{"id":119680,"date":"2018-10-08T12:00:06","date_gmt":"2018-10-08T11:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=119680"},"modified":"2018-10-15T12:00:32","modified_gmt":"2018-10-15T11:00:32","slug":"taibbi-why-arent-we-talking-more-about-trumps-nihilism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2018\/10\/taibbi-why-arent-we-talking-more-about-trumps-nihilism\/","title":{"rendered":"Taibbi: Why Aren\u2019t We Talking More about Trump\u2019s Nihilism?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The White House now says we might as well pollute because global catastrophe is inevitable.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>

President Donald Trump pauses while speaking at a campaign rally at WesBanco Arena, in Wheeling, West Virginia.
Pablo Martinez Monsivais\/AP\/Shutterstock<\/p><\/div>\n

1 Oct 2018 – <\/em>While America was consumed with the Brett Kavanaugh<\/a> drama last week, the Washington Post<\/em><\/a> unearthed a crazy tidbit in the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration\u2019s (NHTSA) latest environmental impact statement.<\/p>\n

The study predicts a rise in global temperatures of about four degrees Celsius<\/a>, or seven degrees Fahrenheit, by the year 2100. Worse, it asserts global warming is such an inevitable reality, there\u2019s no point in reducing auto emissions, as we\u2019re screwed anyway.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe emissions reductions necessary to keep global emissions within this carbon budget could not be achieved solely with drastic reductions in emissions from the U.S. passenger car and light truck vehicle fleet,\u201d is how the report put it.<\/p>\n

To make a real difference, it adds we\u2019d have to \u201cmove away from the use of fossil fuels,\u201d which is \u201cnot currently technologically feasible or economically practicable.\u201d<\/p>\n

There\u2019s been just a flutter of media attention about this, mostly focusing on the hypocrisy. Trump, as is his wont, has at one point or another occupied basically every inch of territory on the spectrum of global warming opinions.<\/p>\n

He went from urging President Obama to act to prevent \u201ccatastrophic and irreversible consequences\u2026 for our planet<\/a>\u201d (2009), to calling global warming a Chinese conspiracy<\/a> (2012), to calling it an \u201cexpensive hoax<\/a>\u201d (2013), and \u201cbullshit<\/a>\u201d (2014), to switching up again during the election to concede the existence of \u201cnaturally occurring<\/a>\u201d (i.e., not man-made) climate change.<\/p>\n

Now comes this Linda Blair-style head turn<\/a>. The NHTSA report deftly leaps past standard wing-nut climate denial and lands on a new nihilistic construct, in which action is useless precisely because<\/em> climate change exists and is caused by fossil fuels.<\/p>\n

The more you read of this impact statement, the weirder it seems. After the document lays out its argument for doing nothing, it runs a series of bar graphs comparing the impact of various action plans with scenarios in which the entire world did nothing (labeled the \u201cno action\u201d alternative).<\/p>\n

These absurd illustrations make Thomas Friedman\u2019s time-traveling efforts to graph the future<\/a> seem like the work of a Nobel laureate.<\/p>\n

\u201cA textbook example of how to lie with statistics,\u201d is how MIT professor John Sterman described it to the Post. <\/em><\/p>\n

There\u2019s obviously a danger at overinterpreting this paper, which mostly seems like a desperate bureaucratic attempt to square science with Trump\u2019s determination to roll back environmental policies for his business pals.<\/p>\n

But even as accidental symbolism, it\u2019s powerful stuff. A policy that not only recognizes but embraces inevitable global catastrophe is the ultimate expression of Trump\u2019s somehow under-reported nihilism.<\/p>\n

While the press has focused in the past two years either on the president\u2019s daily lunacies or his various scandals, the really dangerous work of Trump\u2019s administration has gone on behind the scenes, in his systematic wreckage of the state.<\/p>\n

Implicit in this campaign of bureaucratic dismantling has been the message that pandemonium is a price Trump is very willing to pay, in service of breaking the \u201cdisaster\u201d of government. Many of his top appointees have been distinguished by their screw-it-all mentality.<\/p>\n

Remember, he appointed Mick Mulvaney, a man who had once inspired a downgrade<\/a> of America\u2019s credit rating by threatening to default on the debt, to be his budget director.<\/p>\n

He later put Mulvaney in charge of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, where he fired his own 25-person advisory board \u2014 after requesting a budget of $0 and promising to fulfill the bureau\u2019s mission \u201cno further<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s original EPA chief, Scott Pruitt<\/a>, was best known for having used his time as Oklahoma\u2019s attorney general to sue the EPA repeatedly and zero out the environmental-enforcement budget. Trump made a robotization enthusiast his choice for labor secretary, chose a hockey-team owner to run the Army (he withdrew<\/a>, thankfully), and so on.<\/p>\n

There are still hundreds of top federal jobs<\/a> left unmanned, and some of the non-appointments seem like Nero-level acts of madness. Trump asked for 25 percent cuts<\/a> to the whole State Department on the grounds that they were \u201cprioritizing the efficient use of taxpayer resources.\u201d But what country goes without ambassadors<\/em> for years? Trump fired dozens upon inauguration and to this day<\/a> still has 34 vacancies. We have no ambassador in South Africa, Sweden, Saudi Arabia, even Mexico. We\u2019re a ghost state with nukes.<\/p>\n

All of this is part and parcel of Trump\u2019s doomsday message. He\u2019s been a textbook example of Richard Hofstadter\u2019s famed theory<\/a> of paranoid politics. See if any of this (especially the line about \u201cbarricades\u201d) sounds familiar:<\/p>\n

The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms \u2014 he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization\u2026 Like religious millennialists, he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days\u2026<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

From Day One of Trump\u2019s campaign, pundits have reached for traditional political explanations to describe both his behavior and his appeal. Because we\u2019re trained to talk in terms of left and right, progress and reaction, we tried to understand him in those terms.<\/p>\n

But Trump sold something more primal. His core message was relentless, hounding negativity, lambasting audiences with images of death and disaster.<\/p>\n

His first campaign speech was basically a non-denominational end-times sermon, in which America was either kaput or close to it, surrounded on all sides by bloodthirsty enemies. \u201cThey kill us,\u201d he preached. \u201cThey beat us all the time\u2026 We have nothing\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

He ranted about a system befouled by false prophets. \u201cPoliticians are all talk, no action,\u201d he howled. \u201cThey will not bring us\u2014 believe me \u2014 to the promised land.\u201d<\/p>\n

The \u201cWhat have you got to lose<\/a>?\u201d line he pulled out later was supposedly just a pitch to African-American voters, but all of Trump\u2019s audiences picked up on the \u201cit just doesn\u2019t matter<\/a>\u201d theme. (If you want to be wigged out, check out the similarities between Trump speeches and the famed Bill Murray speech from Meatballs. <\/em>Just substitute \u201cChina\u201d for \u201cMohawk.\u201d)<\/p>\n

Obese and rotting, close enough to the physical end himself (and long ago spiritually dead), Trump essentially told his frustrated, pessimistic crowds that America was doomed anyway, so we might as well stop worrying and floor it to the end.<\/p>\n

If that meant a trade war, environmental catastrophe, broken alliances, so be it. \u201cLet\u2019s just get this shit over with<\/a>,\u201d is how Trump\u2019s unofficial campaign slogan was described in the show Horace and Pete, <\/em>one of the few outlets to pick up on Trump\u2019s Freudian death-wish rhetoric.<\/p>\n

Trump made lots of loony promises to bring us back to the joyous Fifties (literally to Happy Days, <\/em>if you go by his choice of Scott Baio as a convention speaker<\/a>). But even his audiences didn\u2019t seem to believe this fable.<\/p>\n

The more credible promise of his campaign was a teardown of the international order, which he\u2019s actually begun as president. Trade deals, environmental accords, the EU, NATO, he\u2019s undercut all of them, while ripping government in half like a phone book.<\/p>\n

He keeps inviting destruction like it\u2019s a desirable outcome. He even pushed through legislation for \u201clow-yield\u201d nuclear weapons<\/a>, whose only purpose is to be more theoretically usable than the other kind (although he\u2019s wrong about this, too<\/a>).<\/p>\n

His fans even cheered when he played\u00a0nuclear chicken<\/a> with Kim Jong-un, tweeting that his \u201cnuclear button\u201d was\u00a0\u201cbigger & more powerful\u201d than Kim\u2019s (and \u201cmy Button works!\u201d).<\/p>\n

It\u2019s easy to understand the nationalist sentiment behind reversing trade deals or backing Brexit. But what\u2019s the populist angle on burning the planet, or nuclear war? How does hating elites explain cheering a guy on for turning nuclear diplomacy into a penis-measuring contest?<\/p>\n

On a policy level, this apocalypse politics is pure corporate cynicism, with Trump\u2019s big-business buddies showing a willingness to kill us all\u00a0for a few dollars now<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The broader electoral pitch is just an evil version of every nuclear-age dance tune ever, \u201c99 Luftballoons\u201d<\/a> or \u201c1999<\/a>.\u201d\u00a0The world is ending, so fuck it, let\u2019s party. As crazy as it is, it\u2019s a seductive message for a country steeped in hate and pessimism. Democrats still don\u2019t understand it. Trump\u2019s turning America into a death cult, with us as involuntary members.<\/p>\n

____________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Matt Taibbi is a contributing editor for <\/em>Rolling Stone<\/em>. He\u2019s the author of five books and a winner of the National Magazine Award for commentary. taibbimedia@yahoo.com<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 rollingstone.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

1 Oct 2018 – While America was consumed with the Brett Kavanaugh drama last week, the Washington Post unearthed a crazy tidbit in the latest environmental impact statement. The White House now says we might as well pollute because global catastrophe is inevitable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":119682,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[61,65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-119680","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-environment","category-anglo-america"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119680","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=119680"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119680\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/119682"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=119680"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=119680"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=119680"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}