Thread by @wesyang

This piece points out that Trump's incompetence and inertness in office incited the military to begin making policy without regard to his will -- in other words, that the authoritarian threat he summoned up is from those who acted to frustrate him jeetheer.substack.com/p/two-paths-to…

Trump's verbal norm violations created an ongoing state of exception that lead those resisting him into routinized substantive violations of diplomatic, military, governing, and journalistic norms

We have these moments where the satirical comic opera threatens to turn into something minatory -- and as various officials sign on to open letters endorsing the stole election claim there is now (as always) a plausible scenario in which we get there...

And yet we seem to approach this turn asymptotically, never actually reaching it, remaining forever suspended in this weird simulacrum of real history.

Believing in Trump as savior or devil are equally cringe, which is a large part of the comedy of the past four years. He is a 21st century Music Man in a world that has built the communications infrastructure to scale up an immersive MMORPG to replace the real world entirely.

It can now turn malign as the GOP becomes his party, and it might. We'll see. What's clear is that the present plausible alarmism doesn't have anything like the drawing power for the televisual audience of the one that had him personally starring.

And this failure of the show as entertainment may well dictate its course.

(Failed entertainments get canceled)

I took seriously the terrifying prognostications about Trump for the first four months or so and then realized that the intensity of the clamor around him tended to be inversely correlated to the actual underlying facts.

The cases made on behalf of the alarmism, when read properly, revealed themselves to be the more effective cases on behalf of languor and smirking complacency than anything else

I could be wrong -- we'll see...

I get why some people think it's an act of treason, etc for the military to ignore him. But he is an inert and wavering figure who thus produces a vacuum of leadership in the absence of any understanding of how to wield power; hard to see how it could have been otherwise.