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Home»Top Stories»The role of the absurd in Trumpland
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The role of the absurd in Trumpland

ZamPointBy ZamPointAugust 25, 2025No Comments6 Mins Read
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The role of the absurd in Trumpland
A person wearing a mask depicting US President Donald Trump (Image: Reuters/David 'Dee' Delgado)
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In college, I worked at @CrackerBarrel in Tallahassee. I even gave my life to Christ in their parking lot. Their logo was iconic and their unique restaurants were a fixture of American culture. No-one asked for this woke rebrand. It’s time to Make Cracker Barrel Great Again ??

Thus Florida Republican Congressman Byron Donalds explained his fury at a minor change to the logo of mid-range chain restaurant Cracker Barrel. If you think he’s an outlier, think again. The (extremely minor) change has been described by various MAGA figures as a “woke rebrand” for reasons no-one can quite articulate.

“WTF is wrong with @CrackerBarrel??!” Donald Trump Jr posted to X. MAGA musician John Rich asked his followers if they would continue going to Cracker Barrel “now that it’s going woke?” Actor James Woods lamented that at one time “Cracker Barrel was the only place I’d ever stop … I’ll never stop [sic] foot in one again.” The greatest country in the history of the world, torn asunder by a restaurant rebrand.

Meanwhile, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, currently engaged in mass, brutal deportations, shared footage of 1990s TV star Dean Cain (ICE described him as “former ‘Man of Steel’”; we’d add an emphasis to “former”) very slowly traversing its training obstacle course, having signed up as an honorary agent.

Somewhere in all that, the US government — whose leader has consistently promised to save America from the clutches of his evil socialist commie opponents — bought a 10% stake in tech company Intel.

Absurdity comes with the territory of authoritarian leaders — the disconnect between rhetoric and reality demands it.

In 2019, a 91-year-old Cuban comandante, Guillermo García Frías, suggested via state broadcast that the populace supplement their diets by rearing and eating ostriches. Romanian scientists in the time of Nicolae Ceaușescu were forced to put the name of his wife Elena on their research because she wanted a Nobel Prize. In 1944, in Soviet Russia, an orchestra led by pianist Maria Yudina was hustled back into a studio because Stalin had requested a recording and no-one dared to tell him one hadn’t been made.

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Article ID: 1218094

Everything Trump has ever done is a distraction, of course

The absurdity of the Trump era is louder and more brazen, perhaps because these are qualities of the times that shaped him. Outrage over Cracker Barrel, TV’s aging Superman, and the president bragging about how much gold he has in his office while wearing a cap that reads “Trump was right about everything” is of a piece with the general sense of distorting unreality that Trump actively cultivates.

An ongoing Crikey series looks at how the Trump administration’s actions, as opposed to its rhetoric, mirror those of fascist governments. But it’s important to note that the absurdity of the US president’s politics pushes beyond rhetoric — it’s a crucial part of the muscle and sinew in his exertion of power.

Take the White House partnership with PragerU, a conservative advocacy and media group that carefully avoids claiming to be an accredited university. In June, it produced a “museum” of AI-generated videos that reanimate America’s founding fathers. John Adams is brought back to say, “Facts are stubborn things, and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence,” which Adams did say during his pre-revolutionary career as a lawyer. “In other words,” AI Adams adds, “facts don’t care about your feelings,” which Adams never said, but online right-wing influencer Ben Shapiro did.

The events of the last week show how these two elements of Trump’s politics — the assaults on shared reality and the expansion of executive power — tessellate together and reinforce one another.

Following the deployment of the National Guard against citizens in Washington DC and Los Angeles, Trump is threatening to do the same in Baltimore, New York and Chicago. These attacks on cities controlled by political opponents are justified by claims about “out of control crime”, which are more or less the opposite of the truth.

Hawkish former national security adviser turned relentless Trump critic John Bolton was raided by the FBI last week after the White House ordered a second review of Bolton’s 2020 memoir, The Room Where It Happened. This new review argued the book was full of classified information and decided to reverse an earlier review that had concluded the book was appropriate for publication. The official who conducted the incriminating review is Michael Ellis, now deputy director of the CIA.

At the same time, Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth fired Defence Intelligence Agency director Lieutenant General Jeffrey Kruse, whose analysts delivered a preliminary assessment in June that US bombers had not “obliterated” Iranian nuclear facilities but actually had caused relatively limited damage.

Attorney-General Pam Bondi directed federal prosecutors to open a criminal investigation into former president Barack Obama and his aides to establish whether they had concocted evidence to suggest Russia attempted to aid Trump in the 2016 election. Last month, the Justice Department announced an investigation into former CIA director John Brennan and former FBI director James Comey. The announcement did not specify what allegations were being investigated.

On Thursday, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard revoked the security clearances of more than three dozen current and former national security officials, most of whom worked on Russia’s alleged interference in the 2016 presidential election.

On his first day back in office, Trump pardoned more than 1,500 people charged for their role in the 2021 riots at the Capitol building that followed his false claims of election theft in 2020. Since then, more than two dozen prosecutors who had dealt with those rioters have been fired or demoted.

On Tuesday, Trump said Smithsonian museums were “OUT OF CONTROL”, partly for their focus on “how bad slavery was“. The administration has previously announced a comprehensive review of the Smithsonian museums ahead of next year’s 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

The goal, the announcement said, was “to ensure the museums align with President Trump’s interpretation of American history”.

“The stacking of government departments and agencies — particularly those centred on security — with loyalists, and the purging of dissenting voices (which began as soon as Trump reclaimed office), serves these two functions equally, rearranging reality and consolidating power at the same time”.

Each of the above actions moves in two directions at once, rewriting the past while securing control of the future.

Disclaimer: This post is sourced from an external website via RSS feed. We do not claim ownership of the content and are not responsible for its accuracy or views. All rights belong to the original author or publisher. We are simply sharing it for informational purposes.

America Donald Trump United States US politics
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