As Trump played the visiting emperor in China, it has become clear that all is not well in his American empire itself. Entropy made Trump; entropy will unmake him. In the same way that American liberalism ran itself down through the dysfunctions of neoliberalism, and woke into the disorder of Trumpism – as, according the laws of physics, a tidy kitchen will inevitably decline into a mess – so Trumpism is succumbing to its fundamental chaos. Mere weeks ago it seemed that Maga possessed a Gumby-like resilience. Trump’s remark, made during his first presidential campaign, that he could shoot someone in the street and “not lose any voters” proved to be astonishingly accurate. The “president’s” atrocious personal behavior, his criminal acts, the appointment of incompetent clowns to high office, Epstein, Epstein, Epstein – nothing has had the effect of appearing more repellent to Trump’s supporters than the liberal alternative. That seems to be changing.
As the Second Law of Thermodynamics has it, a closed system – a kitchen that remains dirty – deteriorates further and further into disorder. The only chance of slowing that down, or modestly reversing it, is to open the system by infusing it with new energy. Trump and his crew are doing all they can to keep the political system closed by barring the door to new energy, mostly, for now, desperately trying to rearrange districts in their favour—Trump recently punished Republican state senators in Indiana who rejected his gerrymandering efforts there by successfully supporting challengers to them in recent local elections.
And recent court rulings with regard to redistricting have added several possible Republican seats in the November midterms. In late April, the Supreme Court turned on its head the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965, which had enfranchised American’s black population. Section 2 of that Act had aimed to ensure that districts with a majority of black voters could not be broken up into niches with white majorities. If they were, the Act regarded this as racial gerrymandering. The Supreme Court’s April decision, however – Louisiana vs Callais – ruled that attempts to guarantee that black-majority districts could not be broken up were themselves racial gerrymandering. This has now opened to door to a mad rush on the part of several conservative states to redistrict in the Republicans’ favour.
But though the hapless Democrats have not harnessed any consequential new energy in the face of this entropic onslaught, there is no stopping the energy of social and everyday life. Just as in the ocean tiny eddies that contain microscopic marine life have the macro effect of making the entire planet thrive, Trump’s disorder is whirling the ordinary currents of American existence into a slow tide of revulsion against him. Gerrymandering has little chance against the ordinary feelings that ultimately move voters.
Call it the common toad effect. Beyond the general political atmosphere, not matter how dark and confused, people want to be happy, or at least to be hopeful that they may be happy. They are increasingly not happy or hopeful. Trump’s approval rating has plunged to 34 per cent in some respectable polls, making it among the lowest for sitting presidents in modern times. Partly this is a response to Trump’s unabashed disengagement from the country he claimed to want to make great again. His overseas adventures, culminating in the ongoing debacle in Iran, strike the average American as expressions of ego, not national interest.
It is not lost on anyone that as the unbalanced Trump sends American troops careening around the world, he is also obsessing over his new ballroom, new edifices to his greatness like the enormous triumphal arch in Washington, and efforts to rename train stations, airports and national monuments after himself. It was one thing to clamour for Trump, as a Wall Street Journal opinion editor once told me, “because he sticks it in the eye of liberals”. It’s another to stay loyal to such contrarianism when it becomes clear that it is the result of a diseased ego, and not merely a performance preceding the serious dawn of a new golden age. In America, where the ego reigns supreme and is therefore either blessing or anathema, egos that run off the rails do not endear themselves for long.
Militant political promises that have a galvanising effect when made at a rally, or tweeted to the masses, lose their steam when people return to their everyday lives. It’s as easy for the right to work people up over claims that undocumented immigrants are raping and killing as it is for the left to achieve the same effect by declaring that all white people are inherently racist. Life looks different when the clouds of abstract agitprop part.
Trump’s grotesque excesses, once goads to long-simmering resentments, have now begun to cast a gloom over the common-toad-like pleasures of ordinary life. One is getting into a college you like. The DEI policies colleges and universities pursued before Trump’s crackdown on them could indeed be unjust. But when spring comes around, and parents learn whether their child has been accepted by the schools they’ve applied to, no one is talking about DEI. Families are talking about the nerve-wracking process of getting into the schools they’ve dreamed about – compared to that, the questions of who uses a bathroom or plays a sport, of how history is taught or of whether literature and art are “politicised” are about as important as whether a particular college or university has sufficient parking. As Trump’s stupidity in Iran throws the entire world on its ear, his administration is mounting a complex legal initiative focusing on whether the all-women Smith College admitting biological males as females breaks anti-discrimination laws. Of course Maga doesn’t care about Trump’s attack on elite Smith College. But it is beginning to wonder what’s in it for them in the war on trans people. They still can’t pay for a dentist.
Slowly but surely, Trump is disturbing the tiny eddies of everyday stability. In February 1961, JFK kicked off his national physical fitness campaign, declaring that “hardy spirits and tough minds usually inhabit sound bodies”. It was a good idea to get Americans off the couch just as television was taking hold. But it might not have been a coincidence that Kennedy began America’s involvement in Vietnam just three months later. Last summer, Pete Hegseth and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. posted exciting videos of themselves performing push-ups and pull-ups. Hegseth has been speaking to the military about the importance of establishing a warrior culture, which is like the Pope speaking to a roomful of Catholic priests about the importance of going to church.
So it also might not be a coincidence that, last December, the Trump administration made registering for the draft, which had been voluntary, automatic by registering men using their Social Security numbers or driver’s licences once they reach the age of 18. Reinstating the draft would require Congressional approval. But even this small, but energetic, step in that direction throws a shadow over ordinary life. Since, in the past, most draftees have come from the Maga heartland, even Trump’s most stalwart followers might take down their Maga lawn signs. After the start of the Iran war, in towns not far from my own, many already have.
Add to these subtle deformations of ordinary life the fact that Trump is not just alienating but enraging his generals by putting American troops in harm’s way for no good purpose, using up precious munitions, giving a strategic advantage to America’s enemies and driving away America’s allies. In the Cold War thriller, Seven Days in May, a rogue American general plots a right-wing coup to overthrow a liberal American president he regards as dangerously weak. Entropy has no ideology.
[Further reading: Britain and America: the abusive relationship]
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