That’s
where we are. Sit with that a minute,
however unpleasant the company.
Trump’s demand for “unconditional surrender”
is not just aimed
overseas. It is the same script he keeps
trying to run right here at
home. Trump said there would be no deal with
Iran except
“unconditional surrender,” while also
insisting the United States
would have a role in choosing Iran’s next
leader. That is not
diplomacy. That is empire talking to itself
in the mirror, drunk on
its own reflection and calling the
hallucination strategy.
And
once you strip away the flag-waving cologne,
the cable-news drum
roll, and the chest-thumping theater, the
larger point becomes plain
as day. Trump does not merely want obedience
from rivals abroad. He
wants total, absolute, full surrender from
everybody. From Congress.
From the courts. From universities. From
journalists. From cities
that vote the “wrong” way. From immigrants,
dissidents, civil
servants, professors, librarians, Black
folks who won’t shut up,
women who won’t smile on command, and
working people who still
think citizenship should involve more than
saluting while
billionaires pick their pockets.
Remember,
if we don’t hang together, we will hang
separately. That old
warning still has some mileage on it,
especially in a country where
too many people keep volunteering to be
divided, conquered, and then
congratulated for their patriotism.
That
is the real trick of Trumpism. It dresses up
surrender as patriotism.
It tells Americans to give up their
standards, their memory, their
dignity, and eventually their rights, then
calls the whole
humiliating transaction “strength.” It says:
surrender your
skepticism, surrender your conscience,
surrender your ability to tell
the difference between a government and a
mob-boss operation.
Surrender first. Ask questions never. March
now. Think later. Or
better yet, don’t think at all. That seems
to be the preferred
model.
Surrender
your “bat” senses, your “spider” sense, your
Thomas Paine
common sense. Hand over every internal alarm
bell God or evolution
gave you. Ignore the smell of smoke. Ignore
the sound of boots.
Ignore the old, familiar rhythm of power
demanding silence and
calling that silence peace.
As
I said, let’s not delude ourselves. He could
not give a damn about
the troops. He has already told us what he
thinks of them, calling
fallen service members losers and suckers.
He shrugged off the real
threat of Iranians killing Americans here
with a lazy, vacant, “Yeah,
I guess.” It is becoming horrifically clear
that the man has no
brain, only a calculator; no heart, just a
value meter; no empathy,
no sympathy, no connection to humanity, and
alas, no soul. He
evaluates human beings the way a crooked
landlord evaluates
appliances: useful, disposable, replaceable,
billable.
The
devil called. He wants his brother back.
So
yes, in a twisted and ugly way, Trump’s
demand for unconditional
surrender abroad sounds like a confession of
his domestic political
theology. He wants a country that stops
resisting. A country that
stops arguing. A country that stops checking
power and starts
kneeling before it. He wants judges who
rubber-stamp, legislators who
clap on cue, corporations that tithe,
preachers who flatter, and
media outlets that bark when told. He does
not dream of a democratic
republic. He dreams of a national hostage
video with better lighting,
stronger branding, and a choir humming in
the background while the
Constitution gets mugged in the alley.
Because
“unconditional surrender,” in Trump’s world,
never just means
the other side should lay down its arms. It
means everybody else
should lay down their independence. Their
institutions. Their
principles. Their spine. It means America
itself should stop being a
noisy, inconvenient democracy and become a
customer service desk for
one man’s greedy appetites, childish
grudges, and devilish
delusions. He wants the whole country
reduced to a gold-plated
complaint department where every answer
begins with “Yes, sir,”
and every principle gets put on hold
indefinitely.
That
is why the phrase lands with such a funky
smell. It reveals the
instinct underneath the slogan. Trump does
not really believe in
persuasion. Persuasion requires patience,
evidence, compromise,
curiosity, and the unpleasant realization
that other people are not
props in your personal pageant of greatness.
He believes in
domination. In humiliation. In making
resistance seem useless and
submission seem inevitable. Same old
schoolyard authoritarianism,
just with more jets, more microphones, more
money, and a fan club
drunk on red-state pageantry and grievance
theater.
So
when Trump barks about unconditional
surrender, Americans ought to
hear the hidden second sentence. Not just
“they must surrender.”
Also: “you will, too.” Your rights will
surrender. Your
institutions will surrender. Your history
will surrender. Your
self-respect will surrender. In his ideal
arrangement, the whole
country becomes one giant gold-plated lobby
where democracy checks
in, hands over its luggage, and quietly dies
over there in the dark
corner near the potted plants, while some
fool in a flag pin calls it
efficiency.
That
is the scam. He sells national strength by
demanding civic weakness.
He sells patriotism by asking the public to
abandon the very
high-and-mighty ideas that make
self-government possible. He sells
order by normalizing the language of
conquest. And somewhere in that
rotten exchange, too many Americans mistake
submission for unity,
fear for leadership, and loudness for
greatness. Human beings do love
a shiny uniform and a simple chant. Saves
them the burden of
thinking, comparing, remembering, and
noticing that the salesman
keeps stealing the furniture while pitching
the dream.
I
had a professor tell me, “It’s easy to be
over there on the far
Left or Right. It’s hard as hell to stand in
the middle and reason,
think, compare, and contrast.” That line has
stayed with me,
because reason is hard work and surrender is
easy. Slogans are easy.
Costumes are easy. Hating the designated
enemy is easy. Democracy is
harder. Democracy asks grown-ups to think
past their tantrums,
question their idols, and admit that power
without limits eventually
comes for everybody.
So
yes, hell yes, if you ponder the notion,
Trump’s demanding the
unconditional surrender of America too. Not
the land. Not the
highways. Not the monuments. The inner
republic. The constitutional
one. The stubborn one. The one that still
believes power should
answer to something besides ego, appetite,
and vengeance. That is the
America he keeps trying to break. That is
the America he wants
exhausted, confused, intimidated, and
domesticated. And that is the
America that had better stop acting confused
about what exactly he is
asking for.
He’s
a Big Apple hustler, a flimflam con man.
That part is a given. But he
has gone from navigating the political game
to trying to manipulate
it, as on January 6, and now to simply
dictating what he wants and
trying to ram it down everybody’s throat. It
is the old story of
the spoiled yet neglected little rich kid
who grew into a vengeance
machine with a microphone. We’ve all read
the tragic file. So his
meanness, his cruelty, his bullying, his
instinct to degrade and
dominate, none of that is surprising. It was
predictable. Some of us
so-called alarmists spent the last decade
saying exactly that, only
to be treated like we were overreacting
while the house quietly
filled with smoke.
We
knew what he was capable of because we knew
what mainstream White
America was capable of too: repeating
yesteryear, romanticizing
yesteryear, running back to yesteryear like
it was some Norman
Rockwell postcard instead of a
separate-and-unequal social order
dressed up in bunting and lies. When he said
he would take back “our”
country, the subtext was never subtle. He
meant make it 1952 white.
Make it obedient. Make it hierarchical. Make
it safe for old myths
and dangerous for everybody else.
Manifest
Destiny on a global level. Confederate
nostalgia with Wi-Fi. Jim Crow
in a necktie. Empire abroad, submission at
home. That is the smell of
it. That is the shape of it. And that is why
nobody should delude
themselves now. When Trump demands
unconditional surrender from
others, he is telling America exactly what
he wants from her too.
