Jeb Bush was right
You should have clapped
For the past eight years one of my occasional hobbies has been rewatching YouTube clips from the 2016 GOP primary debates. These debates still hold a lot of resonance for me emotionally, as I watched virtually all of them live as a fervent Trump supporter. It’s a lot of fun to recall how energized and inspired I felt whenever our “God-King” landed a superbly timed insult against one of his many rivals.
One of the most memorable dynamics from these debates was the rivalry between Trump and Jeb Bush, who’d started the race as GOP frontrunner and then quickly collapsed as other neocons entered the race and Trump sucked up all media oxygen. Despite this humiliating decline, for much of 2015 Jeb acted as Trump’s chief nemesis in the race, and to my mind this played a crucial role in Trump’s rise.
One reason for this is that attacking Jeb let Trump stay in the spotlight and gradually endear himself to Republican voters while waiting out more marginal rivals. It also let him play nice with more formidable candidates like Ted Cruz, a former debate champion and Tea Party darling who actually could have wounded Trump in the early stages of the race. It was only just before the Iowa caucuses that Trump fully engaged Cruz, and by that point the Trump Train was unstoppable (despite some altogether impressive ratfucking from the Cruz Campaign later on).
More crucially, Bush’s lineage and porcine physiognomy made him the perfect embodiment of everything MAGA opposed, and this let Trump treat him as a kind of electoral piñata. Whenever Trump whacked Jeb! good he would go up in the polls because it felt like a victory for everyone opposed to the hated neocon establishment.
It was also consistently hilarious, and that’s where a serious danger emerged—eventually Jeb!-punching became so fun and such a fixture of beloved meme content that all lingering doubts about Trump’s life of grifting and con artistry were tossed aside. Before long even the most purity spiraling NS types in the Alt Right started to conveniently ignore the parts of Trump’s worldview that obviously clashed with their own, such as his avowed Zionism and hostility to Iran. It was just too much fun to indulge in anti-Jeb memes.
Trump clearly knew what he was doing here. He’d known for years about the base’s ferocious hatred for the neocons. I suspect he took one look at Jeb and saw a schlubby, pink-cheeked ticket to the White House. He realized that by bullying Jeb on national television he could scam bunch of angry libertarians and protectionist midwesterners into ignoring a parade’s worth of red flags and thinking he was on their side.
Trump’s a moron in a lot of respects, but there’s no one on the planet more talented when it comes to scamming resentful idiots at scale. He instinctively knows how to weaponize the friend-enemy distinction like no one else.
Crucially, he understands that people who paint themselves as cynical outsiders are usually the most credulous and gullible of all when you show them a little love. Meanwhile, it’s easy to exploit the arrogance of weird nerds who feel unappreciated by other elites. Guys like that are always itching to let the fox in the henhouse.
And that’s how Trump bamboozled a movement of intelligent and disagreeable men into becoming his staunchest cultural vanguard, while agitating against their own interests to empower a mob of cynical grifters and resentful, anti-intellectual yokels.
Recently I was watching one of the most famous exchanges between Jeb and Trump, and started to feel a deep pit in my stomach.
You have almost certainly seen it—it’s when Jeb called Trump a “chaos candidate.”
The surface-level analysis of this clip is that Bush was simply being a square—that he was hopelessly out of touch for not realizing that associating Trump with chaos just made him sound cool. This is the take I maintained for a long time.
But I recently watched the film Lord of the Flies, and couldn’t help but notice that Jeb’s tirade against Trump almost perfectly resembles Piggy’s impassioned plea for the other boys to act civilized before he is brutally killed by antagonist Jack Merridew:
As I dwelled on this I came to understand the horrifying truth behind Jeb’s words.
Everything Bush predicted has happened. Trump has unleashed into American politics the same primal savagery that Jack Merridew tapped into. A once understandable populist rage has transformed into vulgar epistemic nihilism and a total disregard for civicmindedness. MAGA is all prole resentment at the bottom and cynical grifting at the top.
When Bush called Trump the “chaos candidate,” he thought he was speaking to an audience of mature adults who understood that chaos is bad and should generally be avoided. He didn’t realize the GOP electorate at that time felt so suppressed and disenfranchised by elites that they’d become ferociously hungry for chaos.
This was doubly true for the Alt Right, most of whom were Millennials born and raised in an era where chaos was “in”. For our cohort, chaos was associated with a virile, ambitious, and youthful masculinity—Tony Hawk and Kurt Cobain and T.J. Detweiler. For us chaos gave roughly the same vibes as the Rocket Power theme song.
At the time we were too young to understand that in the real world chaos is never cool. Chaos does not mean extreme sports or a punk rock concert or even a dissident intellectual movement. All of these things are successful because they sufficiently ordered to very deliberately create a glamorous but highly synthetic image of chaos, or alternatively because they are governed by an emergent, implicit, and spontaneous order with firm rules that enable participants to expel nonconformists.
Real chaos is never glamorous, and doesn’t have an emergent order. You can’t negotiate with chaos, because it never keeps its promises. Real chaos means bleak uncaring randomness. It means senseless and arbitrary cruelty. It means rule not by the strongest, but by those with the least to lose. It means a life of slavery to appetite and sentiment and impulse, undirected by any higher ideals.
Real chaos is the junkie suffocating on her own vomit as she’s tossed in a lonely ditch off the interstate. Real chaos is the backwoods troglodyte impregnating his obese paraplegic mother in a bed reeking of sweat and shit and piss. Real chaos is the sadist who breaks into your home and rapes your wife before drowning you in the toilet.
Real chaos is the narcissistic conman sexualizing his daughter on national television:
I’m still shocked Trump got away with this. It has a “hiding in plain sight” vibe to it.
Honestly if I were Jeb I would have leaned into this more. Every debate he should have said Trump wants to fuck his daughter. Just don’t shut up about it, say it whenever they ask you a question, no matter the topic.
“Mr. Bush, how are you going to contain Iran?”
“Excellent question, but let me start by reminding everyone that Trump wants to date his daughter. Anyway…”
If he did this relentlessly I think it might have worked, but of course Jeb was a pampered aristocrat, and couldn’t lower himself to something like this.
As a young unmarried guy of a disagreeable and novelty-seeking disposition, I generally enjoy the “aesthetics of chaos.” I like the vibes of pirates and rebels and revolutionaries and dissidents.
But I now realize that what I actually value is a decentralized and multipolar power structure that makes room for pluralism and ordered disruption. The disruptors need to agree to play by certain rules and must be amenable to good faith negotiation, otherwise they’re just goblins outside the national friend-enemy distinction.
You don’t want to give power to the Jebs and Piggies of the world or they’ll turn society into a corrupt and stultifying longhouse. But you likewise need to swat down Trump / Jack types the moment they emerge and start riling plebs into primal chaos, or else you open the door for vacuous figures like Boebert / MTG to emerge.
It’s too late to put The Beast back in its cage at this point—we can only wait for MAGA to tire itself out. That’s why I’ll be voting Trump this November despite my intense hatred for the man. At this point we simply need him out of politics ASAP.
But as we build a more civicminded right, it’s crucial to start thinking about how we can establish the infrastructure and intellectual / emotional defense mechanisms to ensure this never happens again.
Jeb was an exceptional administrator, when you met with him he knew 80 percent of what you did about the subject at hand. Everyone had to bring their A game when meeting with him. He generally surrounded himself with others who were skilled at government operations, and asked the hard questions at every turn. I think, based on his talent for governing rather that talent for politics, he was the best choice for president at the time.
I can respect this, as I’ve wondered myself if the stable neocons or even the Democrats are just the better option in favor of stability of the Empire. But I can’t really bring myself to back a group that actively wants to see me destroyed.
Trump may be a charlatan, but I’d back the charlatan over the people actively trying to obliterate the values and identity of my people.
I think of Trump as always being more transitionary in character as far as politics goes. He shakes up the cart for better options in the future. Without him, I don’t think people would take half of the shit on the right seriously. Him and his movement have bulldozed ideas into the mainstream. Something that the disenfranchised electorate could never dream of seeing happen before.
My hope has always been looking at a post-trump, but a post trump defined by his success; if it is defined by his failure, I fear we will have to wait another generation for this to be taken seriously, which honestly may be too late.