ARRIVALS: What kinds of troops came over the walls?

SATURDAY, JULY 5, 2025

Trump and Noem declaim: Speaking live and direct from Des Moines, President Trump decided to issue another one of his "Truths."

He was speaking at his July 3 "Salute to America" rally event, The next day, back in Washington, he was going to sign the mega-bill, which had now been passed by the Senate and the House.

Lee Greenwood sang the president onstage at the Des Moines event. For the record, this is the official way the event was being billed:

America 250
A New Era of American Greatness
July 3 Kick-Off Celebration

Lee Greenwood sang the president onstage at the start of this new era of American greatness. "There ain't no doubt I love this land," he sang as the president watched.

(For C-Span's videotape of the whole event, you can just click here.)

We don't question Greenwood's sincerity—but then, the president started to speak. He spoke for an hour and ten minutes—but quickly, at the nine-minute mark, he voiced an important theme.

He praised the bill he was going to sign the next day. And then, sure enough, he said this:

PRESIDENT TRUMP (7/3/25): I got to tell you—I want to thank Republican congressmen and -women because what they did is incredible last night. And the Senate—the Republican Senate. We got not— 

With all the things we did—with the tax cuts, rebuilding our military—not one Democrat voted for us. And I think we use it in the campaign that’s coming up, the midterms. Because we’ve gotta beat them. 

But all of the things we’ve given, and they wouldn’t vote only because they hate Trump. But I hate them too. You know that?

[Cheers] 

I really do. I hate them. I cannot stand them because I really believe they hate our country.

(To view the videotape of these remarks, click here for the report in Mediaite. For C-Span's videotape of the whole event, you can just click this.)

President Trump hates the Democrats! And the reason why he hates the Democrats is because they hate our country!

Who was the president talking about when he made those remarkable statements? 

Was he talking about Democratic senators and representatives—Democratic Party office holders? Or was he speaking of the tens of millions of citizens who are registered as Democrats and who vote for Democratic candidates? 

The president spoke in a sweeping manner. Even as the audience cheered, there was no way to know exactly what he meant.

Lee Greenwood loves the United States—but as we start this era of American greatness, the sitting president may hate roughly half the country's adults. Or so it seemed, this Thursday night, at the Iowa State Fairgrounds on the east side of Des Moines.

In the past week, we've been looking for ways to describe who or what came over the walls when the latest arrival occurred—when Candidate Trump descended the escalator, touching off the ongoing MAGA movement.

One of the things which came over the walls was this free-floating anger and hatred. As we've noted again this week, the same hatred was present at the dawn of the west when the rage-fueled Achaeans came over the walls and took down sacred Troy.

We'd trace that part of the current arrival straight back to the Iliad. For a second part of the current arrival, we'd think instead of the portrait which was comedically presented in the feature film, Men in Black.

Comedically, that film advanced the notion that very strange extraterrestrial beings may be living in secret among us. We remind you of the comical framework as we remind you of Secretary Noem's recent appearance with the Fox News Channel's ludicrous Jesse Watters.

We remind you here of what was said. This too came over the walls as part of the current arrival:

SECRETARY NOEM (6/27/25): Listen, Jesse, you calling these guys "bad hombres"—they really are. I was talking to a U.S. Marshall just yesterday, and he was talking about the fact that they were deporting a planeload of illegals and one of them was a cannibal.

And he kind of said it off-handed, and I said to him, 'What do you—what do you mean, it was a cannibal?" And he said, "Well we put him on the plane, put him in his seat, and he started to eat his own arms, he was such a deranged individual."

This is the kind of people that President Trump is getting off of our streets—people who are murderers and rapists and, and are deranged individuals, that we are working to get out of the country as fast as possible.

[...]

WATTERS: Secretary, was this bad hombre handcuffed to something, and he was trying to chew his arm off so he could escape? Or was he just hungry?

SECRETARY NOEM: No, what bothered me the most was that this U.S. Marshal just said it like it was normal. These are the kinds of people they have to work with every single day when they're deporting people out of this country.

So they had him—put him on the plane and had him in shackles for the flight because he was such a dangerous individual. When he got back to his seat, and put another individual in the seat close to him, he said he was literally eating his own arms—that, for him, that is what he did. He called himself a cannibal, ate other people, and ate himself that day.

That too is part of the current arrival. For a fuller report on this strange event, click here for Wednesday's report.

Are very strange beings hiding among us, as Men in Black imagined? In this case, Secretary Noem showed no sign of understanding how improbable this highly improbable story was surely going to seem. 

Last Friday night, she told this story on the second most-watched TV show in American "cable news"—and no one said a word about it! This Tuesday, she repeated the story at a major press event, with President Trump at her side. 

This time, her improbable story was briefly flagged by several major news orgs—and then was completely dropped. In such ways, the strange cognition of people like Noem is wed to the fury of President Trump, but also to the insouciance of Blue America's press corps.

Two days ago, out in the heartland, the sitting president rushed to say that he hates something like half the country. Earlier, the sitting Secretary of Homeland Security didn't seem to realize that her improbable story was going to seem very strange.

It's amazing to see the way our major news orgs have failed to report the president's statement about his sweeping hatred. Such expressions of hatred have been almost completely normalized at this late stage in the game.

The president's declaration of hatred has gone almost wholly unreported. So did Noem's extremely peculiar story, which she told, two separate times, without even blinking an eye.

With this pair of presentations, the Iliad marries Men in Black. Completing the rule of three, we ourselves will hereby join these manifestations to the silence of the lambs—to the silence of the finer people in Blue America's mainstream press.

Hatred, peculiar cognition, but also insouciance? For better or worse, all three came over the walls as part of the latest storm.

ARRIVALS: PBS portrayed Red America's voters!

FRIDAY, JULY 4, 2025

Is it also a portrait of us? How did our struggling nation's current arrival gain purchase? 

For better or worse, adherents continue to come over the walls. But how did this latest arrival begin—and why did it gain purchase?

We said we'd show you what PBS said, and so we're going to do that. We refer to the venerable PBS program, American Masters, whose newest episode debuted last Friday night:

S39 Ep 5
Hannah Arendt: Facing Tyranny

Premiere: 6/27/2025 | 01:23:45 | TV-PG 

Discover Hannah Arendt, one of the most fearless political thinkers of the 20th century, who transformed her time as a political prisoner and refugee during World War II into daring insights about totalitarianism which continue to resonate today.

The American Masters program is now in its 39th season. Last Friday, it finally got around to profiling Hannah Arendt. 

Arendt was present in her native Germany to witness a different arrival. As a bit of basic background, her biographer tells us this:

Hannah Arendt 

Hannah Arendt (1906 – 1975) was a German and American historian and philosopher. She was one of the most influential political theorists of the twentieth century.

Her works cover a broad range of topics, but she is best known for those dealing with the nature of wealth, power, fame, and evil, as well as politics, direct democracy, authority, tradition, and totalitarianism. 

[...]

In 1933, Arendt was briefly imprisoned by the Gestapo for performing illegal research into antisemitism. On release, she fled Germany, settling in Paris...When Germany invaded France, she was detained as an alien. She escaped and made her way to the United States in 1941. She became a writer and editor and worked for the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, becoming an American citizen in 1950. With the publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951, her reputation as a thinker and writer was established, and a series of works followed.

According to that overview, Arendt is best known for her work on an endless array of topics! That said, she was present in her native Germany during the early years of a disastrous arrival—and she literally wrote the book about the way totalitarianism arrives on the scene.

In last Friday's American Masters program, the portrait of that German arrival starts at roughly the 20-minute mark. You can watch the entire program at its official site.

Full disclosure! The program does a remarkably poor job identifying who is providing the background narration at various points along the way as it describes that arrival. That said, we think we can give you an accurate account of that matter.

According to the program's website, "actress Nina Hoss provides the voice of Hannah Arendt as a student in Germany to the 1970s" [sic]. When Hoss provides this part of the narration, she's reading the actual words of Arendt. 

Several scholars also provide the narration as this German arrival is described. 

In our view, also this:

In its account of that German arrival, the program is making a clear comparison to the rise of our own nation's current political movement. 

You can decide if you think that comparison fair. But to our ear, that's plainly the way this program fashions its account of that earlier disastrous arrival.

How did that German arrival gain purchase? As that part of the PBS program begins, Germany is reeling in the aftermath of its defeat in World War I. 

As best we can tell, these are the voices who now seek to explain the early rise of the political movement which would become the insanely murderous Third Reich:

VOICE OF ARENDT: The most efficient fiction of Nazi propaganda was the story of a Jewish world conspiracy. The Nazis acted as though the world were dominated by the Jews and needed a counter-conspiracy to defend itself.

By 1931, I was firmly convinced that the Nazis would take the helm.

So begins the program's account, with Hoss reading Arendt's actual words. Continuing directly, the scholar Roger Berkowitz extends the discussion:

BERKOWITZ: There were federal and regional elections at the time. And if you look at Hitler's speeches during the campaigns, he would say things like, "We are a majority."

He was never a majority! And he would come up with some argument that they won. He was giving them a coherent narrative.

"We are winning. We are going to change Germany. We are going to change the world. And the movement is growing, and it's stronger because of you and your undying loyalty to me."

To our ear, the comparison to our nation's current situation is already emerging. At this point, the voice of Arendt takes over again, and the implied comparison becomes that much more clear:

VOICE OF ARENDT: The Nazis translated the propaganda lies of the movement into a functioning reality. The ideal subject was not the convinced Nazi, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction no longer existed.

A most cherished virtue is loyalty to the leader, who, like a talisman, assures that ultimate victory of lie and fiction over truth and reality.

A basic distinction—the ability to distinguish fact from fiction—was being replaced by total loyalty to the movement's leader. Stating the obvious, that's part and parcel of one current portrait of the rise of the MAGA movement—not, we'd say, without reason. 

As it was then, so it is now? At this point, Berkowitz takes over again:

BERKOWITZ: Arendt saw this. She was there. She was living there. And so many of her friends said, "Oh, well, he's just crazy. He's just making things up. And don't worry about him. He can't win. He's just creating fantasies."

But fantasies are sometimes what we want and especially at times of economic, cultural, social, and political despair.

People—they were lonely. They were needy of meaning and belonging, and that's what Hitler was giving people.

People were saying that Hitler couldn't win—that he was just too crazy? That, of course, is what many people were saying about Candidate Trump as of 2015. 

At this point, the broadcast returns to the voice, and to the words, of Arendt herself. Within the current context, we'd score these remarks as unwise—as highly unattractive:

VOICE OF ARENDT: The Nazi movement recruited their members from this mass of indifferent people whom all other parties had given up as too apathetic, or too stupid, for their attention.

The result was that the majority of their membership consisted of people who never before had appeared on the political scene.

Were Hitler's early supporters apathetic, indifferent, stupid? In effect, were they just the deplorables?

We have no idea. But within the context of this emerging presentation, that also seems to function as a portrait of President Trump's ongoing support.

In our view, our own Blue America goes off the rails when our scholars pleasure us—implicitly, when they flatter us—with that unpleasant portrait of Red America's voters. At any rate, the overview by American Masters continues with two scholars commenting in the manner shown:

BARBARA HAHN: I think she came up with these ideas when she was looking at what this mass society would provide people.

It would provide them with the impression that they're not alone any more, and there is a party giving them an idea that they are part of something really big.

MALE COMMENTATOR: All the major German conservative politicians are on record over and over again saying, "We cannot let Adolf Hitler become chancellor."

And, yet, because they wanted to recruit followers of Hitler to their side, they didn't just exclude Hitler when they could, they tried to control him. And he was able to then play them all against each other until they had to make him chancellor.

German conservative politicians thought they could control Hitler! Plainly, that's a very familiar portrait of the way Republican pols perceived Candidate and President Trump in the first years of his arrival.

Today, we know that the German arrival led to a brutal genocide—to one of the most deranged events in all of human history.

In this tenth year of his reign, President Trump has engaged in no such conduct. Beyond that, we know of no reason to believe that he ever will, or that he would. We say that despite his new, explicit statement, made last night in Iowa, about the way he actively hates the others—in this case, the Democrats.

It's our assumption that President Trump is fundamentally disordered—is disordered in way which Blue America's press had agreed not to evaluate or discuss. Still, he hasn't conducted a genocide. 

That said:

In our view, much of what that profile describes is well worth contemplating. As our nation has split into two rival nations, it can be said, and often is, that many voters in Red America have turned into "people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction no longer exists."

For many voters in Red America, it can be said that "loyalty to the leader" has perhaps replaced the traditional attempt to separate fact from fiction—has led to the ultimate "victory of fiction over truth and reality."

For many voters in Red America, it can perhaps be said that loyalty to President Trump has gifted them with a pleasing set of fictions, in which they're battling a world conspiracy led by a pleasing set of villains. In our view, American Masters was plainly sketching that comparison in last Friday's program. 

In April 2024, it seemed to us that PBS did much the same thing in the portrait of Julius Caesar offered by this underwhelming program:

Julius Caesar: The Making of a Dictator

The dramatic story of how nearly five centuries of ancient Roman democracy was overthrown in just 16 years…by one man. This is the story of a brazen, ambitious power-grab that saw Julius Caesar consolidate the vast power of Rome in his own hands.

Back then, Trump was said to be Julius Caesar. As of last Friday night, he was you-know-who himself.

In our view, there's substantial merit in American Masters' implied portrait of Red America's pro-Trump voters, who no longer separate fact from fiction in their pursuit of a pleasing tale.

In our view, that's a reasonable critique of many of Red America's voters. The question we will continue to ask about our own Blue America is this:

To what extent, if to any extent, can it be said that this pleasing portrait is also a portrait of us? To what extent has our own tribal blindness lead to the situation our flailing nation is in?

ARRIVALS: Hannah Arendt was on the scene...

THURSDAY, JULY 3, 2025

...when an arrival occurred: How might we most instructively picture the nature of this latest arrival?

Within the House of Representatives, this latest arrival continues this very day. Even as we type, the megabill is about to be approved by the House, extending the political dominance of the current sitting president.

His ongoing political success is supported by tens of million of neighbors and friends—by tens of millions of our fellow citizens. He came down the escalator in 2015. What accounts for the ongoing appeal of this vastly surp arrival?

Those of us in Blue America have a hard time seeing the ways we ourselves helped set the stage for this potent arrival That said, and for better or worse, the forces of MAGA America continue to advance. But what would be the most instructive way for us to picture what has been happening?

For ourselves, we juggle such pictures as these:

When we see the Secretary of Homeland Security speaking, in full sincerity, about the cannibals who may be inclined to eat their own arms, we think of the portrait offered in Men in Black, in which an extremely strange set of alien beings are secretly living among us.

(We refer to the secretary herself, not to the alleged cannibal.)

The scenario offered in Men in Black is comedic. We think of that comedic portrait when we see players like Noem offering highly peculiar assessments.

But when we see people like Watters, Failla and Gowdy assailing a CNN journalist by name—a journalist who reported on an actual DIA assessment;

When we see such people doing that in the immediate aftermath of the murders in Minnesota;

When we see them doing that in support of the sitting president, who said the CNN journalist should be "thrown out like a dog;"

When we see them doing that in support of the president who said that CNN and the New York Times are "scum" because they reported that (actual) DIA assessment;

When we see President Trump, plus Watters, Failla and Gowdy, behaving in such astonishing ways, we toss Men in Black to the side. We think instead of the murderous way the rage-filled Achaeans came over the walls of sacred Troy at the very dawn of the West.

How should we understand the rage which leads people like Trump, Watters, Failla and Gowdy to behave in the dangerous way they did? Which leads a person like Lisa Boothe to put the life of Dr. Fauci at risk through the astonishing attacks she has delivered in several of her appearances on the Fox News Channel?

At this site, we're looking for other arrivals which might help us understand and portray the arrival which is still unfolding here. As we've noted, that leads us back to the portrait of a disastrous arrival—a portrait which was offered by the PBS series, American Masters, this past Friday night.

How did it [ever] get this far? That's what Don Corleone asks at one point in The Godfather. Today, we might ask a similar question about the MAGA movement:

How did this movement ever get stated? What explains its arrival, which continues along today?

Last Friday night, American Masters debuted its latest documentary. The PBS program is now in its 39th year. By clicking here, you can visit the website of its current episode, which you can watch in full:

S39 Ep 5
Hannah Arendt: Facing Tyranny

Premiere: 6/27/2025 | 01:23:45 | TV-PG 

Discover Hannah Arendt, one of the most fearless political thinkers of the 20th century, who transformed her time as a political prisoner and refugee during World War II into daring insights about totalitarianism which continue to resonate today.

Hannah Arendt was indeed a major figure of the last century. It's portrait of her is TV-PG, the website says—but along the way, this documentary discusses one of the most consequential arrivals in all of human history. 

The program discusses the way the Third Reich first gained purchase in 1930s Germany. Breaking a rule of contemporary journalistic discourse, the program seems to compare the early years of that arrival to the way our own nation's current arrival gained purchase.

On its face, that's a highly unflattering comparison. At this point, it's important to state an obvious point:

The deranged leader of the Third Reich went on to stage "the genocide of about six million Jews and millions of other victims."

President Trump has never done anything like that. Beyond that, we know of no reason to believe that he ever would or will.

Whatever one thinks of President Trump, he hasn't engaged in such conduct. That said, the American Masters profile of Arendt draws an obvious comparison between the arrival of the MAGA movement and the arrival of that other movement in the Germany of the 1930s.

Was the program wise to do such a thing? Given the horror of where the German movement went, is it decent to create and broadcast such a comparison?

Readers can judge that as they wish. For those who want to ponder the history of the current arrival, we think it's worth restating what the PBS program chose to present.

President Trump has done no such thing. But what explains his political appeal at the time of his arrival? Who was drawn to his arrival, and why?

The portrait of that 1930s German arrival starts at roughly the 20-minute mark of the American Masters program. You can click over there to see what the program says.

For the record, that program does a very poor job identifying who is providing the background narration at various points along the way. In spite of that major shortcoming, you'll surely get the gist pf what the program is saying.

Tomorrow, we'll show you what the program says about these two arrivals. The programs tells us what Hannah Arendt, then a young woman, saw in Germany at that time. It also presents some of what she later said about the appeal of that arrival.

According to the program's website, "Actress Nina Hoss provides the voice of Hannah Arendt." When Hoss provides this narration, she is reading the actual words of Arendt.

Several scholars also provide the narration as this German arrival is described. To our ear, the program clearly compares that arrival to the rise of our own nation's current dominant political movement.

For reasons we can't even remember at this point, we were struck by what the American Masters program said. Tomorrow, we'll transcribe its intriguing account, trying to remind you of this:

The foolishness and arrogance of our own Blue America helped set the stage for the rise of the MAGA world. 

Quite frequently, Donald Trump's supporters have legitimate complaints to make. It's the lunacy of the cannibal spottings, married to the inability to rein in the rage, which leads us first to Men in Black, then to the murderous assault on sacred Troy and on those within its walls.

We Blues helped set the stage for this arrival. Why did it take hold?

Tomorrow: "The ideal subject was [the person] for whom the distinction between fact and fiction no longer existed."