I wrote about the goblins in charge, an old boss who bit me on the arm, and the use and abuse of contempt. defector.com/kingdom-of-t…
— David_j_roth (@davidjroth.bsky.social) March 28, 2025 at 4:33 PM
National treasure David Roth. at Defector:
,,,,, When my boss bit me, I had just questioned his wish to include an easily disprovable lie in his bio, which I was writing on his computer, at his desk. I was shocked by the bite, but less surprised by the look on his face afterwards—he was flushed and eager, like a child that has just discovered how to be naughty, his eyes shining and a little wet. As with the cohort that generally does that sort of thing, which is weird little kids acting out in daycare settings, there was a question implied in that look—what would be the consequence for doing a thing that you are absolutely not supposed to do? In retrospect, I wonder if he was waiting to see if I’d hit him.
Instead I said something like “what the fuck was that,” although I already knew what the fuck it was, and had known it from within the first few weeks of starting the gig. I had known since then that I would leave the job as soon as I could figure out how; I knew what kind of place it was, and what kind of person was running it, and if I didn’t literally know until that moment that my boss could be described as A Biter, it was more startling than actually surprising to find out for sure. I think I understood at some level that this boss was not merely the sort of person who might bite me—hard enough that I could show the imprint to my wife when I got home and she asked how my day was—but the sort of person who would eat me if need be, or just if he thought he could.
I knew, too, albeit in an abstract way, that there were a lot of people like that out there, certainly in real estate but also just in the world. One of the most important lessons of adult life is understanding people like this for what they are and learning to identify them as quickly as possible; keeping people like this away from those you care about is, in no small part, the work of being an adult. Not being able to do that—putting your trust in people like this, or letting yourself believe that there is any kind of fair and mutually advantageous deal to be made with them—means that you will get victimized a lot….
… Even during the campaign that re-installed him to office, Trump was receding into something memetic and abstract. This version was not so much a leader who would bring his will to bear on the direction of the state—he couldn’t really remember his lines well enough anymore to pull that off, but also Trump has always worked better as a fantasy of business mastery than as the real and shabby thing he actually is—as something more like a gilded Trojan Horse. That rotten piñata would, after getting through the doors of power, burst to release a payload of chittering ideologues who would not otherwise have been able to breach those gates on their own. Trump himself would be free to watch television and go on television and wheeze and drawl from behind his big messy desk during ceremonies in which he signed whatever order those goblins handed him; the goblins, for their part, would be free to feast and shit and caper hideously about as goblins do.
It did not change him and certainly did not improve him, but Trump’s experience of power clearly made an impression on him. His lack of interest in the work that the administrative state actually does was and remains total; that work benefits other people, and so would naturally be of no interest to him. He grew to hate it, and has now survived long enough to watch on television as the people that he picked to oversee the project go about that work in haphazard and sadistic fashion, pausing frequently to celebrate and thank Mr. Trump and heatedly demand apologies on his behalf.
The collection of degenerates that make up Trump’s cabinet makes sense mostly if you think of it as Trump, in his role as executive producer of the end of the American Century, casting the various roles in the cable news television programming he watches. These are, more or less without exception, people who would not be able to hold down a regular job; they are, all of them, instantly and obviously identifiable as predators, and the violence and harm that they have done to more or less everything they’ve touched over the course of their reckless lives proves it all out. But they are also the faces that have represented various broad archetypes—War, Computer, Medicines, Crime, Gold—on rightwing media, and this most avid and credulous consumer of rightwing media would instantly have understood them as credible.
The ways in which these grasping and venal incompetents manage both towards and like Trump were all right there on the emoji-strewn page in the classified war-planning chat to which they mistakenly invited Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg earlier this week. They are thoughtless and reckless, terrified of being assigned any kind of personal responsibility but blithe and breezy about the prospect of blowing up a few dozen bystanders in a country they know nothing about; their concerns are transparently self-centered and fatuous; there is no evident strategy, only the classic Trumpian interplay of grievance and impatience. There is nothing like collaboration, because these are not the sort of creatures that collaborate; these are all inveterate biters, and have long since given up wondering about consequences. Whatever the state once was, it is now this—a bunch of middle-management gangsters fucking each other over or doing each other favors according to their sense of how doing so will benefit them, with no other consideration ever entering the equation. This is how it works, from one day to the next: a bunch of absolutely amoral gangster boss types and various industry elites scratching each others’ itches and cutting each other in and making business decisions; the mores and moral logic of Jeffrey Epstein’s island, but everywhere.,,,
But for all the ways in which this feels like the end, and all the ways in which it really represents something like the final surrender of a power structure that seems to have lost faith or just lost interest in itself, it is not actually an end. That cynicism, too, is Trumpian; the world will cease to matter to him the moment he leaves it, and so he is more than happy to decree that everyone and everything be buried alongside him. It will be important to remember the shame of this moment, both how it felt and how it worked, when it is time to build whatever will rise from it—to remember the blithe and brutal and self-delighted contempt with which this elite set out to devour every other better thing, and to work to build a life and a world that is not just strong enough to resist it but dedicated to its opposite.
The Way We Live Now: <em>‘Kingdom Of The Biters’</em>Post + Comments (100)
