Is it madness to believe that ABC returning Jimmy Kimmel to their airwaves suggests that the Trump project has stubbed a toe? And shown some vulnerability to an aroused public?
It seems strange to say, but the return of Jimmy Kimmel to the air is a great defeat for this regime.
The victories will look anticlimactic and make those who made a lot of noise feel sheepish.
You shouldn’t feel ashamed; the administration should be.
They openly screamed and cried for his removal, and it failed. It showed the limits of their power.
One should take heart in it, although there are many more battles to come.
Cynics will scoff that it was a pecuniary decision; likely so, but if the incentives are in disobeying rather than obeying, we may yet be saved.
This episode shows not only the limited power of the administration but also of its central base of power: the thugs of the online right. They also wish to appear to speak for the people, to embody directly popular demands and discontents, but they are not the people; ultimately, they are a rabble, a mob that can be summoned up but that can’t hope to apply its power to the much larger society at large.
Civil society must recognize them as a fraction, not the whole of the public.
As terrible as they act, they are also not Leviathan. Musk captured Twitter to deliberately create a distorted image of the public, but it deceives its creators, too: they think it is America, but it’s not, it’s just their simulated America.
Don’t grant them more power than they have.
• • •
Historian Heather Cox Richardson makes the same observation in a very American metaphor:
... Trump and his loyalists have outkicked their coverage as they try to consolidate power.
As usual, I am cheered to be in NFL football season.
• • •
Meanwhile, the national embarrassment whined at the U.N.:
Trump accused environmentalists of wanting to “kill all the cows.” There was no evidence for that claim.
Another day, another madness. Meanwhile, the United States commits murder on the high seas.
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