Madeleine Morris
Warning: This is going to be a rather long thread.
When I saw this, it really got me thinking about the way we frame our understanding of the situation. The US has a President who was always suffering from a severe personality disorder, and is now suffering from dementia.
And this coin is a pleasingly concrete way to conceive of and signify his ridiculous narcissism. 1/
Madeleine Morris
Behind the curtains, there are some very, very clever, very malignant people who have truly understood that the media will always choose the shiny object over abstract, hard to grasp changes in paradigm. And Trump is the most perfect of shiny objects. And they’ve set out to restructure the US into something entirely different - not a democracy, not a rules-based society, not even a market-based economy.
An authoritarian, neo-feudal state.
Madeleine Morris
The arrest of James Comey may satisfy Trump’s demand for personal vengeance, but the norms against using the justice department to prosecute political enemies is also gone - entirely.
The targeting of Venezuelan vessels may satisfy Trump’s demand to be portrayed as a take-no-prisoner’s big man on the global stage accommodates his need to feel dominant, but it also spells the end of rules of engagement of any kind.
I could go on and on. But I hope I’m making my point clear. 8/
Madeleine Morris
…something of almost indescribable, monumental proportions has happened, within less than a year of this government in the US coming to power.
Trump is a lazy, very impatient man. He thinks of himself as a king who demands satisfaction of his momentary whims. Those whims are accommodated. And as they are being accommodated, the underlying result is a total destruction of the structural norms of a rules-based democracy. 7/
Madeleine Morris
The treat to invade other sovereign states, normalized. The control of bodies - of all kinds - normalized. State authored piracy, bribery, shake-downs - normalized. Entire institutions - government departments, universities, law firms, media corporations, etc - bullied into whatever posture is required in the moment - normalized. The two other co-equal branches of government castrated - normalized.
While we are all fixated on the shiny Trump object, whether in adoration or disgust… 6/
Madeleine Morris
I want us to think about our life experience and how we’ve flattered or placated a narcissist to get the outcome we want. It’s so tragically easy.
I think most of what we’re seeing covered in the news, is framed as Trump-led initiatives that erode the most basic of democratic norms. He gets the focus, the praise or the condemnation.
Having military troops in the streets, controlling the populace has become normalized. Having hooded thugs kidnapping citizens normalized. 5/
Madeleine Morris
What we can see on the surface, like the observation of an iceberg, is the Trump coin, the Epstein files, Trump holding his chart of tariffs, palling up with Putin and Netanyahu.
But what I want us to consider is just how incredibly easy it is to pull his strings and push his buttons. No, I’m not asking you to feel sorry for him. I’m asking you to see him as the figurehead puppet that I believe he is. Because it allows us to consider the far more dangerous people behind him: their agenda 4/
Madeleine Morris
What I would like to propose that we consider is this:
The same aspects that made Trump a singular object of adoration for the MAGA crowd, also make him a very effective target of hatred for those of us who are opposed to autocracy and fascism.
Trump is the perfect shiny coin to grasp - whether out of adoration or disgust. But he is, because of his many mental disorders, sublimely manipulatable by those around him, who are architecting the demise of democracy in America.
3/
Madeleine Morris
There is something both funny and enraging about it, right?
It’s much easier to be enraged by this than to grasp the far more frightening reality that a search engine that a HUGE proportion of the world uses and depends on on a daily basis, is censoring its AI search results.
Because, of course, this is the censorship we are aware of, but of course, there is every reason to believe it is manipulating search results in many other ways. 2/
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