Slob Fascism
The absurdity is a power move.
What the hell are they trying to do?
We spend a lot of time arguing about the Trump regime’s motives. Is the outrage of the day a mere distraction or a core commitment? Is it one man’s narcissistic flailing, or a systematic move by the architects of Project 2025? Is it effective authoritarian consolidation, or Washington business as usual with a gross Trumpian gloss?
Given the reality-show, meme-hungry, too-online nature of the regime, we’re better off unpacking the answers using media criticism instead of traditional political analysis. As Roger Ebert used to say, It’s not what a movie is about, it’s how it is about it—the details of a film matter less than what it’s trying to do and whether it’s successfully executed (both Silence of the Lambs and Friday the 13th Part IV are “about” serial killers, but that says almost nothing about the point of the two films).
How, then, is the Trump administration telling its story—and how does the manner of telling shape the story’s meaning?
The most important how of the administration’s story isn’t the specific medium, but the mode. Whether the regime is expressing a narrative through military parades, the assembly of adoring crowds, the release of short AI videos on social media, or what passes for traditional press conferences, there are consistent identifiable threads in the way the story is told. And of those, the vital how is simply lying.
The regime tells lies on a level beyond precedent, beyond need, beyond belief. The lies come with oppressive speed and regularity, stacking together relentless confusion, internal contradictions, and flat impossibilities into a hallucinatory welter. At base, the entire debate about Trump “distractions” comes from the fact that the lying is so total that most are literally unable to believe that there might not be a coherent strategy behind it.
And it’s not the content of the lies that are important for unpacking Trump’s story about America: it’s the simple fact of their existence. The constant flooding of the zone with misinformation and bluffs, the willful ignorance, the gobsmackingly public corruption, and the disingenuous claims of congressional impotence (which, by devolving all power to the executive, somehow double as assertions of absolute power for the ruling party) all serve to attack the very idea of truth, of a shared reality that might be used to limit the regime’s attacks on American law, norms, and values.
The lies are, above all else, sloppy. Consider one specific, now decade-long example: Trump’s claim that he’s working on a way to replace the ACA with something bigger, better, more beautiful. The content doesn’t matter at all; what matters is the ability to get away with claiming (for over nine years!) that a new plan is right around the corner. How the claim is made via an obvious, blatant, long-repeated lie. It’s not intended to convey information or even a truth claim, but to taunt the opposition and while providing supporters with one more loyalty test. The very lack of attempt to hide the lie expresses the core message: support Dear Leader, or fuck you.
You can see the same sloppiness in physical productions, including the presentation of Trump’s own body. The clownish makeup ending halfway down the neck, the mile-long tie, the hair, and on and on are meant to show his power—he’s in control, has no fucks to give, is so fully himself that people will buy a line of bullshit as extreme as They’re not after you, they’re after me; I’m just in the way.1 It’s of a piece with the trashy rallies, the cheap gilding, the groping of the flag like it’s a teenage beauty contestant, the coming introduction of UFC fights into the country’s symbolic home…it’s all defiantly ugly, and all always described as beautiful.
Susan Sontag wrote that the fascist aesthetics of the 1930s allowed “everyday reality [to be] transcended through ecstatic self control and submission.”2 In 2025 we have slob fascism, in which the leader’s total lack of control is meant to show complete confidence in both himself and his devoted, disgustingly submissive MAGA movement.
By now we’re largely inured to both the lies and the sloppiness—and the latter in particular can seem like a small thing compared to atrocities like the slashing of USAID funding that leave children literally screaming from hunger. Still, neither should be ignored or dismissed. We’ve been trapped in a lunatic’s reality TV show for going on a decade; if we’re going to maneuver to an exit, we have to pay attention to both the script and the sets. We need to try to nail down the story they’re trying to make us live through.
And on that core, the very obviousness of the blatant lying and corruption—the how—is a completely coherent, if horrifying, story.
It’s a story about the inevitable and eternal triumph of a pure, “real” American people under the leadership and protection of an infallible leader.
It’s a story that says that their triumph—and the opposition’s defeat—has already been accomplished.
Most importantly, it’s a story that says there is nothing you can do to change that. They will be in power forever, the story says; people should just get used to it.
And that’s why focusing on the how is absolutely a powerful weapon for resistance. Because the core Trumpian how, we must remind ourselves, is the unrestrained lie. It’s all lies: that they’ve already won, that none of it is reversible, that the only thing to do is adjust and submit. It’s all bullshit, top to bottom—and it all relies on our buying it.
Remember that, and remember that we’re going to win.
There’s probably not a person on Earth—mayyyyybe Ivanka—who Trump wouldn’t push in front of a train to save himself from minor embarrassment.
“Fascinating Fascism,” collected in Under the Sign of Saturn, 1980.
Timely. 'How' is indeed a nasty bug, well said.