#david roth

I don't have to tell you that this job is a stupid, disgusting one, and one in which only someone who is facile and shameless could flourish to the extent that Carlson has. It is a demeaning thing, although it pays well; Carlson was compensated like a mid-career MLB star to play his part as a meat megaphone for the worst and oldest impulses in American politics.

That the demands of the job changed in the way they did, such that the erstwhile rich-kid heel became a howling blood-and-soil fascist, is meaningful in a number of ways, but I think most significantly in how it reflects the vacancy and drift that define our increasingly theatrical and abstracted politics.

David Roth The Defector

A country would first have to be depraved enough to produce a Donald Trump in the first place, and then it would have to go on getting progressively sicker in ways that permitted him to rise, through one egregious public idiocy after another and from one act of casual defilement to the next, to the sort of prominence that would make that presidential campaign possible. It would have to be sick in ways that would make it such that long before he inexorably won his party’s nomination and then the nation’s highest office, nearly every American knew his name.

The country would have to be distracted and defeated and deluded enough to believe that this qualified him, and even qualified him in unique ways. It would have conflated not just who Trump appeared to be on TV with who he really was, but its own governance with unusually slow-moving TV programming.

[...]

One of the most important things to know about Trump is that he never has a plan. He barely has an itinerary. He simply moves from one flubby gilded hustle to the next, dedicating each moment to whatever feels good or whatever he thinks looks strongest. What mess he leaves behind is by definition not his problem, and he’s always already somewhere else by the time the stain sets.

Trump is used to having other people do what he says, because he is richer and more powerful than them; that people have almost always done just that has made him soft and weak and strange, but also it has seldom led to him being seriously inconvenienced. He’ll call that a win.

So of course Trump didn’t have a plan for losing the election. He expected that the people working under him—that is, the entire United States government—would find a way to stop the election that he’d lost from becoming official when he gave that order, but he had no sense of how that might work beyond them just somehow doing it. He promised evidence that would show he was right and then told other people to find it. It never came, but at some point he just started acting as if it had been delivered and denied, and began talking about how unfair that was.

It was his opinion that he’d won ten or so million more votes than he’d actually received, a victory that Trump, Trumpianly, called “a sacred landslide.”

On Wednesday, after he told them to do it, hundreds of people who live to share Trump’s opinions overran the U.S. Capitol building on his behalf, because they believed they were doing their patriotic duty or at least serving their own unenlightened self-interest; it is a pillar of Trumpism not to recognize a distinction between the two. They were mostly following through on the promise that has always been at the heart of Trump’s appeal, which is that they would get to be a part of his greatest deal ever, and cut in ahead of every less-connected other person when it came time to share the winnings, and enjoy the premium luxury finishes and absolute personal impunity synonymous with the word “Trump.”

Trump has used this glib old huckster’s promise long before it became the heart of his last and most ambitious grift, to sell real estate seminars and signature neckties and ghostwritten books about winning and any number of other similarly valueless things.

Trump has always promised to make the profoundly broken American state work for the people that voted for him, or at least more readily and brutally against the people that those voters didn’t like.

He really did deliver on the last bit, but Trump’s success in unleashing the full idiotic force of American sadism was less a matter of anything he actually did and more a matter of the license he gave others to do as he does—to do whatever outrageous harm they want to do, to demand whatever they want simply because they wanted it.

As the clock ran out on his presidency, Trump began making demands that were more and more difficult and dangerous and degrading to fulfill, and when he stopped getting those things he simply demanded them again, this time more bitterly and with redoubled grandiosity. By Wednesday, the conflations were total—for him to lose the presidency was inherently unconstitutional, it was illegal, it went against God; the only truly patriotic thing to do was to keep the country under his singularly damp command, indefinitely; to save the nation, everything that was not Trump would need to be permanently replaced with him.

“We’re going to walk down,” Trump told his people on Wednesday, “we’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and I’ll be there with you, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them.”

Trump didn’t actually walk with his people down to the Capitol, because he doesn’t walk as a matter of course and because he doesn’t do his own errands. His loyalists rushed the Capitol and briefly, giddily, took it over and defaced it on his behalf; the president was driven home to watch it on television and complain on Twitter about all the people who had let him down.

[...]

...the country’s leaders cannot quite bring themselves to say that the lives of people living in this country matter at all, let alone act as if they do. The state fails daily; it has somehow forgotten how to do anything but hurt and cannot even agree that it would be good to try to help. It does not tell the truth as a matter of course, which gives license to everyone adrift in this to believe whatever story they find most compelling.

In the ways that matter most, in the places where it is needed most, the state barely exists. Where there is supposed to be strength is only power and brute force; what is supposed to be held in common has been openly looted; the triumphal national image is gnawed to bits by a frantically denied shame and raw fear.

The distance and defeat in this is awful to behold, and has created a nation that is both desperately strident and shockingly servile. In the absence of any capacity or will to demand more from it, politics just becomes what people argue about instead of what’s actually happening to them. It’s just a TV show, and people watch it as such.

This was the one big thing that Trump understood—not just that he could do whatever vile thing he wanted, but how many millions there were who truly could not imagine any greater pleasure or higher calling than the chance to do it for him.

Dave Roth:  After The Sacred Landslide 

I've wanted (and tried!) to write something meaningful about Deadspin, but words have failed me. It was a singular, meaningful, and good place on the internet. It was staffed by the exact right kind of people. It had guts and integrity. It had heart, and brains. I like sports, and people who like sports, but precious few people know exactly how to contextualize popular sports within the larger motherfucker of it all, and no one has ever done it like Deadspin did. 

And now, no one else will.

I never wrote a piece for them and I don't know any of them IRL but David Roth, Laura Wagner, Albert Burneko, Drew Magary, Diana Moskovitz, Barry Petchesky, Samer Kalaf, Tom Ley, Lauren Theisen, Megan Greenwell, et al, made me better at what I do professionally and somehow, personally.