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An example of absurdist drama that prophesied Trumpist transformation is Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros—the classic play in which an entire town devolves into rhinoceroses that silence any hope of coherent conversation.
In 1968, the Youth International Party nominated a pig named Pigasus for president; in 2024, the Republican Party will likely nominate a Traitor named Trump for president, a dumber and more corrupt candidate than Pigasus. The Youth International Party—the anarchic, counter-culture Yippies— nominated the pig as an absurd joke. While it’s absurd to nominate an indicted felon who tried to overturn the 2020 election, the GOP is not joking.
The Yippies’ pig had no chance of becoming president: according to the Constitution Pigasus wasn’t qualified, being younger than 35 years old. Trump as an insurrectionist is—like the pig—unqualified to be president, according to the Constitution. Yet, unlike Pigasus, he has a good chance to become president: The Supreme Court will likely discount the Constitution, he leads Biden in some polls, and, if he loses, he will try to steal the election again, threatening “bedlam” if that happens.
To rational people, it is mindbogglingly surreal that an incompetent, ignorant megalomaniac and sexual abuser like Trump, whose grating voice alone rattles teeth, would be deemed fit for the presidency, let alone close to winning power. Yet he is. Despite his enabling of the pandemic, his 2020 defeat, his instigation of the January 6 attack on the Capital, the 91 charges across four criminal cases, and his never-ending hurricane of lies, millions of reality-challenged Americans worship and support him.
Exposing its total MAGA-tization, the Republican Party has crawled with Trump into a moral abyss that turns out to be a bottomless pit of unreality. The fake GOP primary delivers phony, cowardly candidates Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, who are terrified of criticizing him and have promised to support him even if he were a convicted felon. They continue their sham candidacies, hoping that the laws of gravity will reverse on Trump and he will be sucked up into the vacuum of outer space. Failing that, it is perfectly fine with them that the defeated president attempted a coup and, though stopped, he can still return to the presidency.
The deranged Trump swamped his “opposition” in the Iowa caucus by 30 points. Watching cable news afterwards, it felt like I was living in Russia and Putin was running against two puppet candidates. The pundits seriously discussed the micro-details of the race and how each of the candidates fared in Nowheresville, Iowa, and no one screamed, “This is insanity—this is the cult of a madman!”
The craven cult that inflates Trump’s already-enormous self-esteem has given him the power to bend the arc of reality.
The nightmarish possibility of electing the shameless septuagenarian— a self-described dictator—is helped by his politically weak octogenarian opponent Joe Biden who frames the election as a choice between him and doomsday, but provides doomsday-style weapons and unconditional support for Israel’s Gaza genocide. In addition, Biden risks a “Red Sea War” by bombing Yemen, one of the poorest countries in the world.
Angry with Biden, pro-Palestine anti-war progressives might turn away from him in disgust—not voting or voting for third party candidates, undoubtedly funded by Republican donors. Other voters don’t like him because he is too old. In any case, Biden-hating voters might help elect the Muslim-hating, also elderly Trump, who is even more supportive of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu than Biden. In his first torturous term, Trump moved the American embassy to Jerusalem and left Palestinians out of the Abraham Accords, which many viewed as a betrayal of Palestine.
In his first term, Trump’s brutality and corruption were slightly mitigated by his ignorance and laziness. In a second, Trump—older and lazier—would better understand the system’s vulnerabilities and loopholes. On inauguration day 2025, Trump will be an indicted or convicted outlaw. He will commit the first crime of his second term at noon: His oath to defend the United States Constitution will be a perjury.
In a second term, he would install an army of political loyalists whose fealty to his most unhinged demands will take precedence over their commitment to the Constitution or legal governance. They will help him drive a much more focused agenda of vengeance against his adversaries and impunity for himself. For his own survival, he must destroy the rule of law by stopping all state and federal, civil and criminal cases against him. If a president can order the justice department to stop a case against him—as Trump would surely do—then obstruction of justice becomes a normal privilege of the presidency.
A former insurrectionist re-elected to the Presidency, he would use the Insurrection Act to order the military to crush protests—which he hoped to do during the summer of 2020—and turn the power of the federal government against his perceived enemies. Paraphrasing Hitler, he said, “We will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” It has always been Trump’s supreme political wish to wield military violence as personal weapons of power—a wish that many in his party now seem determined to help him achieve.
As xenophobe-in-chief, he hopes to institute a program of mass detainment and deportation of undocumented immigrants, who he says are “poisoning the blood” of the country, employing the rhetoric of European totalitarians. His aides have already drawn up plans for new detention centers at the U.S.-Mexico border, where anyone suspected of illegal entry would be held until officials have settled the person’s immigration status.
If Trump is returned to office, he will undoubtedly make January 6 a national holiday—the Day of the Patriotic Martyrs.
American democracy will disintegrate piece by piece as a second Trump term erects a postmodern fascist state modeled on Victor Orbán’s Hungary—destroying the legitimacy of elections, trampling constitutional rights, instituting a nation-wide abortion ban, cutting off immigration, suppressing derogatory media, promoting Christian nationalism, and undermining the rule of law.
Even beyond this horror, the craven cult that inflates Trump’s already-enormous self-esteem has given him the power to bend the arc of reality. His hallucinating supporters believe in an elaborate MAGA phantasmagoria that Trump has concocted: that the previous election was stolen, that Biden is an illegitimate president, that Biden has weaponized the legal system to prosecute his strongest opponent Trump, and that the January 6 riot was not an insurrection by Trump supporters but an instigation by the FBI and antifa.
In a brief moment after the January 6 Capitol attack, many in the GOP thought the Trump monster had been banished, a pariah in the Party. Republican leaders blamed him for the insurrection. Party fund-raisers assured donors they were done with him. Trump’s own loyalists turned against him. Former Attorney General Barr said Trump’s conduct was a “betrayal of his office and supporters.”
The Murdoch-owned lapdog Wall Street Journalargued that Trump was done: “This week finished him as a serious political figure. He has betrayed his loyal supporters by lying to them about the election and the ability of Congress and Mr. Pence to overturn it. He has refused to accept the basic bargain of democracy, which is to accept the result, win or lose.” Trump also got blamed when the 2022 midterms went seriously awry as Trump-endorsed election deniers lost winnable races and the much-hyped “red tsunami” turned into a dribble. In her book, purged Republican Liz Cheney reported that afterwards Trump was depressed and refused to eat.
After condemning Trump for January 6 and even suggesting that he resign, now-deposed House Speaker Kevin McCarthy traveled to Mar-a-Lago and, in an historically spineless act of recantation, embraced and absolved the starving former President. Cheney and many others have identified this as a pivotal moment in reviving the former president’s political viability and appetite.
Still, previous to this submission, the Republican Party threw away its best chance to bury him forever when 43 senators voted to acquit him in his impeachment after the Capitol riot. They could have relegated him to Palm Beach and saved America from hearing the despicable rants of this malfunctioning moron and putting the police and the nuclear button under his thumb.
Trump resumed eating, lying, and constructing a new absurd reality that has proven more politically salient with the GOP and its voters than many of us thought possible on January 7, 2021, even after seeing it happen over and over for the previous six exhausting, gut-wrenching years.
Pulling off a kind of double coup, this psychopathic fabricator added to the original Big Lie about the “rigged election.” He called January 6 “a beautiful day,” and he designated the nearly 1,300 defendants arrested in connection with the Capitol attack ”martyrs” and “hostages.” He has promised to pardon insurrectionists and threatened to lock up the police who tried to defend the Capitol that day. If Trump is returned to office, he will undoubtedly make January 6 a national holiday—the Day of the Patriotic Martyrs.
The GOP and the right-wing media echo system has been so effective in pumping out Trump’s upside-down-world propaganda that polling recently found that, in the intervening three years, the number of Republicans who believe Trump’s lies about a “rigged election” has, in fact, gone up. Today, only 31% of Republicans believe that Biden is the “legitimate” president, down from 39% in late 2021. The poll also showed that Republicans thought the insurrectionist mob were mostly peaceful.
For millions of people, Trump has managed to transmute historical events that everyone saw with their own eyes into theater of the absurd, an anti-realistic dramatic genre characterized by dark humor, incoherent language, strange symbolism, and themes that relate to human irrationality.
An example of absurdist drama that prophesied Trumpist transformation is Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros—the classic play in which an entire town devolves into hard-skinned, monstrous rhinoceroses that issue ear-shattering bellows that silence any hope of coherent conversation. Rhinoceros thundered onto the stage, in 1960, with a chilling yet farcically funny allegory of how fascism can mutate ordinary people into angry, violent, mindless beasts whose articulateness dissolves into a cacophony of guttural honks.
Writing in the wake of Hitler and Stalin, Ionesco painted a picture of a society succumbing to the contagion of “rhinoceritis,” a disease that erodes individuality and replaces it with groupthink and casual brutality as well as a hatred of non-rhinoceroses. The transformative infection suggests the dehumanizing force of tyrannical ideologies.
Becoming a huge, horned rhinoceros is gradually normalized: A formerly concerned character Jean dismisses his friend’s terror at the multiplication of grotesque rhino mutations and their deleterious effects on human freedom. Jean debases himself and enables rhinoceritis when he says that despite their savage deformity, they’re “harmless, docile herbivores” and “seem so sure of themselves.” This mindless acceptance and rationalization foreshadows the insidious nature of the disease, disguising its destructive potential.
Ionesco’s play exposes the lure of surrendering to a mass authoritarian movement and abandoning the burden of independent thought. Among Trump’s abettors are numerous verifiably insane congresspeople who have been infected by rhinoceritis for a long time such as Marjorie Taylor Green, Lauren Boebert, and Matt Gaetz. But it’s the transformed normies that are most pathetic.
Current House Majority Whip Tom Emmer angered Trump when he voted to certify Biden’s election, unlike 147 colleagues who voted to overturn the election. When Emmer ran for his dream-job Speaker of the House, Trump sank his candidacy, warning that he would be a “tragic mistake” and calling him a “Globalist RINO” (not a rhinoceros). Two months later, Emmer—like nearly 100 members of the House, said, “I am proud to endorse Donald J. Trump for President.” Expressing his gratitude to Emmer for his miserable self-abasement, Trump smirked, “They always bend the knee.”
One of the more pitiful examples of “Trump Debasement Syndrome” is Sen. Josh Hawley, the guy who egged on the January 6 rhinoceros-thugs with a fist-pump that lamely showed solidarity with them and then was recorded in security footage fleeing for his life to avoid those same stampeding thugs. Hawley has decided to “forget” his traumatic escape from the mob, though he had not endorsed King Rhinoceros as the Iowa caucus approached. Exhibiting concern for Hawley’s electoral health, Trump warned him to “be very careful” in his Senate re-election campaign. Shortly thereafter, Hawley joined the Republican Rhino herd and publicly endorsed Trump saying, “I’m with him.”
Rhinoceros explored the erosion of moral values, the seductive nature of power as people become mere instruments of brute strength and aggression. As authority figures collapse and undergo metamorphosis, other people find it easier to justify why becoming a rhinoceros is desirable. As one character declares, “It‘s the strength that counts, don’t you want to be strong?”
Once a rising conservative normie in the party—an acolyte of former Republican VP candidate Paul Ryan, Rep. Elise Stefanik has transmogrified into an automated MAGA rhinoceros. She trumpeted Trump’s reference to the January 6 criminals as “hostages,” and embraced the claim that the 2020 election was an “unconstitutional circumventing of the Constitution.” Stefanik refused to commit to certifying the results of the 2024 election, saying “We will see if this is a legal and valid election.” After calling the media biased against Trump, she said the “border crisis is poisoning Americans.” Desperately thirsty for Trump’s VP spot, Stefanik has become a eager demagogue.
What began, in Rhinoceros, as isolated incidents becomes a rhinoceros contagion as the town’s residents witness an astonishing metamorphosis as more and more people sprout horns, grow enormously huge with hard green skin, and succumb to the allure of the rampaging Rhino fascists. There are no elections in Rhinoceros Town so the entire society is transformed, except for one individual Berenger who shouts, “I’ll take on the whole of them! I’ll put up a fight against the lot of them! I’m the last man left, and I’m staying that way until the end. I’m not capitulating.”
The entire Republican Party—elected officials and voters—have capitulated. They’ve chosen the sickness, nihilism, and absurdity. Fortunately, we still have democracy. Stopping the Trump contagion will not suddenly eradicate the disease and make America perfectly healthy, but it is vital to embrace reality, reject the absurd, prevent further suffering, and preserve the possibility of progress.
While the chamber's GOP leader brushed off concerns, others predict that "Johnson's days as speaker could be numbered."
Just over a week away from a partial government shutdown, 13 far-right Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday protested Speaker Mike Johnson's bipartisan spending deal by joining Democrats to tank an unrelated procedural vote.
Congressional Democrats, Capitol Hill journalists, and other observers highlighted the development as further proof of "Republicans in disarray" as the January 19 deadline looms. Some government agencies are funded until then; others have until February 2.
"The House is essentially frozen again. The GOP leadership cannot bring up any bills that are not already noticed on the suspension calendar. And conservatives just killed leadership's ability to bring up any bills under a rule," Punchbowl News' Jake Sherman explained, calling the House "ungovernable" and the vote "an unmitigated disaster" for Republicans.
"House Republicans are intent on having 2024 in Congress look a lot like it did in 2023: full of dysfunction and chaos."
Decrying "another week of House GOP chaos and confusion," U.S. Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) similarly declared that "the incompetence of Republican leadership is a total unmitigated disaster for this country."
Other House Democrats also piled on and stressed that a government shutdown is just nine days away.
"So far, it seems House Republicans are intent on having 2024 in Congress look a lot like it did in 2023: full of dysfunction and chaos," asserted Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.).
"Deja vu! House Republicans have lost control of the House floor, again. House Republicans have repeatedly shown that they cannot govern," said Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.).
Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) agreed, saying that "Republicans simply can't govern," and separately pointing out that "they're leading the least productive Congress since the Great Depression—it's an embarrassment."
Last October, far-right House Republicans ousted then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.)—who ultimately resigned from Congress at the end of last year, reducing his party's majority—and eventually replaced him with Johnson (R-La.), after Reps. Tom Emmer (D-Minn.), Steve Scalise (R-La.), and Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) all abandoned their speakership bids.
While Johnson's election was seen as a sign of the far-right's hold on the Republican Party, he and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) still reached a spending agreement on Sunday that largely aligns with the deal McCarthy and President Joe Biden negotiated last year while passing the Fiscal Responsibility Act to prevent a U.S. default.
Johnson and Schumer agreed to $886 billion for defense and nearly $773 billion for nonmilitary spending for fiscal year 2024. The Senate leader and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) also said Sunday that they made clear to Johnson that "Democrats will not support including poison pill policy changes in any of the 12 appropriations bills."
NBC Newsnoted that before the vote on Wednesday, Johnson "did not rule out another short-term funding bill to avert a shutdown later this month, a shift from December when he vowed there would be no more stopgap bills in 2024."
Explaining the far-right revolt, House Freedom Caucus Chair Bob Good (R-Va.) reportedly told journalists, "We're making a statement that the deal, as has been announced—that doesn't secure the border and doesn't cut out spending and is going to be passed apparently under suspension of the rules with predominantly Democrat votes—is unacceptable."
According toPolitico:
As the vote failed, Johnson left the floor and huddled in his office with Republicans on the Rules Committee, including Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), who has flirted with trying to oust the speaker after the topline spending agreement.
"We'll see," Roy said as he was leaving Johnson's office about the potential that additional bills go down. "Right now, the point here is that we're not remotely satisfied."
Appearing on Fox News after the revolt on Wednesday, Johnson stressed that he, too, is a "conservative hardliner" and acknowledged the frustrations of Roy and others, while also dismissing concerns that he may be ousted like McCarthy was just a few months ago.
Johnson said that "I don't think I'm in any jeopardy of being 'vacated,'" but others were quick to frame the vote as a signal that a motion to vacate may be coming soon.
"The GOP can't manage to pass rules (largely unheard of before this Congress), they're about to chase off another speaker, and they're showing revenge porn in committee again... The 118th Congress," said Rep. Summer Lee (D-Pa.).
Democratic strategist Sawyer Hackett declared: "Here we go again. A dozen or so Republicans are blocking passage of a rules vote to protest Speaker Johnson agreeing to a spending deal similar to McCarthy. Johnson's days as speaker could be numbered."
The Louisiana congressman has been called "the most important architect" of a scheme inside the House to provide cover for Republicans trying to overturn the election results of 2020.
After three failed nominees in as many weeks, Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday elected Louisiana Congressman Mike Johnson as speaker—a signal of the far-right's hold on the party.
The 220-209 vote along party lines came after Reps. Tom Emmer (D-Minn.), Steve Scalise (R-La.), and Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) abandoned their speakership bids in the wake of a few far-right Republicans voting with Democrats earlier this month to remove Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), whose January election took 15 rounds of voting and required concessions to the far-right.
"MAGA is ascendant," Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla) declared this week, referring to the "Make America Great Again" campaign slogan of former President Donald Trump, who is Republicans' 2024 presidential front-runner, despite his ongoing criminal cases.
"If you don't think that moving from Kevin McCarthy to MAGA Mike Johnson shows the ascendance of this movement and where the power in the Republican Party truly lies, then you're not paying attention," added Gaetz. He was speaking with Steve Bannon, Trump's former chief strategist, who last year was found guilty of contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena from the U.S. House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.
Some objections to Johnson, vice chair of the House Republican Conference, relate to the January 6, 2021 insurrection, incited by Trump and his "Big Lie" allies as Congress was certifying Joe Biden's 2020 win.
"Today is a dark day for American democracy," Stand Up America founder and president Sean Eldridge said Wednesday following the vote. "Mike Johnson's record of election denial and his attempts to overturn the will of the people make him totally unfit to be second in line to the presidency. Those who have spent years trying to undermine our democracy cannot be trusted to lead it."
"Entrusting the House of Representatives to a man The New York Times called 'the most important architect of the Electoral College objections' is proof of House Republicans' contempt for our freedom to vote," Eldridge added. "The American people deserve a speaker who will stand up for our democracy and our fundamental freedoms, but sadly, House Republicans have embraced MAGA extremism instead."
Reporting earlier this month on the 139 House Republicans who voted to dispute the Electoral College count in 2021, the Times explained:
While most House Republicans had amplified Mr. Trump's claims about the election in the aftermath of his loss, only the right flank of the caucus continued to loudly echo Mr. Trump's fraud allegations in the days before January 6, the Times found. More Republican lawmakers appeared to seek a way to placate Mr. Trump and his supporters without formally endorsing his extraordinary allegations. In formal statements justifying their votes, about three-quarters relied on the arguments of a low-profile Louisiana congressman, Rep. Mike Johnson, the most important architect of the Electoral College objections.
On the eve of the January 6 votes, he presented colleagues with what he called a "third option." He faulted the way some states had changed voting procedures during the pandemic, saying it was unconstitutional, without supporting the outlandish claims of Mr. Trump's most vocal supporters. His Republican critics called it a Trojan horse that allowed lawmakers to vote with the president while hiding behind a more defensible case.
Patriotic Millionaires chair Morris Pearl, who also noted the Times' reporting on Wednesday, said, "That Republicans would elevate Mike Johnson to the speakership is as reprehensible as it is predictable."
"His actions leading up to January 6th were disqualifying: He has no business in elected office, let alone wielding the speaker's gavel," Pearl added. "Sadly, this is of no concern for the modern GOP, which is contemptuous of the basic tenets of democracy. His election as speaker is a damning statement on our politics and a blight on the institution of the House of Representatives."
Advocates of reproductive freedom, climate action, and protecting programs like Social Security also opposed Johnson.
"Johnson has a long history of hostility towards Social Security and Medicare," noted Social Security Works executive director Alex Lawson. "Multimillionaire Johnson has also made the outrageous claim that forced births are necessary to fund Social Security."
Food & Water Action deputy director Mitch Jones warned in a statement Wednesday that "Speaker Johnson, an egregious climate skeptic and proud election denier, has had his career bought and paid for by the oil and gas industry. Johnson's shameful anti-truth, anti-science views are a clear and present danger to America's public health and environment.
NextGen America similarly said on social media that "from denying the results of the 2020 election to supporting a national abortion ban, it's clear: He's a threat to our future and democracy. Yeah, we're just as horrified as you are."
Public Citizen executive vice president Lisa Gilbert asserted that "Mike Johnson's claim to fame is leading the charge to deny President Biden's certification and attempting to overturn a democratic election."
"A year out from the next presidential election," she added, "House Republicans have made their contempt for democracy and their intent to lean into full-on election denialism crystal clear."
This post has been updated with comment from Patriotic Millionaires.