Donald Trump is Chaotic Evil

The American Carnage: Redux tour continues apace.

Dungeons and Dragons is not only a super fun way to do improv with your friends, it also has a handy shorthand for broadly defining a person’s general moral/ethical positioning called “alignment.” Characters and players are defined by two axes: Lawful/Chaotic and Good/Evil, each with Neutral in the middle. I identify as Neutral Good: whether something is lawful is not as important to me as whether something is good or bad. When it comes to former president and current fascist windbag Donald Trump, he’s almost certainly Chaotic Evil: what are laws when there’s havoc to wreak and within that havoc, much suffering to inflict? 

This past Saturday, Trump held a campaign rally in Ohio. Any readers familiar with the idea, whether from coverage here or from watching Jordan Klepper burn slivers of his soul talking to attendees, will know what a barely intelligible circus these events are. That there was a teleprompter at this particular rally barely makes a difference because the windy weather seemed to knock it out of commission. The tiresome Nazi-loving former president/old man yelling at clouds is not known for saliency even with the guidance, so you can probably guess how things went with him speaking off the cuff. While Trump didn’t call a hyper-bigoted conservative sycophant “MLK on steroids,” he still found a way to be reprehensible in all the ways you expect.

Trump seemed to be losing more of his cogency as he first attempted to blame the teleprompter issues on Biden, who he perhaps imagines sneaking into the rally dressed like the Hamburgular to throw monkey-wrenches everywhere. And of course, because Trump would otherwise come apart at the seams if he didn’t punch downward, the blithering asshole suggested the rally organizers not pay their contractors as punishment. In the 90 minutes of verbal wanderings through pandemonium, Trump “told” “jokes” about Fani Willis’ name and called Biden “stupid.” Gavin Newsom was “Gavin NewSCUM,” a name so far beyond lazy that it shoots the moon and becomes a parody. 

Trump also appeared to jump into an alternative reality when he seemed to claim that Biden had beaten Barack Obama in a past election: “You know what’s interesting? Joe Biden won against Barack Hussein Obama. Has anyone ever heard of him? Every swing state, Biden beat Obama but in every other state, he got killed.” Finding out what Trump thinks he’s saying here could be morbidly interesting, but it’s entirely fruitless. We always knew that Trump walked in his own version of reality, but this is a whole other level. I wonder which alternate dimension this national election took place between Biden and Obama. It’s an alarming moment that shows how tenuous Trump’s grasp on reality is, but it’s not the only absurdly wrong thing he said at this rally. One of the most buzzed-about portions of his speech seems to be when he claimed that a Trump loss in the upcoming election would lead to a “bloodbath.”

“Now, if I don’t get elected, it’s gonna be a bloodbath,” he said. “That’s going to be the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country.” Nancy Pelosi, among others, interpreted this to mean a coup, perhaps in a similar shape to the attempted coup on January 6 of 2021. Others, like the spineless cat’s-paw Mike Pence, bent over backward to find alternative interpretations like “it’s an economic bloodbath.” It’s interesting to see that Pence is unwilling to endorse Trump officially, but he sure is willing to carry water for him. The Party of Trump really does a number on the self-worth if Trump could openly seek Pence’s death and Pence still covers for him. Having to debase yourself to stay relevant in a party rapidly prioritizing a bloated plutocrat over literally everything else must be quite a trip. Trump will die one day, but the Republican party machinery is so desperate to continue their minority rule that they’d probably look into re-animation to keep him alive. I’m sure such dreams are what keep Elon Musk going. The other awful talked-about thing in this garbage circus of his was holding forth about how immigrants aren’t human. 

“I don’t know if you call them people. They’re not people, in my opinion,” he said. “But I’m not allowed to say that because the radical left says that’s a terrible thing to say.” This is another replay of the “American Carnage” hits, memorably introduced to us as the “rapists and murderers” comment Trump made after descending his golden elevator at Trump Tower. It’s easy to understand why Trump has gone back to this well: it got him the presidency once, after all. In fact, this playbook of speaking and acting with maximal cruelty to signal your bigotry and “anti-woke” bona fides is practically its own school of thought. Failed Republican Presidential candidate hopeful Puddingfingers-in-Cheif Ron DeSantis attempted his own version by passing a series of stunt laws that were barely thought-out or written, but would make splashy entries in the endless culture war. DeSantis is now learning that laws passed to show everyone what a good “anti-woke” Trump lapdog you are do not in fact make for good governance. One would think that his embarrassing campaign has shown DeSantis’ fiefdom of Florida that he doesn’t care about the state outside of launching him to national significance, but these kinds of unserious leeches have a way of staying in power despite every reason to be taken down. 

It’s a delicate needle to thread, discussing Trump now. The knee-jerk reaction that comes from many commentators like me, white men with upper-middle class backgrounds and college educations, is often to downplay or undercut news like this either by pointing out the political shallowness of it or making a joke of it. Making light of something or minimizing it are reactions that come from fear: fear of what’s happening, fear that we can’t stop this, fear that this will win. In discussing it, it can be easy to believe that this is too ridiculous, too absurdly wrong to be taken seriously. It’s also tempting to enter a discussion as to whether Trump “means it.” The reasoning behind this sort of discussion is that Trump is too stupid and/or too far gone to have a coherent set of political beliefs and that he’s either lashing out at the vulnerable carelessly or giving his base what they want. This discussion has limited value because whether Trump “means it” or not, the result is the same. Whether Trump is parroting the words of viziers or speaking from his own demented heart, he is using his platform to dehumanize a vulnerable and heavily marginalized community. Whatever your explanation (the cruelty is the point, he’s a doddering old dino, he’s using stupidity to obfuscate his fascism), the result of his politics remains a deepening wound in America. 

There is no logic to recognize here because we know Trump will move the goalposts and change the shape of his positions at a moment’s whim. It’s not that such words are “distractions,” (another shibboleth of the commentary set) because these words have real consequences: normalizing the bigotry and emboldening bigots further. We can’t call it a distraction when we’ve been down this road before. We know what he’s about and what he will do. He’s telling us right now! All the writers who claim this is some sort of sideshow to keep our eyes from some greater evil Trump is doing are falling into a sort of trap: repeating our recent history. Trump’s campaign so far has been a replay of his first one. He paints America like it’s the flaming Hollywood sign in the opening of a 90s dystopia flick: burning and bloody, overrun by mysterious others who loot the immaculate suburban enclaves where good people live. We got wrapped up in the ontological mystery of whether he “meant it,” whether people are dumb for believing this, whether this is all “a distraction,” but we learned how pointless these questions are. Trump could be a total tabula rasa on which a cabal of snakes writes their dreams for a much worse America or he could be deep in the throes of dementia, we know the result is the same. Discussing whether Trump’s latest sign of unfitness is a “distraction” is itself a distraction. We can’t afford to take him as unseriously as we did before. Whether or not Trump “means it,” we have to take this seriously or else we’ve decided threats against our most marginalized groups aren’t to be taken seriously. The Democratic party already struggles to seem genuine or authentic in their support; do we really want to rationalize not caring about this?

The way that American media treats electoral politics like a horserace or a game played between competing teams gives the political arena a less “real” feeling. There’s the conservative-flavored idea that “politics” are somehow dirty and beneath decency to take part in. This is a bald-faced lie told to deflate the average citizen’s investment in the direction their country takes and thereby depress voter turnout. It doesn’t matter how outrageously unpopular Republican policies are if there’s not an active voting body. Politics can be a dirty game, but they’re also values in action. Politics is the exhausting process by which the direction and meaning of the country takes shape. Unless you want the dictatorship Trump is openly promising, don’t spend another second wondering whether he’s being genuine. Otherwise, we’ll be think-piecing ourselves into oblivion as Trump’s boot descends down upon our necks.