Okay, I don't want to do a whole 'STRAP IN YOU COCK-HOLSTERS AND TAKE A BIG SIP OF COVFEFE BECAUSE THIS IS A THREAD' thing, but the #TrumpTaxReturns, #TrumpIsBroke thing is stupid and annoying, so here it goes: (1/whatever)

This is Robert Trump, Trump's younger brother who died recently. He's normal, right? Regular hair, no fake tan- oh and did you know he was on the board of the company that owns Bethesda, who published the Wolfenstein games?

So Robert Trump is what Donald Trump would look like if he was normal, and a big part of being normal is caring what other people think of you. It's obeying rules: fake tan looks bad and tacky (with a whole load of classist assumptions thrown in) so you don't get it.

So what if you don't care about rules? There's a whole strain of anti-aesthetics that runs from Dadaism through Surrealism, Punk, 2000s hipsterism to whatever 100 Gecs think they're doing that says "rules for what 'looks good' in a world as fucked as this are hypocritical"

But that's not Trump- he has strong beliefs in a whole host of norms (punching Don Jnr for not wearing a suit to a baseball game). So more accurately, his aesthetic relate to the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt's idea of the Sovereign as being one who can 'decide upon the exception'.

His aesthetic ideas are "there are rigid, gendered rules for how somebody should look that must be obeyed, but as a Sovereign, I may break those rules." See also his effeminate, gossipy behaviour and crucially his taxes.

And people, literally all people, love the idea of somebody who exercises sovereignty. John Wick didn't say 'killing people is wrong and illegal, so I had better call the police about the death of my dog', he fucking shot a billion guys. And that's cool.

Virtually every story in popular fiction has elements of deciding upon exceptions as a crucial heroic trait. People love that trope, and Liberals don't seem to understand this *at all*, hence all the 'got his ass' posts going around today.

They see hypocrisy as a sign of weakness when they should see it, as Trump's supporters do, as a sign of strength.

To counter it you don't need a finger-wagging hall monitor, you twatwaffles need a heaping spoonful of Deleuze. Deciding on the exception may break the rules, but it does so by acknowledging that the rules exist- they're a territory that you might step outside sometimes.

So move elsewhere. Don't play games with people who make a virtue of cheating at those games. Crazy idea: *have policies that improve people's lives in ways that they cannot deny*, like Medicare for All.