DONALD TRUMP'S AUTOMATONS

[Nevilledog]

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/05/trump-worldview-rubio-johnson-graham/682110/

No paywall link
https://archive.li/tdatZ

in george orwell’s 1984, at the climax of Hate Week, Oceania is suddenly no longer at war with Eurasia, but instead is at war with Eastasia, and always has been. The pivot comes with no explanation or even announcement. During a public harangue, a Party orator is handed a scrap of paper and redirects his vitriol “mid-sentence, not only without a pause, but without even breaking the syntax.”

Republican politicians in Donald Trump’s Inner Party faced a similar verbal challenge when the president changed sides in Russia’s war against Ukraine. One morning in late February, Republicans in Washington greeted Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky as a hero for continuing to resist Russian aggression. By afternoon, following Zelensky’s meeting in the Oval Office with Trump and Vice President J. D. Vance, the Ukrainian leader was an ungrateful, troublesome, and badly dressed warmonger who, if he hadn’t actually started the conflict with Russia, was the only obstacle to ending it.

After this new line was communicated to party leaders, a pro-Zelensky social-media post was taken down as swiftly as the banners denouncing Eurasia. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, and Senator Lindsey Graham—all supporters of Ukraine—were sent out in front of the cameras like the Hate Week orator, not to explain a new policy but to pretend that nothing had changed while America switched sides. Using nearly identical language, Rubio, Johnson, and Graham declared that Zelensky must do Trump’s bidding, which is also Vladimir Putin’s bidding, and capitulate to Russia; otherwise, Johnson and Graham added, Zelensky should resign. America’s enemy isn’t Russia. America’s enemy is Ukraine.

The philosopher Henri Bergson observed, “The attitudes, gestures and movements of the human body are laughable in exact proportion as that body reminds us of a mere machine.” The cause of laughter is the “deflection of life towards the mechanical.” This insight explains why there is something comical about politicians when they substitute programmed language for speech that reflects actual thought. They are besuited contraptions, like another orthodoxy-spouting ideologue in 1984 whose spectacles catch the light and seem to render him eyeless while his jaw keeps moving, as if “this was not a real human being but some kind of dummy.” Having emptied themselves of the capacity or will for independent judgment, they become extremely fluent automatons, able to put together whole paragraphs of logical-sounding arguments, but with no connection between brain and mouth. Every politician is required to speak like a robot some of the time; it takes a special talent to betray an entire worldview without missing a beat.

*snip*

[Charlie Chapulin]

1. Our only hope is with the Proles?