The Brooklyn Rail

Trump and his minions have all become unconscious surrealists, using meta messages, subtexts and subterfuge, pretexts and prevarications to subvert the meanings of words and images. In 2016, Salena Zito, who was talking with voters in America’s heartland before the November election, realized that when Trump said things that were not factually true but had an emotional tone and indicated a certain direction of belief, his supporters took him seriously, but not literally, while the press took him literally, but not seriously. The latter turned out to be a historic tragic mistake. It was all serious, from the beginning.

Trump and his supporters are now saying that the above page from the 50^th birthday celebration book for Jeffrey Epstein that was released on September 8 was not written, drawn, or signed by Trump, and that it is, in fact, a fake artifact produced as part of the “Democrat hoax” in order to draw attention away from Trump’s magnificent achievements as President.

The outline of a headless, armless, and legless torso of a young girl indicates the dream object of Trump/Epstein desire: a pubescent girl that cannot speak, run away, or punch back. Imposed on this speechless Acéphale torso is a fable of a friendship between two rich men who have “certain things in common,” including the knowledge that “having everything” is not enough. The enigma doesn’t age because there are always more headless, limbless, affectless girls to use and abuse. What a wonderful secret to have between two rich pals!

When Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal published a description of Trump’s birthday wish for Epstein, JD Vance immediately posted this on X: “Forgive my language but this story is complete and utter bullshit. The WSJ should be ashamed of publishing it. Where is this letter? Would you be shocked to learn they never showed it to us before publishing it? Does anyone honestly believe this sounds like Donald Trump?” and Donald Trump promptly sued Rupert Murdoch for $10 billion, for defamation in “a series of quotes from a nonexistent letter.” Now that the letter is clearly existent, is Trump’s defamation suit null and void? Should Trump have consulted E. Jean Carroll about how to make a defamation suit stick?

Now that the whole Epstein “birthday book” is available to the public,¹ it is clear that almost everyone who hung out with Epstein knew that he liked “having sex with very young girls,” and most of them celebrated this as the charming eccentricity of a “super-rich” man, different from them in scale, perhaps, but not in political or moral substance.

The conspiracy was the conspiracy of the obscene concentration of wealth and power in America today, and their psychosexual exercise in dominance and submission.

The responses of GOP lawmakers to questions about the birthday book were something to behold. Speaker Johnson claimed he hadn’t seen it and besides, Trump is innocent and tried to stop Epstein by becoming an FBI informant! The rest of the responses loosely followed two approaches: either it was a Democrat hoax and Trump didn’t do it or, if he did do it, it didn’t matter. The “Democrat hoax” approach required the acceptance of an especially involved diabolical plan, whereby Democrats had the foresight, 22 years ago, during the George W. Bush presidency, to forge the letter and Trump’s signature in the book and predict then that Trump would someday be elected President of the United States and this letter would be used to implicate him in the Epstein operations and that might be important in this distant future.

The War of Words

On the day that Charlie Kirk was assassinated in Utah, Steve Bannon called him “a casualty of war. We are at war in this country,” and Donald Trump called Kirk a “martyr.” Alex Jones followed up with “Make no mistake—we are at war,” Jesse Watters on Fox News said, “They are at war with us,” Elon Musk tweeted, “If they won’t leave us in peace, then our choice is fight or die,” and Laura Loomer vowed “vengeance.” Donald Trump first sent out a relatively restrained post, but later reverted to form, blaming Charlie Kirk’s murder on the news media and the “radical left,” who are the only ones in the US using political violence. This came only a few days after Trump declared war on Chicago and renamed the Department of Defense the Department of War.

But are we at war now? Or is it primarily a war of words and images, an epistemological cold war? That is, is the violence in our new political rhetoric, in both words and images, and the widening gap between justified belief and opinion reaching a screaming peak, driven by our troll-in-chief? Certainly, the pace of events has quickened, including the back-shooting of the CEO of United Healthcare that made the shooter into a folk hero, the killing of a couple about to be married at the Jewish Museum in Washington, 180 shots fired at the CDC building in Washington that killed a police officer, Molotov cocktails in Boulder, the assassination of Minneapolis public officials by someone dressed as a cop, the school shooting of young children praying at Mass in Minnesota, the firebombing of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s house, and the two assassination attempts on Trump. And that’s just a partial listing. Is this reaching an unprecedented level in American history?

When I was ten and just becoming politically conscious, a string of assassinations began. Medgar Evers (June 12, 1963), John F. Kennedy (November 22, 1963), Malcolm X (February 21, 1965), Martin Luther King, Jr. (April 4, 1968), and Robert F. Kennedy (June 6, 1968) were all shot down over a five-year span. These assassinations changed American politics drastically.

But the speed of delivery and graphicness of public images of violence have increased substantially since then, thanks to social media. Within minutes of Charlie Kirk’s murder, the image of his body blasted backwards with a fountain of blood gushing from his neck was all over social media, being seen by millions of people, including children, accompanied by a tsunami of disinformation about the shooting disgorged from people and bots. And this came only a few days after images of the brutal stabbing death of a Ukrainian woman on a train in Charlotte, North Carolina went viral, also accompanied by the worst kind of inflammatory rhetoric.

In this online environment of extreme images of violence combined with extreme rhetoric, and an increasing blurring of the line between reality and nonreality, many of us appear shell-shocked. The ten largest corporations in America who traffick our attention for profit have long known that sex sells, but these days rage sells even better. They have modeled their algorithms to detect our political leanings and then push us toward a rage response. Young men like Thomas Matthew Crooks and Tyler Robinson are especially susceptible to this kind of manipulation, and become isolated in rage.

After he used a Mauser M 98 bolt action long rifle to blow a 30-06-size hole in Charlie Kirk’s neck, which caused Kirk to bleed out in front of his wife and two young children and 3000 young admirers, Tyler Robinson went on Discord (billed as “Group Chat That’s All Fun & Games”) to see if his friends were talking about it. An acquaintance of his asked him, in jest, if the photos of the shooter that the police had just released were of him. Robinson replied that his doppelganger was trying to get him in trouble. Then someone else on the group chat blurted out, “Tyler killed Charlie!!!!” Another suggested the group might turn Tyler in to get the $100,000 reward being offered by the FBI and Tyler joked, “Only if I get a cut.”

Robinson spent a good deal of time on Discord that day. Near the end of his posts comes this one: “I’m actually Charlie Kirk, wanted to get outta politics so I faked my death, now I can live out my dream life in Kansas.” Tyler’s avatar on Discord was from the Garfield comic strip, depicting the confused face of the cat’s nerdy incel owner, Jon Arbuckle:²

The only two things that are really going to have any effect on the current epidemic of mass shootings and political violence are the passage of sensible gun laws and getting young men off of social media, and those two things, I’m afraid, are far away.