The Portal

The photograph of a bloodied former President Trump defiantly pumping his fist in the air beneath the American flag as his Secret Service minders struggle to protect him was immediately among the most indelible political images of the past half-century. As memorable as a hunched Richard Nixon signaling V for victory, or JFK standing tall in West Berlin, these are the kinds of images that are impossible for political operatives to gainsay or counterfeit, because they capture character in action. Once seen, these images are impossible to unsee. This was one of them.

In Trump’s case, the photograph was of a man who took a bullet in front of his supporters and lived, just like he said he would. He got up with blood on his face, in front of 10,000 or more people, and showed both the presence of mind and the unkillable ego strength to stage the political photograph of the century with himself as the star. Worship him or hate his guts, it was the most Trumpian act imaginable.

Hordes of commentators were quick to analyze the significance of the moment in terms of what did not happen. Imagine if the shooter hadn’t missed! Had Trump not survived the assassination attempt, they all argued, the country would obviously have been plunged into one form or another of civil war, a result of the inevitable violent response from the right. Luckily, extremists on both sides would have to go at it some other time. …

This interpretation is exactly wrong. In fact, the meaningful, history-changing event is the one that happened. If Trump had been killed, having failed to anoint a successor, the people who have been putting Jan. 6 protesters in prison by the hundreds for the past three years would have rolled right over what was left of Trump’s MAGA movement, and Joe Biden—or whoever they chose to run at the top of the Democratic ticket—would have won the election by a minimum of 20 million votes. The idea of an American center that is manfully holding the extremists of “both sides” in check is a palliative illusion drawn from a bygone time and place that ain’t coming back. It’s wishful nonsense, whose function is to conceal the true unpleasantness of the reality that we are living in.

Instead of two radical extreme wings flanking a sober center, as the important commentators want us to believe, there are in fact only two sides in American politics now.

One is the Democratic Party, a power vertical that mediates between the interests of the country’s billionaire oligarchs; its corporate elite; the ranks of elite professionals; the press, which functions as the propaganda arm of the party; the billionaire-funded NGO complex, through which billionaires fund party “organizers” who turn out votes and pressure the bureaucracy and its corporate analogues; public employees unions; academics; and the various state-sanctioned identity buckets from which votes are harvested and to which public benefits are distributed.

Then there is the Republican Party of Donald Trump, a bucket of social losers and other undesirables, like family farmers and white working-class voters, who of course are all racists; religious people, who are crazy and whose children will eventually hate them if they don’t already; car dealers from Wisconsin with three or fewer dealerships; small businessmen who sell things like miracle pillows; and a few billionaires whom the majority of the other billionaires don’t like.

Now, America being a free country, it’s perfectly acceptable for any citizen, myself included, to disapprove of both sides in this equation, to instinctively dislike the powerful while at the same time being repelled by the aesthetic and other shortcomings of the powerless. You can decry McDonald’s food and the general idiocy of rural life, and shudder at the horrible fashion sense displayed by people who live in the middle of the country who don’t have much money and watch the wrong TikTok videos. Maybe you fled rural life when you were younger and have zero desire to return to the miseries of your dreary small-town home in Nebraska now that you’ve seen the wonders of dinner parties in Park Slope. Or maybe you share the natural human preference for winners over losers. Or maybe you are a believer in a world without borders. That’s your business, and not mine.

What you can’t do, however, is assert that a mighty American center made up of the moderate, right-thinking majority of the country is waiting in the wings for the noise to stop and make everything normal again. That is never going to happen, any more than a troupe of magical unicorns is going to gallop through the streets of Chicago at the end of the Democratic National Convention pooping soft-serve ice cream.

It’s Trump or the Democrats. Those are your choices.

For the record, I don’t vote. I think it’s wrong for reporters to pick sides. But I found Trump to be a vulgarian whose first term in office was mostly a disaster, culminating in the social catastrophe of mass lockdowns and mandatory vaccinations whose health effects remain to be reckoned with. In his time in office, he was: easily distracted; surrounded himself with a sordid assortment of flunkies and scum; confused words with actions; and displayed the managerial ability to run a shoeshine stand in one of his few remaining Manhattan buildings, which are decorated in taste so gaudy it seems likely to repel even midlevel Azerbaijani millionaires, or whoever the audience for these places was originally supposed to be.

However, as it turns out, I am even less of a fan of the people who have spent the last seven years weaving wild conspiracy theories about a duly elected president in an attempt to drive him from office by zeroing out the store of public trust in every institution in America, and in doing so have turned the American press, academia, and other places that once served entirely useful social functions into a Soviet-style moral, intellectual, and aesthetic wasteland.

Plus, Trump is funny. Faced with the opportunity to spend an evening listening to Trump do one of his Dada-esque Vegas lounge routines or listening to tenured maniacs from the faculty lounges of Harvard and Yale explain how Trump is preparing to put them all in camps because they’re Jewish or gay, I’ll choose Trump—in a heartbeat.

I’m hardly the only person in America who is sick to death of a decade of braying anti-Trump hysteria. Trump’s Iwo Jima photograph conveyed a truth that many Americans were hiding from themselves: namely, that besides being funny, the man has the strength of a bull. For three years, Americans have been mentally conditioned by a series of kangaroo court trials held in Democratic strongholds before overtly partisan judges. They were conditioned not to see Trump as guilty—the trials and the verdicts being acknowledged as flimsy by Democratic partisans from James Carville to Andrew Cuomo to all but one of the Democrat-appointed judges on the U.S. Supreme Court. Rather, the point was to humiliate Trump and steal his chi.

The point of the Trump trials was never to put Trump in jail—though the thought was no doubt appealing to many party operatives and donors, and is probably even more appealing today. But that was judged from the beginning to be both unnecessary and impractical. The point was the trials themselves, which would trap the ex-president in courtrooms at the mercy of judges and prosecutors, some of them helpfully representing key party demographics. The blustering billionaire who had failed to hold onto power after forgetting that politics is a game with rules and seeing his team of third-rate losers outwitted at every turn by their better-credentialed opponents, the man who had threatened to jail Hillary Clinton, the arch-insurrectionist of Jan. 6, would now sit in the courtroom while his reputation and his fortune and even the privacy of his marriage were taken from him. Day after day, Trump would be forced to sit there and do nothing, as he became the Incredible Shrinking Ex-President and Convicted Felon. Trump would be shown to be weak, while the People’s Justice reigned triumphant.

Trump’s supporters, meanwhile, who made the mistake of trespassing on the grounds of the Capitol on Jan. 6, wearing headdresses with horns like teenage boys dressed up for Purim, would rot in prison, maybe forever—put there by vengeful party judges. See? Trump will not and cannot protect you. He is a spent force.

Now one photograph, capturing a single charismatic moment, has destroyed all of that—the product of a state-of-the-art mind-shaping campaign involving the efforts of many thousands of dedicated operatives and costing many billions of dollars. An election that a week ago seemed to smart observers like a foregone conclusion was now a fair contest. Even with 15 million Democratic absentee votes already in the bank, it is now anyone’s ballgame.

Politics is the art of governing men. As such, it necessarily partakes of the irrational. Men are motivated by all kinds of things, both good and bad. They are motivated by tales of heroism, calls to sacrifice, and by the desire to defend their families and homes. They are motivated by calls to expel foreigners and to restore ancient purities. They are motivated by lust, including the lust for distinction; by greed; by the prospect of violence; by the hope of recovering a golden past that historians might agree never happened; and by promises of attaining an otherworldly paradise which rationalist philosophers might dismiss as nonsense.

The underlying irrationality of human nature, founded on such eternal verities as our longing for eternal life, which is strictly impossible, and by our flight from the certainty of death, presents political leaders with a mixed bag of tools that can be used to inspire, frighten, or cajole their fellow humans to come together and make decisions that might hopefully benefit the group, and perhaps actuate some greater idea of the good. Some version or another of the preceding vision has animated accounts of politics by philosophers, historians, poets, and novelists since the days of the Greeks.

There is another view of politics, of course. In that view, men are not irrational by nature. They are, by nature, calculating machinelike beings. In this view, which has been evolving steadily since the middle of the 19th century, politics is less of an art than a science, the rightful province not of storytellers and backslapping phonies and carnival barkers but of sober scientific experts whose job is to engineer outcomes that produce the greatest good for the greatest number of people, with special attention being paid by the enlightened men and women of our age to the historically disadvantaged and oppressed, in whose favor the arc of history inevitably bends.

The ideal of democratic governance for rationalist believers is as obvious to them as it seems false and repellent to followers of the Greeks. Presented with expert calculations about the necessary outcomes of certain decisions, properly functioning citizen-calculators use their software to calculate the likely benefit of desired outcomes to themselves as well as to others. Lesser calculators will put the benefits to themselves first, while more evolved beings will be moved more often by the greater good. Errors in the calculations that are presented to the public can be identified by well-credentialed experts, using agreed-upon rules and methods. While some believers in the above process may identify themselves as small-d democrats, others define themselves as socialists or communists, or as apolitical technocrats.

The 2024 American election will not be decided by a single photograph. Rather, it will be decided by the contest between those who understand politics as an art, partaking in some part of the irrational, and everything that definition implies, and those who understand it as a science, and who understand human beings as calculating bots, or as ants. In turn, that contest will decide a great swath of the history that follows.

Which is why, in the aftermath of the Trump photograph, Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, with a fortune that was estimated yesterday at just over $270 billion, and who routinely promises to build cities on Mars, and controls the country’s most popular open information platform, decided to formally endorse Donald Trump. Of the three disasters that befell the Democratic Party in the past two weeks—beginning with Biden’s debate performance and continuing on to Saturday’s assassination attempt and its revival of Trump’s chi—one can make a strong case, from the mythic-irrational POV, for Musk’s endorsement being by far the most significant and disastrous.

The worth of that endorsement can hardly be calculated in dollars, though Musk’s fortune is essentially limitless, meaning that he could in theory give Trump $50 or $100 billion to buy every major news channel along with every roadside billboard in America between now and the election. There is also the fact that Musk controls X, a communications platform for which he already paid some $50 billion, and which he has used to break what was fast becoming a softer form of Soviet-style information management affected by the Democratic Party in concert with American security agencies and other organs of the state. With plenty of money to spend, along with free access to X, Trump should have little difficulty in getting his message across, while attempts at censorship and image-adjustment by legacy media outlets are likely to immediately look foolish, like The New York Times’ attempt to mute the power of the Trump survivor photograph by cropping out the American flag.

None of this is what truly matters about Musk’s endorsement, though. By joining his chi to Trump’s, Musk has created a double helix out of the two most powerful human memes on earth—a double helix being a notoriously much more resilient shape than a single one. To bash Trump, you must now bash Musk—who has a much higher favorability rating, especially among younger Americans.

Are Trump’s billions and his image of success a fiction? Maybe. But Musk’s fortune is indisputably real. Is Trump Hitler? Then so is Musk. So is Tesla. So is the dream of going to Mars, and engineering things that work. Some MSNBC talk show hosts may believe that, but clearly no one else does. Very few Americans, regardless of race, gender or other identity-politics identifiers, want to live in a country where Elon Musk, the world’s single most effective and admired living innovator and builder, is forced to spend his life in a courtroom being prosecuted by Jack Smith or Fani Willis on trumped-up charges, which is how the Democratic Party has come to operate. That buck stops now with Elon Musk.

And there is more. While Trump may represent a truculent refusal to give up on a bygone America, even to many of his supporters, Musk represents the future. By joining his chi to Trump’s, Musk has flipped the script of the election, and turned Trump from an artifact of the past into a possible bridge to the future.

That is what the coming American election will decide. Through an instant of indelible personal courage, following a mostly disastrous one-term presidency, Trump created an opportunity for redemption, not just for himself but for the portion of the country he represents, the part that the billionaire elite is so eager to discard. Elon Musk grasped Trump’s hand. In doing so, the two men opened up a portal between the American past and the American future that simply didn’t exist before that gun went off. It is now up to Americans to decide whether we want to step into that portal or continue on as bots in a maze administered by narrow technocrats from both parties whose judgment on every significant public issue—domestic and foreign, from education, to building a fair and strong economy, to race, to the Middle East, to Afghanistan and Iraq, to China, to Russia, to COVID—has proven disastrous, and who govern by conspiracy theories, chicanery, and lies.

America has always defined itself through myths whose connection to reality has been tenuous at best. By debunking America’s founding myths, and eliminating any clear vision for its future, technocrats may create a territory that is easier for them to administer. But that place won’t be America. What choice do we have other than to embrace whatever vision of the past and future allows us to continue to be Americans?