Introduction
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Editorial Note
When it comes to planning texts ahead of writing them, I do a piss poor job. Ever since I heard of President Joe Biden’s farewell address and when he came to allege his successor Donald J. Trump of being an oligarch, I was excited to learn a little more about the concept that I hitherto only heard of with reference to Russia. Little did I know, although I should have expected, that I was going to end up completely out of bounds and with a text that would be much more than a little commentary and correction of the outgoing President’s remarks. As things stand now, this little side hustle as I was getting prepared to write about the Geneva Conference of 1954 in my main project turned out to become a two-months project by itself. I do not claim that it wasn’t worth it as it was fun and I learnt a lot in the process. But I admire those who are able to discipline themselves and are able to stop adding more and more content to their project to the point where they became immobile. Alas, I know why I do not work with publishers and instead choose my independence in my hobby: It gives me space to not deal with such hindrances.
I nonetheless remorse that of the three handwritten notes of things I wanted to add to this text; I wanted to see if I can draw comparisons between Shakespearean kings and Donald J. Trump, although there, it was finally dropped because of the flow of my text as it autonomously developed. You may hear such apologies from fiction writers who claim that their protagonists developed lives of their own and led them rather than they as the writers determining their protagonists’ fates. (And think of all the readers who wouldn’t have it and instead allege their favourite authors of whimsically killing them off at their audience’s expense) Perhaps I could have waited a little longer until I read William Shakespeare’s Richard 111 and “Tragedy of Cymbeline”, and redirect the text in such a way as that I could still shoehorn an apparent passage in. But for what good would it have been? If there is one lesson I have learnt from the composition of this text, it’s that Charles Bukowski was right: One needs to kill one’s darlings. And mine were the handwritten notes and the ideas in my head that didn’t make it into this text. It still ended up to be a decent piece of work that did the incumbent, second-time President justice within the given circumstances.
Which leads me to something else that I may want to address hereby: To some readers, the tone may seem too pleasing of the incumbent President, that I even tried to curry favours with him and his sympathisers because I didn’t sufficiently condemn his actions. If anyone should come out of this text with this impression, if the potential for such perceptions should exist, let me put things straight: I condemn this man’s actions and what he is doing not only to the hallowed office he occupies for the second time now, but to this glorious nation as well. I have been doing so ever since he took over office for the first time, but hatred for the subject-matter doesn’t excuse a lack of professionalism. Just imagine if the journalists and editors of the “Washington Post” or the “New York Times” began to write like the scriveners of “BoingBoing.net” or the “Daily Mail”. Their readers would exit their subscriptions by the thousands, their income would collapse like a detonated skyscraper. Now I am not a staff writer for either of the two honourable newspapers, I am just a hobby blogger with no outreach whatsoever, but I still want to hold myself up to standards I would expect of others in the public discourse, especially those who have got a good following on social media, therefore could be held to certain responsibilities. Also, what would be the fun in writing if one wrote in a long-form text the same way that one wrote, for example, on Twitter? It would become stale and boring, and no reader could expect any surplus value from its lecture.
Now, enough of the writing process, let’s talk a little about the content. Regarding the headline, the question would be how long it could take one to pick up the definition from a dictionary and compare it to the first umpteenth days of the President—so far, he has been barely two months in office, but the text has spanned for more than 90 pages. How is this possible? I confess that a good portion of the pages is filled with references to news articles that may be of no interest for the people today as we are still living through his presidency, and all of what is being said here is freshly burnt into our brains. But my experience has taught me that texts written on topical subjects age poorly overtime when the events addressed lie in the dark past. The first time I have noticed that was when I read Paul Lafargue’s « Le droit à la paresse », where he as spoken about several contemporary issues that to me as someone who has only read a little about history was benign and would have required me to look it all up with the little information that he presented to me. The second time was when I was doing research on the life of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, including skimming through some of their correspondence preserved in collected works. The online version of the “MEGA” has done an outstanding job in annotating the digitised letters already available for today’s readers who may not be familiar with the history of, say, workers’ strikes in 19th century’s Cologne, or other subjects the two of them spoke about when they wrote to each other. (When the subject wasn’t either Marx’ occasional money troubles or the stagnating progress in his writing, the letter which I can genuinely relate to) Although I am never going to achieve the fame of the likes of Marx, Engels or even Lafargue, I still wanted to make sure that whenever someone should coincidentally stumble over this text, or any other I have uploaded to the internet, they should be able to read up quickly on what I am talking about. In times of the internet’s provision of abundant information, there is no excuse to not share information on subjects that cannot be considered common knowledge. And with the many incidents President Trump is triggering, even those I have cited in the stream of this text cannot necessarily be assumed to be known by everyone. My experience since January 21, 2025, has been that it becomes a drag to catch up with everything, and I cannot vouchsafe for the actuality of all footnotes. Some I have updated, but at some point as I was nearing the end, I gave up on updating most of them, as long as it could be foretold that the basis of my assessment was not altered by the latest developments. And that was the main point all along—one cannot write about ongoing events without immediately experiencing expiration. The only ones who this curse must leave relatively unaffected are journalists who are always catching up and never overtake.
Speaking of the internet’s abundance in information, we must also speak briefly about link rot. I have previously said that I wanted the afterworld to be able to read this text and simultaneously be able to check what I am talking about by citing viable sources in the footnotes. The problem is that the topical information are usually from news articles available online. When one reads older essays and books, such as by Walter Lippmann, one will come across references to newspapers that may be out of print by now—with Lippmann, the first that comes to mind would be the New York Herald Journal. Of course there are archives, but who has got the time to commute to the next library that may have access to an archive’s resources to read up on that? And would that person believe it worthwhile to undertake this journey just to check what I am talking about? The internet conveys the convenience to not get up from one’s chair or couch—one can just click the link and be redirected to a website. Quickly skim through the text to revive your memory, and jump back to the PDF. The only issue that could interrupt this process would be link rot. Researchers have already notified that nearly 20 percent of all websites are dead (M. Klein et al., 2014), which may sound like a lot but technically aren’t when one remembers that the web archive has got more than ten billion websites saved in alternately many crawls, the total amount pending daily. I have occasionally saved some of the sources I have quoted, but am in good graces that all of which I have cited have also been saved once either at Archive (dot) is or the Web Archive’s Wayback Machine. Perhaps I will come back to also save some of the (dot) gov resources as the Trump Administration pursues the deletion and censorship of the government’s online resources for the most dystopian reasons, but as I said: Given their yearslong presence online, there is a good chance that they have already been saved. I noticed it the first time that this chance realistically exists when I saw that George Washington’s digitised Farewell Address was saved more than 75 times over the span of nearly a decade. I shall be damned if this proclamation should come back to bite me in the arse.
One of the other reasons I finally decided to bring this subject up was the lack of consequence on the subject of when to cite statutory laws and when to just name them in brackets within the text. I have noticed that I began citing them and later resorted to naming them in-text, but didn’t generalise my practice upon realisation because I feared repercussions from MS Word when I removed the footnotes, so it stayed the way it was. The inconveniences to the reader should relay at a bare minimum, methinks. If it should be otherwise, please let me know. As for the mentioning of applicable statutory law or court rulings related to some of President Trump’s actions, please do not expect cutting-edge legal analysis, I am nothing but a layman, if I could even call myself that. I cite such information the same way I cite news reports, analyses or commentary. Readers who are interested in commentary by legal experts on the laws I have cited will have to commit to the extra effort of unearthing it. No such resources were available to me anyway, so I couldn’t have offered it even if I wanted to. Another minor detail that I have come late to realise was that through the Federal Register, I could learn about Executive Orders’ numeration that I have previously seen in the Heritage Foundation’s “Mandate for Leadership”, but due to my aforementioned laggardness, I did not do good in citing them properly. Because I am a lifelong netizen who has learnt how to properly cite sources, I have treated them like I treat all sources, without any sense for special treatments. To some this may prove improper execution of my work, and I take their critique as valid, but I also had the common reader in mind who may value the link to the full text more than the FR identification number. If you value the FR ID higher, feel free to download this PDF and add them with a comment or write them in the margins.
Notes concerning the content
After all this time that I have been writing this text—as I will note in my main text, I have started writing as early as when President Biden claimed that Trump were an oligarch—one would wonder whether this text is really just about the semantics of oligarchy and the likes. And technically, yes, it is just about this topic. But as time rolled on and the “Trump train” kept on moving further towards the inevitable cliff, I noticed that it would be foolish and uninteresting to stick to just this topic, and so, I did what I mostly contemplated for myself when reading the news during his first presidency and the advent of the second: What kind of authoritarian he is. I will stick to just this term because anything else would either be far-fetched, boisterous without any substance, raucous or immature. As soon as one joins any social media network and delves into political posts, one is likely going to hear that he were a Fascist. And while I cannot claim to not have occasionally considered the etiquette myself, I have finally abstained from it because it just didn’t fit the bill. If one asked the people how they got the idea that Trump were a Fascist, the most substantiated arguments would usually refer to Umberto Eco’s late essay, “Ur Fascism”. I have spoken some details of the essay in my previous long-form text (Oliver Bender (2022), page 766), and when one reads this footnote, one will notice that it does not fit Trump’s policies or overall reörder of US society at all. He is divisive and full of hatred, and hasn’t got a redeeming feature about him that we could interpret as charming and in pursuit of a glorious past in his country. There is no greater story he wants to tell, and unlike a Fascist, he is not interested in a strongman state. Au contraire ! In tandem with his right-hand man Elon Musk, he is underway to hollow the state out so that he can rule like an absolutist monarch. The backlash his party members experience and we will address later in the text shows this clearly: He is not interested in bringing his country forward, we cannot even tell that there are monetary interests involved. Instead, he seems to be driven by a lust for destruction, whether it is for a sense of retaliation due to what he had to go through during his first tenure or just because he is unable to fathom the aftermath of this detour we cannot tell. And if his first tenure has taught us anything, it’s that we must abstain from becoming armchair psychologists who treat President Trump like our collective patient. It hasn’t worked with Barry Goldwater, and it won’t work with the “man, woman, camera, TV” guy. As for Eco’s essay, while I have treated it more seriously in my main text, “Capitalism & Anarchism”, one thing must be made clear: That it is overexaggerated in its acclaim, it helps far less in making out Fascists in our everyday life (as its Dutch translation insinuates, the title reads “Hoe herken ik een Fascist?”, How do I recognise a Fascist?), and its overall foundation could be understood as pre-emptively rebuked by the equally critically acclaimed essayist and novelist George Orwell. In his 1944 essay, “What is Fascism?”, he has exposed the consequences of the excessive application of Fascism as a buzzword to smear unliked contemporaries, thus hollowing out its otherwise sharp meaning (George Orwell, 1968 [1944]). I found the modern interpretation of this sentiment of Fascism as a shutdown argument to silence adversaries in the writing of novelty novelist Marc-Uwe Kling quite fitting: In the first volume of his trilogy “Kangaroo Chronicles”, his anthropomorphic protagonist, the Kangaroo, is put on trial for attempted theft of a bicycle, and when the judge is set to read its verdict, he decries him as a Fascist, thus provoking an additional fee for insulting a public official (Marc-Uwe Kling, 2017 [2009]). The author, who is also the Kangaroo’s involuntary landlord/host, has provided us with the best assessment of its misbehaviour in the same sketch: It has got a problem with its anger management; perhaps the same can be said of the people who throw the term “Fascist” around too, but again: No armchair psychology, it leads us nowhere and gnaws on our credibility.
I have sometimes wondered if people like to grasp for utmost extremes because they believe that nothing else could placate a problem’s direness; that as soon as someone tried to mediate by providing a sober judgment could beget relativism and disadvantageously relieve people so that they in turn underestimated said problem’s urgency. As I will make clear in this text, this is not my interest, but when we always drive at the highest velocity, we will blind ourselves for more pressing problems. Everyone who learns about time management 101 will be taught that they need to prioritise their tasks, or else they will not get anything done in time. One needs to assert which tasks must enjoy the highest priority and which ones can wait for a day or two more. The same applies for the challenges of our times: President Trump is a pressing issue, there can be no doubt about it, but he is not the paramount one because he is only the symptom of an underlying, greater problem: That of Conservatism’s decay, shown foremost in the misattribution of fringe right populism guised in its name. Throughout the Western world, right-winged populism of varying extremnesses has garnered support because politically homeless people radicalised themselves out of desperation because they lost their home to a worn-off pseudo-Conservatism that was more interested in appealing to the broadest masses rather than keeping a clear-cut profile even though it may cost them some votes. This tendency has become clearest in German chancellor Angela Merkel, who throughout her chancellorship wore her party’s profile off to such a degree that it barely stood for anything anymore. Once she left, the party not only lost a nonetheless charismatic figure, but was also left with a baggage it had a hard time laying off, while a good part of the population already showed its disenchantment with the party that no longer had anything to offer to them, especially not the Conservative alternative to the other parties that respectively served their bases and constituents.
President Trump, on the other hand, showed a party that was already hypocritical in its swinging in intervals when it comes to fiscal responsibility that they did not have to be ashamed of behaving like schoolyard bullies and even alluded to autocrats (by becoming ones themselves) as long as their achieved their goals. Many understood the rise of Donald J. Trump as a mask-off moment, that he allegedly unleashed a sentiment that was lingering within them for years. I would technically agree with them, although one could also be a little more forthcoming and allege them of being amoral opportunists who took no chances when a man ruining the Grand Old Party’s reputation gained popular support within the populace. Whichever answer is the right one does not bold well for the country as a whole anyway. It does not mean that we had to show leniency towards the man who has triggered the process because he were a victim of his time, as he did not show any interest in undoing the damage he has caused, but it means that we have to reconfigure our understanding of how he came to happen and what a GOP past his presidency and political actions will look like. We cannot expect the Republican party to dissolve as so many parties have when their first and only leader died or dropped out of politics; it is likelier that it will devolve like the CCCP did in the Soviet Union, especially after the latter’s downfall with the raising of the Iron Curtain and the incremental independence of its Eastern European, Caucasian and Central Asian satellite states. Republicans, if they still deserved one more chance, had to be understood like partygoers who have fun as if there were no tomorrow but were not granted the benefit of an early death, so that they had to come to the realisation that their life was not a movie, series or telltale and that they were indeed going to see another day, including the tortuous headaches. And in my opinion, those headaches cannot beget them too early.
As for now, I have said everything that I needed to say. It was plain from the start that this Introduction is not going to be able to compete with G. W. F. Hegel’s famous introduction to his “Phenomenology of the Spirit” which clocks in up in the sixties and touches on so many relevant subjects to the text that many authors would be able to dedicate as much time and text to it alone as they would to the actual main text. The same won’t apply to this introduction, as it comes closer to an editorial note. I still found it reasonable to address the subjects to avoid any false expectations or misunderstandings concerning the decisions I made in the process of this text’s composition. I hope that none of the editorial decisions hinder the enjoyment of this little text.
Yours sincerely,
Oliver Bender
Further Reading:
- Klein M, Van de Sompel H, Sanderson R, Shankar H, Balakireva L, Zhou K, et al. (2014) Scholarly Context Not Found: One in Five Articles Suffers from Reference Rot. PLoS ONE 9(12): e115253. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0115253
- Bender, Oliver (2022). Capitalism & Anarchism. Rationalpolitik. Link: »Rationalpolitik«. Page 776.
- Orwell, George (1944). As I Please. In: Orwell, Sonia; Angus, Ian (Eds.) (1968). The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, vol. 3. As I Please. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Pp. 111—114.
- Kling, Marc-Uwe (2017 [2009]. Die Känguru-Chroniken. Berlin: Ullstein Verlage. Seite 112.
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