We Have Become a Banana Republic
We Have Become a Banana Republic
A Sardonic Take on a Totally Normal and Above-Board FBI Raid
“Anyone reading the histories of this latter city [Florence] will see how many false accusations were lodged in every era against citizens who were actively involved in the city’s most important affairs. Of one they said that he had robbed funds from the city government; of another, that he had not succeeded in some undertaking because he was bribed; and of yet another, that because of his ambition he had committed this or that impropriety. As a consequence of this hatred arose on every side, which led to deep disagreements, and from deep disagreements sects, and from sects to ruin.”
- Machiavelli [Discourses, I.8]
As you have probably seen by now, on Monday, August 8th, 2022, the FBI raided Donald Trump’s living quarters in his Mar-A-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida. The world found out from Trump’s public statement. Here is the live coverage from the New York Times. Basically, they are alleging that Trump took documents with him when he left the Oval Office, in violation of federal public records laws, which of course is exactly the sort of jaw-dropping evil you would expect from “literally Hitler.” After 7 years of this deranged “BlueAnon” bullshit, it’s hard to believe this substantial escalation political warfare will do anything but help Trump with the public. To half the population the FBI is so incredibly discredited that what they will claim to have found hardly matters, though it will be amusing to see what they purport to be in these documents if they tell us at all. Republicans used to be love federal law enforcement agencies, but like every other power structure in our country they have aligned into one horrible blob under some sort of blanket of liberalism, so here we are:
Of course the other half of the population has become slavishly devoted to the federal spy agencies and believes Trump will be in prison any day now for 7 years. As someone who was proudly born just yesterday, I’m sure the FBI never has and never would do anything wrong. Michael Tracey was on fire with sarcasm about the Trump-obsessed establishment liberals and “progressives” on Monday, so please forgive me for quoting him several times, starting with:
But don’t worry, The Atlantic, the leader of “elite opinion” [ie the official propaganda] insists this all proves we are not a banana republic, which of course you should take to mean that we are definitely a banana republic.
After years of insane claims about Trump ranging from “pee tapes” to Stormy Daniels [where its not even clear what Trump did wrong, though its incredible he forced a hooker to give him his money back], to the idea that his presidency was a scam to rent golf carts to Secret Service agents, and of course years of “Russiagate” bullshit, and “Capitol Riot” where he used “fight” in a political context and did nothing that isn’t legally protected free speech, there is a severe public weariness of these accusations- most of which would be more or less irrelevant even if true. Of course, what some like to call “BlueAnon,” or “Alt-Center,” still spend their lives in deranged fantasies about Trump going to prison; whats more, they don’t understand that Trump would have to go down for something extremely serious for it to be seen as anything but political persecution: they can’t win by getting him for tax evasion like Al Capone, much less for a public records issue. Michael Tracey summed up their delusions quite well:
They can’t even tell you what point they think this would prove in any sort of credible way, they just want to tell you 1/6 is worse than 9/11, because they truly do have a religious fervor, not for God, and certainly not for America but for the concept of government power in a “liberal democracy.” Matt Taibbi wrote an excellent article about this a few weeks ago, explaining just how wearisome and counterproductive this has all been:
“From George Nader to Michael Cohen to Hope Hicks to Michael Flynn to Don McGahn to Alexander Vindman to Cassidy Hutchinson to a long, long list of others, we’ve been repeatedly told the key Bearer Of Secrets had turned states evidence, and the “John Dean moment” was here. Do you remember the New Yorker article from the summer of 2018, “Allen Weisselberg, the Man Who Knows Donald Trump’s Financial Secrets, Has Agreed to Become a Coöperating Witness”? The one containing the line, “Allen is the one guy who knows everything”?
No? Neither had I. But it happened, another moment crumpled up and thrown at the bottom of what in the rearview mirror now looks like an enormous mountain of lost opportunity, a Giza Necropolis of spent political capital [emphasis added.] Getting Trump indicted has seemed just around the corner for six long years now, but the action of every final showdown always unfolded like a Kafka novel, where the punchline of the Land Surveyor’s valiant search for justice was that it never got him over even the first in the thousand lifetimes of obstacles he needed to best to reach the center of the Castle. This still feels like that. Is this really the end, or barely just starting?”
Writing this article is actually causing me a great deal of irritation, not because of concern for Trump or his fate, or even our country so much, but the sheer fact that this is still going on, and is still escalating, amidst a collapsing economy and a world on fire. Tracey again:
It seems clear that at most some archaic procedural rule was broken related to document storage. But that seems to be what they hate the most about Trump: we are ran by Mandarins who value nothing but access to tax revenues and the following of obscure procedures. Trump isn’t nearly good enough or virtuous enough to actually pose a threat to the Deep State/Empire commensurate to their deranged obsession with him, and thus the only rational answer is that the issue is that “decorum” is all they have- they certainly don’t have virtue, competence, good results, or anything else political classes generally use to maintain public faith in them and the economy is bad enough that people actually care about the government. Either way, this was a reckless move, clearly aimed at preventing democracy, because they are sure Trump can win in 2024 if he is allowed to run. This could only possibly backfire, especially as the Democrats are flagrantly corrupt and about to lose power, and then themselves be on the receiving end of politically weaponized federal agencies. I mean, look at their insane hubris:
She is straight bragging about the fact that she mishandled and improperly recorded classified documents and is using it to raise funds. This is what passes as appropriate behavior among them, bragging about getting away with doing what their delusional brains think will finally bring down the bad orange man. It is the same case as always, where whatever they do is a priori good and just and democracy and whatever Trump and his Republican supporters do is a priori bad and so anything they do for power is always justified. This is all especially glaring as they’ve made it clear the point of their scam January 6 committee is to find a way to legally prohibit Trump from holding office, and Democrats have been since the day in question. They would have no cause to do any of this if they didn’t know that Trump is popular enough to win and does better than Biden in head-to-head polling. Certainly governing well is not within their power. Nothing ever sticks because we’ve all seen their game, so their only move is to literally “subvert democracy” by preventing the candidate who can win from running. They aren’t supposed to be able to do this, because the President is supposed to be a check on the institutional power of career government employees, and electing a demagogue blowhard like Trump is an intended safety valve against the sort of vast institutional power we face, especially as the President has become relatively more directly elected over time. But no, instead they will try to legally prohibit a former 1-term President from running again, against all laws and traditions:
But instead of worry about all of this you should probably be a good automaton droid and believe the legacy media. After all, they’ve never lied before. There is surely nothing sketchy going on here:
The only possible read you should have on this is that our noble, self-sacrificing federal agents are trying to save the nation from evil incarnate. Ignore all that you have witnessed and experienced. Forget all their prior statements, we are talking about a man who has plumbed such depths of depravity that he may have left a job with his personal files. Even Pol Pot was never accused of such evil. Trump’s supporters will finally see that they’ve been taken in by the devil, and and the Blue Checks and Boomers who watch CNN 16 hours a day will finally take their rightful place as arbiters of all that is good and liberal democracy: it is the only way to save mom [*birthing parent, excuse me] and baseball and apple pie. That is definitely how this will play out. They’ve changed my mind.
No one would ever view it another way:
And don’t pretend Biden is not responsible for this, there are three branches of government:
Though, I will admit, during the Trump Administration it became extremely unclear who the fuck these people actually work for, so perhaps they’re just doing their own thing and this is one of their “six ways from Sunday” of getting back at Trump. Eh, it’s probably fine.
The most basic level of political understanding would tell you they are corrupt establishmentarians who worry that Trump’s erratic behavior will create distrust in the luxury tower of secrecy and privilege from which they oppress us. And plus, with how much shit he talked the last several years, they would definitely look like a bunch of bitches if he gets away with disrespecting them. The man has been in a highly public 6 year dispute with the so-called “Intelligence Community,” which is quite the euphemism for a spy cartel that goes around convincing isolated mentally ill people to attempt terrorist attacks so the FBI can catch them and pretend to be noble.
My intention when I started this article was to analyze the situation through book I chapters 7 and 8 of Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy which are titled, respectively, “To what degree public indictments are necessary in a republic to maintain its liberty,” and “False accusations are as harmful to republics as public indictments are useful,” so as to explain how our faction got so extreme and damaging. I may still write that article in the future, as a broader overview of the situation, but I found I was too exasperated to write it today. Not exasperated because I support Trump, nor because I fear for the future of the Republic. Exasperated because this has been going on for 7 fucking years of their deranged, destructive, hypocritical lunacy, and I cannot stand it anymore. It’s a common analogy that a polity is made up of a body politic which is like a human body and a statesman must act as a doctor, but in that analogy these lunatics applied extreme chemo and radiation against a man who was largely benign besides being a bit strange and mean and in some ways mildly less warlike than his predecessors. It’s madness and I cannot stand their bullshit any longer, though it seems I’ve reached that limit an infinite amount of times already.
Anyway, I’ll give you one more Machiavelli quote, and beyond that you can for once read him for yourself, and if I manage to get an article about indictments and accusations out later, you can see it then. For now:
“False accusations irritate but do not punish the citizens, and those who are irritated think about proving their worth by hating rather than fearing the things that are said against them.” [Discourses, I.8]
Contemporary America certainly proves that. Stay sane out there, it’s what separates men from liberals.
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It's actually quite shocking that for all their efforts they have failed to find prosecutable criminal behavior in Trump's past, being as he has been for decades our cultural archetype of the shady businessman.