Trump has repeatedly joked that Biden may have been crudely cloned, not merely mentally incapacitated, during Biden’s single term in the White House, which would make Biden like the knock-off Emperor Palpatine in the Star Wars sequel trilogy (or indeed a bit like the Star Wars sequel trilogy itself).
Perhaps Trump is making a new play for African-American support, since the black community is especially partial to conspiracy theories about celebrities and others being cloned—with the clones purportedly being used by the elite for a combination of subversive identity-theft missions and decadent subterranean parties—a conspiracy theory that’s an almost-unchanged cultural inheritance from paranoid whites in England about four centuries ago, weirdly enough.
More likely, Trump doesn’t think the Biden clone claim is true and doesn’t care one way or the other whether people take the idea seriously so long as it further insults one of his enemies. Think of it as a strange way of subjecting Biden to the “NPC” insult popular a few years ago, meaning some people are the mindless, inhuman equivalents of “non-player characters” in videogames.
Trump’s indifference to reality in such comments makes him like a living, dialectical fulfillment of the right-wing and left-wing forms of post-truth postmodernism recently lamented on this site by Crispin Sartwell. I’ve seen a few truth-challenged millennial right-wingers embrace some form of that grotesque Hegelian fusion, which may be half the reason so many of them like Trump.
By contrast, Jonathan Rauch has written about the various filter systems in societies that keep speculation and hyperbole from going completely off the rails by providing periodic reality checks, including markets, migration, science, journalism, and (loosely speaking) democracy, each of which (when functioning properly) affords people the opportunity to switch between worse and better options and which combined he calls “liberal science”—in a broad, non-partisan sense of both those words.
Calm down and check your work against others’ observations and evidence before you say anything too crazy, in other words. This was considered common sense not too long ago. It’s why, for instance, we should be pleased that Trump and the U.S. Court of International Trade must each submit formal arguments to the Federal Appeals Court next week about whether Trump’s unilateral imposition of tariffs was an overextension of presidential authority (tariffs are taxes, after all—money taken from buyers and sellers and kept by government, as surely as anything ever cooked up by the IRS).
If the end result of the court proceedings is liberation from Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs, it’ll also mean expanding the range of customers’ and businesses’ untaxed choices beyond the arbitrary range preferred by one angry, trade-hating ruler—our arbitrarch, we might call him. The process of thwarting his will in this case could be dubbed liberal science or (pre-Trump) conservative capitalism or just plain libertarian markets in action, but surely it would beat having the choices of billions of individuals overridden by the choice of one person.
I find myself rooting, then, for the courts to save us, something I don’t like to do, since society at large tends to prevail in the long run if the courts are seen to be greatly at odds with a resentful public’s will. It’s not easy to look at any big subset of the politically-active part of the public with an expectation of rescue in this case, though: The Libertarian Party and its creepy New Right allies have proudly made themselves an adjunct to the Republican Party for the time being, the Republican Party has proudly made itself a mere adjunct to Trump, and Trump—who is, after all, a product of New York City and the Ivy League—has made himself a ridiculous anti-market tribune of the people, effectively an adjunct to Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.
A transactional, one-time-favors politician—somewhat like a dictator or monarch but usually less dangerous because his ambitions are smaller—doesn’t care if people now have to hang on his arbitrary, almost random whims. That’s the idea, really, and the randomizing ruler thinks each of his fleeting ideas is great anyway, so where’s the harm? Unless, that is, you were hoping to make long-term business, travel, or court-related plans in a stable, predictable environment.
Pre-Trump liberalism had reached absurd heights of hubris, faking long-term stability and rationality while practicing its own form of unpredictability, slapping on taxes and regulations as it pleased. Trump justifiably took liberalism down a few notches, but unchecked he may now continue downward, right into the abyss of unreason. People tolerated the randomness in his first term in part because he was plainly playing defense most of the time, using the randomness as an ongoing distraction to keep his establishment enemies at bay. Now the chaos seems gratuitous. With each new political fight in his second term, it looks more and more as though “he started it,” as feuding kids on the playground might say.
I’m reminded that a few months before Trump was elected in 2016, I likened him to the nineteenth-century absurdist fictional court jester Pere Ubu, concluding with the warning that Ubu worked well as a joking reminder that the prevailing royal court deserved to be subverted but once in power himself became a maniac who caused a bloodbath. The play was all too prophetic about the looming 20th century’s mass murders. In similar fashion, Trump may prove to have been a good disruptor but, if decrees like his trade and migration restrictions continue, may prove a nightmare as an unfettered ruler.
The podcast comedian types who celebrate him are perfectly suited not just to lampoon the left but to make an unserious president seem sane, which isn’t good. Online, the trolling keeps on going even if good things are smashed along with the bad. Trump smashes trade—ha ha! Trump smashes rules against corruption—ha ha! Smashes budget discipline—ha ha! Threatens to smash places ranging from Gaza to Greenland to the Gulf of Oman! LOL, good one, fellas!
Where does it all end? In a long Truth Social post after the initial U.S. Court of International Trade ruling against his tariffs, Trump condemned markets, legislatures, judges he’d appointed himself, and the Federalist Society as left-wing threats to his trade policies and his presidential will in general. With this level of unpredictable, Ubu-like egomania, might he yet prove to be an even worse, more willful president than FDR or Wilson?
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey