Trump’s TraumaLand

Pay attention to what Trump does, not what he says.

So we hear again and again. But sometimes speech is not just words but what language philosophers call speech acts. The leading proponent of ordinary language philosophy J. L. Austin called them performative utterances. I do in a marriage ceremony is what seals the deal. Your clergyman pronounces you married, formally declaring to the world what your vows already made so. The deal is done before he speaks. Marriage is the only Christian sacrament consecrated by the laity, by you and me.

Trump threatens to pardon the January 6th insurrectionists, and the damage is done even before he signs the Executive Order. We clutch our pearls, wondering, what can we do to stop this?

Trump nominates a clown car of cabinet secretaries, dreams of buying Greenland from our NATO ally Denmark and take over the Panama Canal and make Canada the 51ststate and the Gaza beachfront “the Riviera of the Middle East,” and crazy as those ideas are (and there are many more), the menace is increased by those pardons. Three-card monte, bait and switch, flooding the zone, throwing spaghetti against the wall to see what will stick — choose your metaphor. It's all about the chaos, fast and furious.

Read the rest of this piece over at Randy’s Substack, here: https://randyfertel.substack.com/p/trumps-traumaland