By Steve BermanDonald Trump was restored to Twitter by Elon Musk, but won’t tweet. Trump dined with Ye, who brought to dinner the most coprophagic plus-two he could find: Nick Fuentes and Milo Yiannopoulos. Ye then went on Infowars with Alex Jones, and forced Jones into speaking sober sanity by literally praising Hitler. Ye’s masked appearance and insane actions left every other crack-up in talk show history (including Tom Cruise’s nut-up on Oprah, and everything Howard Stern has ever done) seem like an episode of Firing Line with William F. Buckley. Alex Jones has filed for bankruptcy under the weight of close to $1.5 billion in judgements against him by the families of murdered children for claiming the Sandy Hook massacre was a “false flag” government operation. Trump then posted on Truth Social in favor of burning the Constitution and declaring himself emperor in the name of America’s dead “Founders.”
Trump also posted about—without directly referencing—Matt Taibbi’s Twitter thread about how Twitter, under former management, was captured by the Democratic Party and its runabouts. There’s nothing in Taibbi’s revelations that we didn’t already know. Twitter management had lost control of the company’s many tendrils of censorship, and those levers were being yanked by the Democratic political machine.
Life imitates art, imitates life, imitates politics, imitates art, and back to the beginning again, except dumber. It’s an unending spiral of art as idiocy, the path widening as it goes ever down and the idiocy inflating as it descends beneath the bedrock of farce, into the domain of the Batman character “The Joker.” Everyone knows it’s an inarguable fact that the best Joker is Jack Nicholson, from the 1989 Tim Burton film. (Sorry Heath Ledger fans, Ledger’s Joker stood on Nicholson’s shoulders). While Chris Nolan’s version attributed the Joker’s psychotic chaos to chaos itself, Nicholson’s Joker saw it as art.
You know how concerned
people are about appearances.
This is attractive, that is not.
That is all behind me.
I now do what other people only dream.
I make art…until someone dies.
See?
I am the world’s first
fully-functioning homicidal artist.
Nicholson’s Joker would feel well at home, almost vindicated, in America’s current political currents.
To reference a real-world example, in Mongolia, a herd of sheep circled for 12 days, not even stopping to eat or drink, in an unending march to nowhere. There’s a disease called “circling disease,” which appropriately comes from consuming food contaminated by animal feces, that can cause this behavior, but it’s generally fatal within a few days. These sheep just keep circling, because they are likely engaging in what sheep do—herd behavior. A few sheep got spooked and run in a circle, then before you know it, they’re all doing it. Sheep as art.
Sheep as politics.
American politics has morphed from governing to art, and artists, despite their “rebel” trademark, tend to be herd animals, because they’re tethered to their fans, whose generational and faddy preferences shift in the wind.
Twitter went from creating scalable microblogging technology to creating art. They could not help themselves, as the Jack Napier of politics painted Twitter orange and called it a masterpiece. Now that art is exposed as the spray-painted amateur graffiti it was, even too childish for the master himself to touch as a canvas. Napier Trump has moved on to a new medium—dinner—and soon—court rooms. Yet he still has the political art critic world in thrall as they can’t get enough of his work.
There are still pockets of sanity and government in America, mostly at the state and local level. But the art can’t help but infect even the lowliest of election officials by covering them in unanswerable records requests to prove unprovable stolen election claims, to give yet more paint to people like Ye, Milo, Fuentes, and Jones. Banksy ain’t got nothing on the MyPillow Guy.
Meanwhile, Ye’s mentally ill art has become so poisonous, that even Milo has walked away. “Ye and I have come to the mutual conclusion that I should step away from his political team. Ye is a genius whom I have come to love and respect. We remain friends. I will continue to pray for Ye and all his endeavors,” Milo posted on Telegram. Milo, who got disinvited from CPAC in 2017 because he thought sex between young boys and older men was a good idea, could not make his art avant-gard enough to compete with Ye’s anti-semitic rant, but both of them consider themselves not above bending God’s ear.
Party politics has become a donor-obsessed festival of populist pop-art, with Democrats unable to release their death grip on abortion-for-everyone, and government of, for, and shoved down the people’s meat-starved throats. They have become the reactionary party of “democracy!” that needs salvation which can only be found in their money-lubricated bosom, and beginning with Twitter—wait, not Twitter because Elon Musk is the electric car wielding Mephistopheles—beginning with Facebook (no, because Zuckerberg actually listens to conservatives!)—beginning with the Senate, they will march triumphant into the hearts of all Americans, including those who aren’t Americans but live here.
Republicans can’t decide whether Trump’s art is still artsy, or if DeSantis can disengage from his battles with Disneyenough to remember he’s got a Yale undergrad and Harvard Law degree hanging on his office wall, and wears the gold oak-leaf of a U.S. Navy Lt. Commander, a hot-shot JAG lawyer. Trump’s only got his two Emmy nominations, but no trophy. The next election is one that will see if politics as art will continue like sheep marching in a circle, or if the public has had enough pain.
The 2024 election cycle begins Tuesday, when we find out if Hershel Walker, a nice guy with a dark past who should never have set foot in politics, can beat a pastor who has traded the call of God for the political canvas of art. Remember, it was Trump who painted the 2020 win for Sen. Raphael Warnock. We’re still waiting for the thank-you note for that masterpiece.
The sheep will circle, the pundits will tweet, Ye will admire his newest führer, the artists will descend ever into outrage, and America will always be dazzled in red and blue like a Jackson Pollock original. It will continue until something—democracy? our republic?—dies. Maybe it’s already dead, but if God has an ear to bend, I’ve got a prayer to tell him.
Follow Steve on Twitter @stevengberman.
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