Altered States by Geoff Carter « The Pen in Hand Blog

Illustration by Michael DiMilo

By Geoff Carter

In the late 1970s, when I was still in college, a movie named King of Hearts was the popular midnight movie (before it was preempted by Eraserhead and the ubiquitous The Rocky Horror Picture Show). The film was about a French town taken over by inmates of an insane asylum during World War I. The hero of the film is Charles Plumpick, a Scottish soldier tasked with disarming a German bomb that is set to destroy the whole town. When they find out about the bomb, the “sane” occupants of the town leave and the asylum inmates take on the roles of the townspeople. Plumpick at first fails to recognize the townspeople belong in the asylum, but he eventually discovers it.

I, along with a vast number of other Americans, am feeling a little like Charles Plumpick these days because the inmates in our nation’s capital seem to be running the asylum. We might not have known it at first, but we know it now. We have a president who wants to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, who intends to take over Greenland, and who thinks Canada should be America’s fifty-first state. That’s all-asylum material.

While these antics might be amusing—and perhaps deliberately distracting (crazy like a fox)—other Trump policies have proved to be much more serious—and malicious. He has appointed his billionaire buddy (and head donor) Elon Musk to head his Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, which he has used to recklessly (and illegally) access personal information, cut funding to humanitarian organizations, and fire thousands of federal workers. This process (if there is a process) has been so haphazard and disorganized that nuclear weapons specialists, medical experts, and others who had been fired during the DOGE purge had to be rehired the next day just to keep things functioning. It is a comedy of errors.

Trump has also targeted Social Security, Medicare, and the judiciary for annihilation. He has already abolished the Department of Education and has instructed the Department of Justice (now filled with his stooges) to go after his political and personal enemies. His vindictiveness is matched only by his greed and his capacity for corruption, his political policy is marked by emotion and impulse, not logic, reason, or experience, and his ambition is fueled by a dark and cruel lust for power. He wants to be king—and he will if we let him. In someone else, these delusions of grandeur might be diagnosed as a mental disorder. Unfortunately, Trump is making his delusions a reality.

In Heather Cox Richardson’s March 21st essay, she describes a 2004 interview with a Bush official who speaks about how the new Bush administration will shape the world, stating, “we are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality” (Cox).

Ms. Cox goes on to posit that we are now witnessing an administration attempting to do just that. And they have already—on some levels—already changed the American reality.

In the pre-Trump era, it was unthinkable that an elected official—particularly a president of the United States—would brag about grabbing women’s genitalia, ramble on in public about the size of a professional golfer’s penis, or made fun of a disabled reporter at a press conference. For a leader of the free world to display such crass and cruel behavior and not to become a pariah would have seemed—and been judged—insane. Now—thanks to Mr. Trump, it’s normalized—just another part of the political landscape.

It would have been unthinkable to see a Jimmy Carter or a George Bush (father or son) or a Ronald Reagan denigrate the federal electoral system, scream and yell—with no factual basis—that the 2020 federal election was stolen, and deliberately send a mob to attack the United States Capitol to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power—to stage of coup d’etat. Now, thanks to Mr. Trump, it’s part of the political landscape.

It would have been unthinkable for a Bush or a Reagan or an Obama to berate members of NATO, Canada, and threaten to attack Panama and annex Greenland. Imagine if Ronald Reagan would have turned his back on a country like the Ukraine fighting to maintain its independence from Russia and instead cozy up to a murderous dictator like Vladimir Putin. Unthinkable. Now, thanks to Mr. Trump, it’s part of the political landscape.

It would have been unthinkable for either George Bush to cozy up to white supremacist groups like The Proud Boys or the Oathkeepers, pardon over one thousand rioters (some convicted of violent crimes), and to call these traitors “patriots”. Now, its… you get the picture.

These behaviors would have seemed impossible in yesterday’s political reality, but through his incessant and unrelenting normalization of the extreme, Donald Trump and his legion of far-right minions have skewed America’s view of what is normal. Standards of decency and integrity have become eroded until they are now little more than memories.

Listening to him chronically lie—according to Mother Jones, he lied at 30,000 times during his first presidency—and watching him bully opponents and vindictively attack anyone who opposes him has normalized these behaviors.

The Republican party’s inability—or unwillingness—to stand up to him has begun to normalize fear and compliance to authoritarian behavior. They have embraced his lies, ignored his moral crassness, and cravenly bowed to his most frivolous wishes—obedience in advance.

It took the American people, like the character Charles Plumpick in King of Hearts, a little while to realize that the people running things are not exactly all there. The latest—and possibly most frightening—example of this is Signalgate, the arrogant, reckless, and just plain stupid non-secured texting of classified material by members of Trump’s handpicked staff and cabinet members.

During his first term, Donald Trump seemed a little weird and offbeat, sort of like pro wrestler turned Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura, but relatively harmless. We shrugged as the lies mounted and his ineptitude became more obvious, and only realized his true maliciousness on January 6^th, 2021. We should have flushed him then, but he somehow convinced a slim majority of the American people to reelect him.

This is the new reality—that we believed a con man and huckster like Donald Trump is the best person to lead this country. Americans were somehow willing—or unable—to remember his lies, his advice to drink bleach to cure Covid, his felony convictions for fraud, his loss to E. Jean Carroll for sexual assault damages, and his insidious bullying.

Now he is trying to force an even newer and more harsh reality on us—that of an American king ruling over a nation of serfs and sycophants.

In the same essay, Ms. Cox Richardson points out that the president and Mr. Musk seem a little taken aback by the hundreds of demonstrations, town halls, and protests mounted by our citizens in reaction to the draconian cuts made by this administration. The people are, in Cox’s words, being stubborn about giving up the reality of their freedoms.

Thirty-four thousand people showed up at a Stop Oligarchy rally in Denver. Twenty-three thousand showed up at another in Tucson. Republican senators and representatives refusing to hold town halls are being berated and ridiculed. Democrats are holding town halls in their stead. The people are rising.

This is the reality the American—not the oligarchs—are making for ourselves.