The last several weird hellish years of Trump are coming to an end. A new series of weird hellish years of Trump is just around the corner.
In a few months, Trump will have a new pack of acolytes and sycophants to replace the ones that will be fired, leave, and/or end up in jail. Trump will also find increasing utility among fringe media and will elevate and expand their prominence within the daily attention cycle.
His base will feel rewarded for their faith in Trump’s ‘chosen’ ability to undermine mainstream media and overpower the ‘deep state’, even if that faith is intermittently shaken by impeachment-related initiatives.
In the next few months, a new kind of influence ecosystem will emerge. Over the last decade, social media have upturned the ability of traditional media to dictate narratives and manufacture consent. But Trump’s use of Twitter in particular has merged aphophenia and resentment into a powerful agent for cognitive misdirection. As a result, Trump will be able to more easily bypass established media organizations and current social media dynamics, which in turn will enable him to more directly instigate, coalesce, and consolidate alternative distribution channels for his fuckery.
But the traditional media aren’t entirely useless to Trump. They are heavily implicated in his sustenance because he meets and excedes shareholder expectations. Traditional media organizations will no longer be able to resist playing reactionary to fridge media. They will be ‘assimilated’ so-to-speak into a larger media complex.
And while galaxy-brained establishment Democrats pursue the kinds of legal initiatives (e.g. impeachment) which they could have ardently and mercilessly pursued beginning on January 21, 2017, Trump’s newfound media distribution system will be used to weaponize every one of his enemies’ attacks. On his terms. On his turf. The vulnerabilities of his threat matrix are almost entirely closed-up now.
Anyone who does not understand the mechanisms of the current state-of-affairs and their opportunities will be ineffective in removing Trump. More worrisome: they will be incapable in mapping-out a post-Trump world that’s better than the one which made it possible for him to get this far.
The bottom line is this: the people who can topple Trump with a proverbial phone call are terrible people. That’s a much bigger problem for us than Trump. The danger of Trump is the opportunity for the People to overthrow all of the assholes, not just this one.