So what I think about with the Trump administration is something that you could call — and I say this with some hesitation — “gooning towards the Führer.” This concept that people have about Nazism, which is working toward the Führer, which is that you had all of these people who were trying to figure out what the Führer wanted, and they would work towards those desires as they understood them as best as they possibly could. And here I want to be absolutely clear about one thing, which is I’m not saying that Donald Trump is Hitler. This is more just a description of how things actually worked in the Nazi regime. And here, the basic idea is that “gooning” refers to what used to be called — my Catholic upbringing — the sin against the Holy Spirit. But it also involves images of goons. It involves images of, for example, in Minnesota —— I think I’m going to interrupt you to just say, in order to understand this analogy, you have to understand that “gooning” is an online masturbation subculture made famous in a big Harper’s article. But it has to do with the endless exchange of video clips. – Yeah, absolutely. But what I wanted to get there, get at there, is less the masturbation aspects of it and more the ways in which this is about video, and this is about a particular way of thinking about the world in terms of whether it makes good video, whether it makes good spectacle, whether it makes good online sensation of one sort or another. And the point is here that this is not just, as far as I can tell, this is not just about the ways in which the Trump administration communicates with its followers and communicates with the outside world. This is about the way in which the Trump administration communicates with itself. So we have all of these various people who are part of the Trump coalition who are competing for his attention. They are competing to get the Truth Social post, which validates them, which builds up their status with respect to others. What we’re seeing is, we’re seeing messages being sent through video, through social media, and everybody in a certain sense trying to get the attention of Trump as well as Trump’s followers through getting things done via video. And so I think creates a world in which you get mistakes happening, you get stupid things happening. Trump is an extremely mercurial person. Everybody is trying to figure out what pleases him. And some people get it very badly wrong, and they make mistakes.
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