Mirror Stage
A visit to the Southland as Trump looses the fateful lightning of his terrible un-swift mind
I’m just back in NYC from a family trip to the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia, spending another spring-break exploring this great land of ours. The good news: it’s still there. For now.
These hopeful trips to our National Parks bring so much dissonance and pathos since MAGA began turning one long-held national consensus after another on its head. This time, the ambient psychosis was tough to escape even deep inside the Luray Caverns, whose magnificent cavern system — a network of cathedrals in speleothem, column, flowstone, and tites stalac- and stalag- —beckoned as a potential home. Nature’s fall-out shelter.
There was even a genuinely meditative moment, when our audience of assembled tourists gave silent attention to a performance of Luther’s “Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott” on the Great Stalacpipe Organ, whose claim to being the largest musical instrument in the world rests on its use of the entire chamber’s stalactite formation as a one large lithophone.
Solenoid-triggered hammers struck stones that resonated at roughly the right frequency to sound a halting, quiet rendition of the hymn, some like gamelan bells, others like a contrabass xylophone. Deep in this stone chamber, the day after Easter Sunday, we heard this song whose English lyrics go “A mighty fortress is our God/A trusty shield and weapon/He helps us free from ev’ry need/That hath us now o’ertaken.” (Try to spot the lake’s surface in the clip below.)
Back on the surface, the only signs of madness were the dueling billboards we saw on either side of I-81, the two kinds advocating voting yes or no on an April 21 redistricting referendum, without context and using identical language.
While a shady, election-year move to redraw district maps certainly feels like today’s Republican party, this particular measure aims to correct for these recent GOP efforts. So the result is a series of schizophrenic ads and posters, the most puzzling being a red-tinted poster featuring the MAGA-approved mugshot-like Trump photo and the line “President Trump says ‘take over the voting,’” to advocate voting YES on redistricting.
The potency of the image struck me, how it managed to rile me up as we moved through the green and rolling hills. But it was easy to work out that the color, photo, and Trump’s call to arms were all a baldfaced bait-and-switch by the Page County Democrats, whose name was right there at the billboard’s bottom. What a naked ploy, like the big bad wolf donning grandmother’s nightgown and sleeping cap. Are we supposed to believe that MAGA voters are actually dumb enough to fall for this?
That certainly seems to be the worry of a GOP committee member interviewed by a local news station, who said “the fact that they’re using his likeness and statement out of context seems like an issue to me,” and of a local lawyer who volunteered to bring some action against the Dems for this weaponization of the truth. “Even if President Trump said those words somewhere else in the country about redistricting,” he wrote, “there is no evidence he ever endorsed this Virginia referendum and is urging Virginians to vote for it.”
So the issue isn’t whether or not the President of the United States issued a Stalinesque threat like “We need to take over the voting.” It’s that he didn’t utter it about this particular case in this particular state.
An accurate quotation under a pre-approved photo is as close to a mirror as political billboards get. Which may be why the pro-redistricting side is called “Virginians for Fair Elections” and the anti-redistricting side is called “Virginians for Fair Maps.” While both sides could credibly use the slogan “Stop the Steal,” only one would sue the other for copyright infringement.
These signs for local elections appear along the same stretch of US-81 where zig-zagging wooden Civil War-style fences and monuments commemorate a battlefield that claimed around 1,372 American lives—528 fewer than the number of Iranians killed by the U.S. and Israeli strikes thus far, per the International Red Cross and Red Crescent—in a war whose casus belli was the wrong president winning the election.
The battle is primarily remembered today for being the only time in American history a school’s student body was used as an organized combat unit.[tion...
Which brings us to our drive back to NYC, on Tuesday, the morning that our president used words that should be on every Democrat billboard and made our drive back to NYC long indeed.
“A whole civilization will die tonight,” this man posted sometime between Monday night and Tuesday morning, giving his war-criminal’s threat against Iran’s civilian population an obvious nuclear dimension, and giving the effective end to America a primetime slot of 8 p.m. Eastern Time.
I can’t remember, how are we supposed to take him? Was it seriously but not literally? Literally but not seriously? Neither seriously nor literally? Both?
We’ve been having Cuban Missile Crisis-like moments so often and for so long with this regime, that it’s a bit jarring when one feels like the real thing.
If partisans call this brinksmanship, we point to the fact that this adventure at the brink led us to Iranian ceasefire conditions that include their retaining control of the Strait and pursuing a nuclear program. If they say that Trump’s terror is directional, we point out that Trump’s terrorizing all of us with his TV sweeps-week hype. And let’s hear them explain how a threat to “destroy a civilization” isn’t a threat against the United States, and to the very idea of governments and nations.
Not even some post-hoc rationalization, like Nixon’s madman theory, supports the idea that one dim, fragile man using his own propaganda platform can put a threat to destroy a civilization for failing to open a shipping lane—in writing, for whole world to see—and this is somehow “strategy” or “leverage.”
There’s a fear on the left of seeming to be bogged down in language, of over-parsing whatever b.s. the powerful sends out over the airwaves, especially when they put so little effort into these statements themselves.
But while MAGA leaders hope that quickly pronounced polysyllabic words pass for precise language, there’s evidence that people notice when claims of “safety” and “security” are used to send paramilitary thugs into peaceful cities to abuse and kill citizens. People notice the misuse of terms like “domestic terrorist.” They notice when a hitherto controversial president dispenses with argument, negotiation, and strategy and just throws out his final, world-ending offer a mere 40 days into a conflict.
The man has disqualified himself for the position he holds so many times that it’s hard to believe it when we witness a real resounding Nuremberg Trial episode like the one on Easter Tuesday.
I know, I know, this is what happens when you give great power to trivial men. Fine, fine: the man doesn’t know what words mean, doesn’t know how negotiations work, doesn’t realize the mike is hot, doesn’t know where he is, forgive him, Father, he knows not what he does. But the threat is still out there, despite him pulling the feeble old “two-weeks” maneuver to save face. Whether or not he intended to follow through, the damage is done. None of his people can walk this back, even if he’d let them.
We spent the six-hour drive listening to quiz shows, singing songs, and trying not to burden each other with our fear. This episode really did a number on other folks I follow online, from the ordinarily measured economist Paul Krugman, who posted existential fear on his Monday Substack, to the laconic self-styled Faulkner TikTok pundit Robert L. Arnold, who dropped a few elocution levels down to Hegseth level to say, “Somewhere along the line a man who carries himself like a half-read pundit with a glass full of shit whiskey and a microphone decided that regime change was a weekend project. That geopolitics could be reduced to a bar bet, a womanizing, whiskey-soaked peace of shit failure with no real military leadership experience was made secretary of defense, and then he decided that he could bulldoze decades of regional complexity with the same confidence he uses to mispronounce it. And no one stopped him.”
The kind of mirror that the Virginia Dems billboard held up to MAGA is now facing all of us. And someone like either Khrushchev or Kim Jong Un is looking back, from wherever the mirror is currently placed, presumably opposite a gold toilet in the White House or Mar-a-Largo.
I don’t love writing posts like this, especially after a brief absence, but not saying anything feels worse. I realize there’s little left to say about this sad, sick grifter, conman, serially bankrupt businessman other than charting further data points along in his decline, noting how other people react to them, and trying to imagine a path toward reconciliation with his supporters when he’s finally gone.
Whenever I think of this country and Donald Trump post-2024, I keep coming back to this bit from the Ozzy comic James Donald Forbes McCann that riffs on the old saying, “Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.”
“Fool me three times,” he continues, “that’s twice as much shame on me. Fool me four times? Shame back on you, actually. You are picking on a vulnerable man, something has obviously gone wrong with me.” And back and forth until he gets fooled a sixth time.
“Fool me six times means I have lured you into my trap!” he declares, like J.D. Vance or someone at the Heritage Foundation. “Pretending to be a fool six consecutive times to give you a false sense of security. Now you are the fool. And you have the shame.”
I don’t know who the real-life corollary is to the person who gets fooled seven times, but I advise people still in the MAGA camp to try this next one, just for practice.
“Fool me seven times? You saw through my trick,” says the comic. “But there’s no shame because I’m getting fooled by the best.”
May we all make it to the next fool alive.