Trump won because Russian agents “hacked” the election. Trump won because fake news tricked simple minded voters. Beginning on election night, they explained away their loss with theories as pat and implausible as a summer action movie: Instead of pausing, listening, thinking, and changing, America’s ruling class withdrew into a defensive crouch. In retrospect, the lesson seemed obvious: Ignore voters for long enough and you get Donald Trump. Yet the people at whom the message was aimed never received it. Happy countries don’t elect Donald Trump president. You couldn’t really know what Trump might do as president, but he didn’t do any of that. He didn’t lower interest rates to zero, or open the borders, or sit silently by as the manufacturing sector collapsed and the middle class died. Trump didn’t invade Iraq or bail out Wall Street. Trump might be vulgar and ignorant, but he wasn’t responsible for the many disasters America’s leaders created. They just concluded that the options were worse-and not just Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party, but the Bush family and their donors and the entire Republican leadership, along with the hedge fund managers and media luminaries and corporate executives and Hollywood tastemakers and think tank geniuses and everyone else who created the world as it was in the fall of 2016. What was written as an allegory is starting to feel like a documentary, as generations of misrule threaten to send our country beneath the waves.ĭonald Trump was in many ways an unappealing figure. He never mentions what happened to the ship. Plato imagined this scene in The Republic. You look on in horror, helpless and desperate. You can’t tell them this because they’ve banned acknowledgment of physical reality.Īs waves wash over the deck, they’re awarding themselves majestic new titles and raising their own salaries. But it’s clear the crew is in charge now and they’ve gone insane. … Maybe the captain and first mate fell overboard. An incendiary read for all the unabashedly hilarious realities of the world we're stuck in.

Tucker carlson ship of fools review