How To Message a State Murder Spree

Even overwhelming chaos becomes a kind of hum after 10 years, which is how long ago neofascism early adopter Steve Bannon promised to “flood the zone with shit.” Slow the hum down, and you can hear the click of each part of the process ratchet into place: Lie, extort, abuse, steal, claim victory, switch targets, repeat. So it’s been in the last seven days. The president’s personal paramilitary waged war on Minnesota and threatened to attack Ohio. The secretary of state testified to Congress about the president’s new slush fund from stolen Venezuelan oil. They’re both trying to extort Europe over Greenland. We’re sending ships to menace Iran. His stooges raided Atlanta, looking for magical voting information that would make him not a loser.

The people of Minneapolis have shown that all of this can, in fact, be processed, contextualized within Trumpworld’s greater crime spree and incorporated into everyday understanding, even in the midst of being directly targeted. They have shown the country how to function as full-time workers, parents and neighborhood protectors, all while maintaining the ability to extemporize about unrelated Trump misdeeds on a live mic. There are people today in Minneapolis working two or three or four more jobs that they didn’t have a few weeks ago — atop the regular jobs that keep the lights on and critical ones like parent or caretaker. They’re not just protecting their own children but shepherding their neighbors’, when not practically smuggling them. They are keeping watch on their streets, cordoning off roads and following goon squads who kill them. They’re delivering food and necessities to people who can’t leave their houses. They are suddenly homeschooling. They have brothers in sisters in cities from which the Department of Homeland Security never moved on and never stopped a campaign of terror. They have a lot on their plate, and they will wake up tomorrow and do it again. 

It feels as if it is these citizen volunteers — who maintain solidarity while getting pepper sprayed in the face — are the only ones able to grasp the history of the moment, and conceptualize it for what it is: as a war on the United States. While moms are investing in gas masks, the generals in Democratic leadership positions flash thumbs-up as eggs come off the production line like artillery shells.

A day may produce a multitude of atrocities, but the message should be the same. Every violent Immigration and Customs Enforcement tantrum should be reflexively met with the observation that everything they’re claiming and failing to do here while committing crimes could be done by two city employees with short-sleeve dress shirts and clipboards. Instead, the Party’s default tendency to hesitantly venture a universal line-of-the-day, in bot-like unison, remains unsettlingly bloodless. It may work on more abstract existential issues like health insurance subsidies, but in the current context it feels like calling 911 and getting a voicemail tree that keeps starting over every time you press “0” or scream for an operator. Reflexively mocking and condemning a fully militarized klanbake response to a civil-bureaucratic problem would at least, as The Dude says, tie the room together. Instead, policy responses to events stop short of greater coherence. “It is unaffordable that you can get shot in the face” is inhuman, but at least it’s about someone being murdered and opens up the question of why the murderers were there and what they might feel empowered to do. “We need body cameras and better training” is about another time and place entirely — a courtroom date long in the future, or a training session months ago at Donald Trump’s 47 Day Kindergarten Kombat Academy for People Who’ve Gotten DUIs on Sea-Doos.

It’s maddening that Democratic leaders — whose only confident form of messaging is treating their supporters like especially dimwitted children — still cannot seem to walk and chew gum at the same time. It’s maddening that they refuse to flood the zone themselves, crowdsource what works and listen when they hear it. (Abolish DHS!) But most of all, it’s maddening because Donald Trump is a formula. Venezuela and the Kennedy Center, Harvard and Iran — they’re all the same thing to him, just different nouns you plug into a scumbag’s one-page playbook. If you’re a politician and find yourself unable to repeat “A + B = C” after seeing it in the wild a second time, you should do the honorable thing and go get paid a quarter-million a year to sit on the board of IndentureCorp (A Division of Rackrent).

Trump himself and his own administration have admitted to the formula. The ICE occupation of Minnesota is as much about crime as bombing Venezuelan fishermen was about fentanyl. His militia is there to break some legs after the protection-racket routine failed and the state didn’t cough up voter data necessary for stealing elections. Atlanta — where FBI agents just seized Fulton County’s 2020 ballots — is no different. The timeline is just longer. Trump began extorting the State of Georgia after losing the 2020 election. He wanted about 12,000 votes and to avoid being a loser, and he got neither. He had to endure five years of forcing supplicants to tell more and more risible lies on his behalf, but a few quick strikes here or there — some lists of names to lean on and others to ethnically cleanse — and that’ll be enough to declare victory in November. On to the Ohio game.

If it feels like a lot sometimes, it’s meant to. Most Americans are accustomed to political cycles that are meant to minimize shock and convey steady, effective management. But fascists have to obscure their corruption and incompetence somehow, so they overlay a constant noise of action and reaction, swarming over all tested and disciplined 24-hour-cycle responses and stoking fascist masculinity’s twinned pathologies of tryhard dominance and weenie-levels of abject terror. Trump seems like a lot, but he’s a lot in the same way that the Taco Bell menu seems like a lot: Sure, there are a couple dozen items on there, but they’ve all got the same ingredients. Names and locations change, but the Trump program relies on as much formula as a three-camera sitcom. Beholding it sends the mind to boredom quicker than overborne; you simply can’t be knocked off your feet anymore by a hum that never ceases and never changes. 

It is bad enough that communities recreating themselves and networks of support under an occupation are doing so without every bit of personal and physical assistance from their representatives in government. But it is inexcusable that people now holding down multiple instant full-time jobs are served by a party that presumes they can’t hold more than one idea in their heads at once. If the political messaging worry is that telling people too many different stories makes them lose the plot, then the great news is that the Donald Trump story is always the same.