A Few More Smidgens of Optimism -- The Power of Shiny Objects
I have been trying for years to warn people about the dystopia that is now upon us, but now that it is here, I find myself surprisingly non-despondent. That is partly because we are learning the answer to the fundamental question of our time -- What's the worst that could happen? -- and no longer have to imagine something even worse. In addition, however, there are in fact small glimmers and faint flashes of what I vaguely recall is called hope.
Two weeks ago, I offered some reasons to believe that all is not lost, both in a Verdict column and a companion column here on Dorf on Law. I have now added to that body of work in a new Verdict column that was published yesterday: "More Reasons to be Guardedly Optimistic." That piece was somewhat longer than usual, so I will spare my readers by being relatively brief here.
Probably the most important point that I make in yesterday's column has to do with whether Donald Trump's supporters will become disaffected from him as things go from bad to worse. I pose what is in essence a gotcha question to myself, because I have argued on the record saying that Trump's voters are not ignorant children but knew that he had no plans to decrease grocery prices nor do a lot of the other things that he repeated incessantly throughout the 2024 campaign. As I put it in yesterday's column, "Trump has already fulfilled his most important campaign promise—that he will never be a Black/Indian woman." Every day that he wakes up a White (not in actual color, of course) dude, he makes his voters happy. That he is doing anything else is a shame, because he could do nothing and simply float through life without being bothered with reality.
If I believe that to be true, however, it would seem that I cannot rely on the assumption that many non-Trumpists are making, which is that people were fooled into voting for Trump because they do not understand anything (or, in the more generous version, because they are too busy living their lives) and will suddenly become angry when they see that he did not have their interests in mind. Put simply, they say: "His voters aren't bigots or bigot-adjacent but are simple folk living their simple, uninformed lives." Trumpists respond: "Hey, he's just doing what he promised to do" (except the whole prices thing, which is now in the memory hole).
In response to both non-Trumpists and Trumpists, I argue that Trump's supporters are more than capable of being aware of the world around them and engaged enough to deliberately vote for him with their eyes wide open, but they might nonetheless become angry when he does a lot of things that he in fact never said he would do (in kind or at least in degree). There is a lot more to that argument that interested readers can find in yesterday's column, so I will say no more about it here.
At the end of yesterday's piece, I also added this new item to my list of reasons to be somewhat optimistic: "The Trumpists Have Embarrassingly Bad Arguments—When They Bother to Argue at All!" I should have said that they have embarrassingly bad ideas, not merely bad arguments, so I am saying that here. That is, if I were only to say that they have bad arguments, that would leave open the possibility that there are good arguments to support their policies, even though the Trumpists failed to make them.. But that cannot be true, because the policy ideas themselves are simply laughable (or worse).
Consider an example that hit the news sometime after I put yesterday's Verdict column to bed on Wednesday evening. Trump announced seemingly out of nowhere that he is going to make a sudden visit to the US government's gold stockpile at Fort Knox, explaining that he wants to make sure that the gold is actually there. It turns out that, as usual, this head-scratcher came not from Trump's very, very large brain but instead (much like his "eating dogs and cats" insanity at the non-debate in October) from the Musk-ovite fringes that fill the internet with conspiracy theories. Trump's boss told him that they should check on the gold because some of his bros believe that the government has been lying to everyone for decades about its hoard.
This is unbelievably stupid, a truly bad idea in every way. First, even if they find that the gold is there, that will obviously not satisfy anyone, including Musk, who will surely say that the stacks of gold bars are merely a Potemkin sham. Second, what exactly do they plan to do if the gold is not there? Tell everyone that their money is worthless? Trump always brags about the stock market when it sets records during his time in office, and the market will not be enthused by such craziness, to say the least.
But the more fundamental reason that this is idiocy is that gold does not matter, because money is not valuable because it is backed by gold. We know this because most money in the world (and in fact throughout relevant human history) is not backed by gold. Money is, as strange as it is to say, "created out of thin air" -- and that is not at all a bad thing! I have written about that many times, for example in 2011 and in 2021. The larger point is that transacting in gold is unnecessary and wasteful, which is fine because it is neither necessary nor sufficient for a nation's currency to be backed by any kind of commodity.
I honestly am surprised by this one, because one would have thought that a crypto bro like Musk would be especially aware that money depends on social acceptance, not physical content. But because "If you're so rich, why aren't you smart?" is the perfect question to ask Musk (and Trump) on pretty much any subject, I should not have expected him to be able to see the ridiculousness (and contradictions) in this latest flight of fancy.
And this leads me to my newest reason to maintain a bit of hope. Trumpists not only have bad arguments and worse ideas, but they are easily distracted -- in this case, literally being fascinated by shiny objects. We should all cheer when Musk-Trump go off chasing butterflies, because every minute they spend exploring those blind alleys cannot be spent carrying out more of their truly harmful ideas.
I should note that it is possible that this moment of gold-bugging could cause harm, especially when Musk and Trump are involved. Fans of the TV show "Brooklyn Nine-Nine" might recall the duo of doofuses named Hitchcock and Scully, who are absolutely terrible police detectives and more generally incapable of functioning normally. In one cold open, Hitchcock somehow manages (while sleeping, mind you) to put his face in a bowl of water and start to drown.
In other words, it is possible for sufficiently incompetent and confused people to inflict damage in even the least seemingly dangerous situations. As I noted above, the Musk and Trump field trip to Kentucky could end up undermining confidence in the US monetary system, which could have very bad effects indeed. Even so, I cannot help but be happy when the "news" sources that Trump follows continue to offer up distractions that will lead him down rabbit holes. More, please.
In the end, it is a sad state of affairs when one of the least-bad things that we can imagine is for the President of the United States (or, as I overhead a guy at a bar in Toronto call him last night, "the Cheeto in Chief") to be hoodwinked into wasting his time on things like gold bar hunts. But because he and his patron are both such easy marks for nonsense, it is "not nothing" that there will be days when they are amusing themselves as they play with each other in a relatively safe sandbox.