The devil you know

by David Benjamin

“How low can you go?” —Chubby Checker

WASHINGTON D.C.—Smedley, who has been my undercover informant in the nation’s capital since Nancy Reagan’s astrologer, is nervous now because he has, somewhat reluctantly, come in from the cold. He has an actual salaried job in the second reich of Donald Trump and even an office, a converted janitor’s closet in the West Wing basement. Humble though this space was, Smedley had a desk, a computer, a phone line and a copy of Project 2025. His mission, he explained, was to facilitate a national psy-op called “Moral Disarmament.”
I demanded details.

Smedley paused to light a Parodi stogie—causing my eyes to water—and he said, “We reached a point in Donald Trump’s rise from the ashes, after January 6, that a basic human sense of outrage against corruption, a natural inclination toward honesty and decency, had been buried beneath the cascade of lies, evasions, profanities, obscenities and delusional gibberish from Trump.”

Smedley went on, “This numbing of we, the people’s, moral core was happening slowly but surely. The leading sociopaths in Trump’s circle—Stephen Miller, Pam Bondi, Pete Hegseth, a bunch of us—realized we had thoroughly conditioned everyone, especially yellow-dog Republicans, to the theology of ‘American carnage.’ Just by invoking loyalty to Trump (and mentioning his similarity to Jesus) we knew we could get away with anything immoral, amoral, criminal, abominable. The question was: How do we speed up the suffocation of America’s conscience? How do we smother the memory of a founding president who could not tell a lie?”

I suggested that one secret to Trump’s success is a talent for blame-shifting. In a transparent pathology of projection, he has spent his life calling honest people, many of them victimized by his depredations, “sleazebags” and “scum.”

“That’s right,” said Smedley. “And you see how it works. The louder and longer this nakedly phony, endlessly repetitive victim-slandering goes on, the more tiring it becomes. After a decade of treading slime in a sea of lies, all that most people can do is shrug. ‘It’s just Trump,’ folks keep saying, ‘being Trump.’”

Smedley said that the “clinical trial” of this new national ethic of ‘So what?’was the aftermath of Trump’s January 6 riot at the Capitol. “Donald spent four years coddling these criminals, telling Americans not to believe our lying eyes, insisting that 2,000 thugs trying to kill police and and yearning lynch the vice president, shitting on desks and pissing on pillars, were patriots attending a picnic. Gradually, that travesty against the very foundations of our democracy shrank so small in the perceptions of the people that—when Trump being Trump, on his first day back in the White, set feee 1,600 criminals, many convicted of sedition—we could say, ‘Oh well, maybe it wasn’t so bad after all.’”

Smedley blew a foul-smelling smoke ring. “At that breathtaking moment of moral surrender, we knew we could normalize anything! High-fives all around the Oval Office!”

I said, “Wait. What about restoring faith in government? Trump’s people have been calling Washington a ‘swamp’ for ten years. They were going to drain it.”

“C’mon, man. People aren’t that gullible,” said Smedley. He took a deep cleansing breath. “Well, they are gullible, but selectively. They need showbiz—a little pizzazz! For instance, it’s easy for millions to believe that Hillary Clinton was part of a Satanist cult of Democrats sacrificing stolen children in the cellar of a pizza parlor, eating little boys and girls’ entrails and drinking baby’s-blood cocktails. This is a great horror story and it makes perfect sense to anyone who’s watched a few Freddy Krueger movies. But taxpayers? Believing that senators and congresspeople can behave honestly and ethically on behalf of their constituents?”

“Don’t make me laugh,” I said.

“Exactly,” replied Smedley. “Pizza-gate was cosmic crapola, but its effect—along with all the whoppers and conspiracist drivel generated by the Trump cult—was to accelerate the inversion of reality. It conditioned the public to picturing fictional scenes of grotesque carnage that are eerily parallel to the real-life grooming and rape of hundreds of little girls by Trump sidekick Jeffrey “Terrific Guy” Epstein and his vampiric wing girl, Ghislaine Maxwell.

“The combination of pizza-gate with Epstein’s decades of pimping children to horny old men, from which all of those horny old men—prominent politicians, corporate leaders and Wall Street moguls—have been shielded from exposure and prosecution, are the essence of Moral Disarmament. They are proof to a cynical public that the swamp is drowning all of us.”

“You’re saying that we can’t trust anyone. We’re all Fox Mulder now.”

“Not quite,” said Smedley. “I’m saying that Trump is the only one we can trust. He’s the naked emperor, completely exposed. More blatantly than any politician in U.S. history, in the history of the world—really, Hitler and Stalin were more subtle and sophisticated—Trump is the devil you know. He struts and frets his contempt for our republic’s sacred texts. He tramples our institutions, sneers at the rule of law, shatters our alliances and plots revenge against his endless roster of enemies. He fingers strange women in dressing rooms and lusts after his own daughter. We know the worst of Trump and we see, in his mental and moral desiccation, that he’s getting even worse. But he is our education. We have also decayed under his guidance. Lest we open the gates to the barbarians of his deepest delusions, we have no choice but to forgive the Donald any offense, any outrage, any depravity. We have already forgiven him that symbolic body gunned down on Fifth Avenue, just as we are poised to forgive him proximity to those non-symbolic teenage girls raped and sodomized by his pedophile party-pals, Jeff and Ghizzy. ‘I’m rotten,’ he tells us as he smiles mirthlessly and waggles his tiny fingers, ‘but so’s everyone else. Go ahead and get rid of me. But the next one—you don’t know him like you know me—could be just as rotten, or rottener!’”

“We stick with the devil,” I asked, “because we know this devil?”

“Well, we’re not Faust,” said Smedley, waxing literary. “We’re selling our souls, but not with full disclosure. Trump wears the mask of a Messiah, a savior who laments apocalyptically that humanity’s sins have grown into a mountain of evil. Atop that infernal peak, he foresees the End of Days and prophesies its imminence. He sees what we’ve done to ourselves—sinking even to the depths of twice electing an idiot president—and tells us, sadly but with a diabolical twinkle in in his raccoon-ringed eyes, that we are doomed. He sees the four six-winged beasts and the seven-horned Lamb. He sees ‘a pale horse: and his name that sat upon him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given over to them a fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword and with hunger, and with death.’

“Trump sees even his own fate, preordained by a life among grifters, gamblers, gonophs, pimps and pedophiles, toward which he will drag us with him. He is our tangerine-flake archangel of paradise lost … ‘that old serpent … which deceiveth the whole world, he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.’

“You’re saying that we’re the angels?”

“We’re only as angelic as Trump tells us he is,” said Smedley. “We are disarmed, stripped of scruples. Willingly, we are his subjects. We cannot escape, and we will stay with him ’til the bitter end when we all plummet into the pit we dug with bare and blistered hands when we voted for him—twice.”

“But I didn’t vote for him,” I objected. “Ever.”

“Look it up,” said Smedley, puffing smoke into my face. “Judgment Day ain’t Election Day.”