Booker, Trump, Le Pen: Three Takes on Three People

The noble Roman Senate (19th century fresco)

By Thomas Neuburger

“There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even tacitly take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon all the apparatus and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.” —Mario Savio, Berkeley Free Speech movement

Cory Booker

On March 31 and April 1, Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) gave a 25-hour speech that ended with these words: “This is a moral moment. It is not left or right, it is right or wrong. Let’s get in good trouble.”

Reporter Jonathan Katz records what the Senate did next. (A typo below — “an an” should be “and an”.)

Needless to say, Mr. Booker and all other Democratic senators had no problem allowing the Senate to resume its business, in this case the approval of one more Trump nominee. From the Congressional Record, page 124:

[BOOKER, concluding his speech] This is a moral moment. It is not left or right, it is right or wrong. Let’s get in good trouble. (Ms. LUMMIS assumed the Chair.) My friend, Madam President, I yield the floor. (Applause, Senators rising.) Madam President, thank you to the pages. Thank you to the Parliamentarian staffs. Thank you to the clerks. Thank you to the doorkeepers. There were so many people who make this place special. I kept you up all night. I kept you up 24 hours. I just want to say thank you. Thank you, everybody. (Applause.) The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Idaho. Mr. RISCH. Madam President, is the next regular order of business the confirmation of Mr. Matthew Whitaker? The PRESIDING OFFICER. Order in the Senate, please. Order in the Galleries. Mr. RISCH. Madam President, is the next regular order of business the confirmation of Mr. Matthew Whitaker to be NATO? Is that next order of business up? The PRESIDING OFFICER. It is.Mr. RISCH. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that myself and the Senator from Iowa be permitted to speak each 3 minutes, and immediately upon conclusion of that, we proceed to the vote on the confirmation. [SILENCE] The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

“Without objection, it is so ordered.” And so it goes. Even Booker didn’t speak up, throw his body into the gears of this moral moment.

Help? Anyone? No?

Ladies and gentlemen, the Aristocrats.

Donald Trump

Soon I’ll offer another installment in the “What’s really going on?” tragicom series (the first pass is here). In doing so, I’ll be guided by this insight from Ian Welsh, which I urge you to read.

The Trump in my novelist’s brain is driven by very few things. As regards the nation (as opposed to his need to be stroked), they are these — ignorance, arrogance, vengeance and meanness of spirit. Welsh captures the ignorance perfectly in a recent piece:

Trump Doesn’t Have A Master Plan There are a lot of smart people who think Trump has a plan. For example, that he’s deliberately reducing America to a regional power to avoid full Imperial collapse. Or that he’s using tariffs to rebuild American industry. No. Trump isn’t the type, he doesn’t have a master plan. Trump is driven by the idea that other countries are taking advantage of America: by a sense of grievance. He wants good deals, by which he always means that the US gets more than it gives, and he’s willing to end a deal if he thinks it isn’t good.Trump has virtues (not all virtues are moral virtues.) … But he’s not a deep thinker. He doesn’t know much about the political economy, and he doesn’t make and execute policy plans. His purge of the “deep state” is driven by grievance: they went after him during Biden’s reign, so he’s going after them. His tariffs are driven by looking at trade balances and feeling they’re unfair: Europe has about a 235 billion trade surplus with America, for example. That, to Trump is unfair. … Canada has a trade surplus, so that’s Canada taking advantage of the US to Trump, never mind that the US actually sells more goods to Canada than vice-versa and the surplus is essentially all energy trade. If his tariffs were part of a master plan to re-industrialize he wouldn’t have gutted Biden’s industrial policy, which was actually working, and he wouldn’t be waffling back and forth on them. He’d institute them. …

None of his tariff ideas will make sense if you try to see thought. They’re nothing like thought; they’re impulses driven by ignorance and zero self-knowledge.

What this means for the nation, I’ll offer my own best guess soon. (Hint: If he f*cks with the rich and the NatSec state both at once, they’ll remove his piece from the board.)

Marine Le Pen

For those not following French news, Marine Le Pen, hard-right beacon and Trump-like presidential candidate, has been ruled by a court ineligible for public office for the next five years as part of a sentence for crimes she and her party committed.

The Right in America and elsewhere are calling this “lawfare” — the use of the court to eliminate a political rival. The last part is true; Le Pen is indeed a far-right threat to the center-right order. But is the state wrong to punish real and serious crimes?

I’ll let French commentator Arnaud Bertrand help sort out your thoughts. Here’s a key piece (“FN” and “RN” refer to Le Pen’s party):

… The whole case centers on the fact that between 2004 and 2016, FN members of the European Parliament (MEPs) were using their EU parliamentary assistant allowances to pay people who were actually working for the party rather than on EU business. At the European parliament, each MEP gets around €23,392 monthly to hire assistants, and the FN/RN created a system to funnel that money into party operations, which is illegal. Tellingly, many of these "assistants" were on both the European Parliament payroll AND the party's organizational chart, and some never even met the MEPs they supposedly worked for. The court determined the amount diverted totaled €2.9 million. …

Yes, it’s true that the hard-right Le Pen or her party could win the next presidential election. And yes, it’s true that the current president, Emmanuel Macron, is both deeply unpopular and a neoliberal hack.

But is the hard-right correct that this prosecution should not have been done? What if the shoes were reversed and Macron were removed from the board, giving a gift to Le Pen in the next election? His opponents would certainly cheer. Is this lawfare or not?

An interesting thought in these overly interesting times.

Music

Speaking of the French, here’s a historical song from the Revolution. Enjoy.