The Trump presidency, which Bill McKibben calls “so spectacularly horrible that it is hard to look away,’’ has become must-watch, hate-watch TV. This week’s episode: The Wingnuts Abandon Ship.
It was perhaps inevitable that the alt-right crazies who took more credit than they deserved for Donald Trump’s election would eventually fall out with the Monarch of Mar-a-Lago. Why? Because no president governs from the far-anything, be it the far left or the far right. Bill Clinton learned that his first year in office, when the onetime progressive governor of Arkansas bitterly referred to his inner circle — dominated by former Goldman Sachs cochairman Robert Rubin — as “Eisenhower Republicans.’’
It took only 78 days for the hard-right paladins of the Infowars crowd to figure out that President Trump was not, alas, the America First isolationist they thought he was. The now-famous — thanks in part to a slavering profile in The New Yorker — loon/PizzaGate promoter Mike Cernovich called Syria’s use of chemical weapons “fake news’’ and denounced Trump’s retaliatory missile strike.
In a follow-up tweet, Cernovich suggested that the GOP’s 2008 presidential candidate helped fake the Syrian crisis: “Did [Senator John] McCain give ‘moderate rebels’ (ISIS) in Syria poison gas and Hollywood style film equipment?’’
Shades of “Capricorn One,’’ everyone’s favorite O.J. Simpson movie, about how Hollywood faked the 1969 moon landing.
Milo Yiannopoulos, the right-wing provocateur whose 15 seconds of fame seem to have elapsed, denounced Trump’s missile attacks as “FAKE and GAY.’’
Remember how, after the election, Boston Globe and New York Times readers expanded their “news diet’’ to find out what the other half reads? I started monitoring Infowars and its founder, Alex Jones, the renowned wackadoodle who was once buddy-buddy with Trump. (“Alex Jones – nice guy,’’ pretty much the same thing Trump said about the wonderful Bill O’Reilly.)
A few days ago, Infowars coughed up this gem: “Is Trump a Rothschild Agent?’’ Producer and “resident Jewish person’’ Rob Jacobson handled this hot potato, and stopped short of branding Trump an agent of Zionism. He did denounce the president: “We elected a leader and what we got was the same old stuff,’’ he said. “It’s over, he’s beaten.’’
Jacobson’s cohost, Owen Shroyer, spelled it out: “Somebody got to him. I think he’s Stepford Trump now.’’
Much of this could be predicted. The Cernoviches and the Rothschilds-run-the-world types operate on the margins of the information-influence spectrum. In an election decided at the margins — 27,000 votes in Wisconsin, 10,000 votes in Michigan – it’s worth courting them. But now Trump has reverted to type, bootlicking Fox News and the “failing’’ New York Times, which command audiences he wants to address.
As for the alt-right, with its “Continuity of Government’’ obsession, i.e., Bush=Obama=Trump, they are better off serving up the red meat of “resistance’’ to their followers, who presumably will continue to snap up survivalist products, patent medicines, and literature (“The Case Against Fluoride’’) hawked on alt-right websites. There is more advertising heat in denouncing “cuckolded conservatives’’ than in trying to figure out tax reform for the middle class.
So the wingnuts have left the building — for now. It’s easy to imagine that Trump and the loony fringe may find use for each other again, as soon as the next election cycle, perhaps.
Alex Beam’s column runs regularly in the Globe. Follow him on Twitter @imalexbeamyrnot.
