a country anymore.”
AND
“A new golden age.”
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Alexander Karn
It’s worth asking, what is the difference between these two scenarios? Or, rather, what will determine which of these scenarios awaits us?
The answer reveals a lot about the essence of MAGA politics.
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