Wanted: Two-bit swindler for tinpot dictatorship

The classified ad's wording leaps to mind upon reading only the first portion of the first sentence of The NY Review article, "Flicking the War Switch": "On July 21, 2021, after Donald Trump had finished his first term as president, he gave an interview at his Bedminster golf club...."

A cyberprinted ream of his swindling, sulking, petty displeasure, fanatical vengeance, infinite retributiveness, planting of false evidence and blithesome befoozling of amassed ignorance and the readily humbugable followed. After all, "he gave an interview."

Said interview was one of his many applications submitted for a second shot at the nationally advertised job — the very job he had just attempted to fashion but failed in meeting assorted tinpotted standards of regulation dictatorships. Hence he got sacked, which more accurately is to say, he allowed himself to be sacked, an act prohibited by — you got it — regulation dictators. az

Never again, he swore, and thereupon began scheduling interviews for the position, then filled by a man hopelessly, even embarrassingly incompetent at exploiting the despotic opportunities at his easy disposal. Most embarrassed was Mr. Trump. What a schmendrick, what boobery, thought Donald. He never botched the job that badly.

But let us now turn to the 21st of July, 2021, the day of the featured interview, retold in "Flicking the War Switch," by Fintan O'Toole, journalist, author of more than 20 books and, pointedly, drama critic.

[Trump was questioned by] a ghost writer and a publisher who were working on the memoirs of his former chief of staff Mark Meadows. He let them see the secret and still classified plan of a putative American attack on Iran: "It’s so cool…it’s incredible, right?"

Trump was showing off, but he was also trying to get back at his former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley. In The New Yorker, Susan Glasser had just published a report under the headline "'You’re Gonna Have a Fucking War': Mark Milley’s Fight to Stop Trump from Striking Iran." Glasser wrote that Milley had met with Trump on January 3,  2021, when the defeated president was still trying to defy the result of the previous November’s election and stay in power. The subject of the meeting was "Iran’s nuclear program."

[Milley had a "nightmare scenario"] playing in his head..... [Trump] would manufacture an external crisis by launching a missile attack on Iran: "It was not public at the time," [wrote Glasser,] "but Milley believed that the nation had come close—'very close'—to conflict with the Islamic Republic."

Trump was sufficiently enraged by the article to shred all his obligations to national security and disclose a top-secret plan to people who had no clearance to see it. At the Bedminster briefing he planted a rebuff that duly appeared in Meadows’s memoir, The Chief’s Chief: "The president recalls a four-page report typed up by Mark Milley himself. It contained the general’s own plan to attack Iran, deploying massive numbers of troops, something he urged President Trump to do more than once during his presidency. President Trump denied those requests every time."

The implication was clear: attacking Iran was a terrible idea and only Trump had stood between the US and the consequences of this madness. This was the version of history Trump was so recklessly determined to see published after his first term.

Not to be pedantic but his was less a "version of history" than a creation of rank anti-history. (Discrete versions of the real thing are the differing stuff of reputable scholars.) All the same, What matters, notes Finton, "is that the story he wanted to tell about his first term was one in which he stoutly resisted all pressure to go to war with Iran."

But Trump's fabricated correction of the record was no act of merely mopping up the past. His snake eyes were fixed on the future, one in which he would make sure the electorate appreciated that he not only possessed the requisite reptilian qualifications for a dictatorship but that he was auditioning for it by behaving in full, slithering accordance with the job's regulatory demands.

One prequalifying and quite understandable stipulation of such is that applicants must downplay in the extreme the tinpot banana republic of egregious malgovernance and police-state repression they're deadset on "normalizing," should one be hired by the suicidal electorate.

Required in place of imminent reality are bombastic promises of a heavenly domestic economy — whose present existence, if applicable, must be tub-thumped into a rolling hell — and a revamped foreign policy of, let's say, globally shocking, awesome stick-it-to-'em trade. (See, regulation note: "American voters don't give a shit about the world anyway, and are uncomprehending of inexorable blowback.")

Why, anyone could do this, right? Sounds pretty simple, straightforward, just follow the rules. Little could be more not-right.

The immense, daunting trick pulled off by the successful applicant is to come across as authentically dictatorial in achieving all manner of greatness for the greater good of others only, while simultaneously not frightening the bejesus out of fascism-cheering rubeland's rather narrow, middle-earth electoral periphery — because you the applicant are job hunting precisely like a fucking authentic dictator of banana republicanism and police-state repression.

Trump broadly sold himself in the particular way pointed out by journalist and drama critic Fintan O'Toole: Only he stood between the US and the consequences of madness ...

being perpetrated by the sane then-in-charge of peace and a thriving economy.

Yet not all credit goes to Donald Trump. True, with a priori psychotic foresight and exquisite sociopathic care he answered the publicly advertised call for a two-bit swindler, that itself something of a commonality in the sewer of victorious Republican demagoguery. Still, his singular ascendence to a generalissimo-bemedaled, tinpot dictatorship was unforgettably aided by 2,284,967 imbeciles with a voter registration card.