Towards the end of Christopher Isherwood’s 1939 book, Goodbye To Berlin, there’s a scene I’ve thought of frequently in recent years. At a fairground at the far end of Potsdamer Strasse is a boxing and wrestling tent. For a small entrance fee, spectators see “fighters” wrestle and box a few rounds, before the referee announces that in order to see more, they must pay an extra ten pfennig. One wrestler plays the part of the loser, growing angry when “beaten”. In one boxing match, the taller, stronger boxer is fake knocked-out. The referee collects money from the crowd and asks for a challenger from the audience. A young man, clearly friends with the “fighters”, strips off and just so happens to be wearing shorts and boxer boots. A purse of five marks is announced, and the young man emerges victorious. The audience, Isherwood wrote, began to take the fights seriously, egging their favourites on, and arguing about the results, despite the fact that they had been there the entire time, and had observed all the elements of the theatre unfold. “The political moral is certainly depressing,” the scene ends, “these people could be made to believe in anybody or anything.”
Last Thursday evening, the human cartoon wrestler known as Hulk Hogan stood on stage at the Republican National Convention repeatedly mentioning his “world title” (a fake accolade in a fake sport), while ripping off his clothing to reveal a Trump-Vance T-shirt underneath. The Maga spectacle doesn’t do subtlety but even this was a little too on the nose.
Watching this on television, I thought of Peter Thiel. It was Thiel who bankrolled Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against the website Gawker, the nine-figure settlement ultimately bankrupting the company. Thiel’s grudge with the outlet went way back, when Gawker’s tech gossip blog Valleywag published a story with the headline “Peter Thiel is totally gay, people.” Thiel’s spectre wasn’t just there in the phony wrestler, but also in the shadow of Trump’s Machiavellian vice-president pick, JD Vance, who once wondered whether Trump was “America’s Hitler” and now… well, you know how this one goes. Vance has said Thiel was a source of inspiration to him when the tech billionaire gave a talk at Yale, and went on to work at a Thiel-founded company, Mithril Capital. In 2022, Thiel funded Vance’s run for the Senate to the tune of $15 million.
Walking around New York city, listening to the audiobook of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins Of Totalitarianism (fail to prepare, prepare to fail), I’m sometimes interrupted by messages from friends asking “what’s it like over there?” As an outsider dropping in, what it’s like is living in the pages of a history book, if that history book had turned into a flip book and was then set on fire. This feeling is underpinned by the experience of daily reality. Naturally, life goes on. Normality reigns. It’s in the lines of people queuing for a $10 viral-on-TikTok fettuccine alfredo. It’s in the kids playing basketball in the park. It’s in the guy washing his face at a spurting fire hydrant to cool down at the tail-end of the heatwave. It’s in chatter of tech bros with glowing wristbands identifying themselves as Burning Man veterans meeting at a dive bar.
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All of this rings like an overture of an increasingly doom-laden oratorio. As the days pass, these scenes feel less like everything is fine, and more like that bit at the start of a disaster movie, the “little do they know” stage. The signifiers of an ordinary morning – the frisbee thrown to a Labrador, the yellow school bus pulling up to a curb, the ice cream cone melting in a child’s hand – will soon all feel like memories from another time, one before the monster came to town.
“All you criminals, all you lowlifes, all you scumbags, all you drug dealers, and all you crooked politicians need to answer one question, brother. What are you going to do when Donald Trump and all the Trumpamaniacs run wild on you, brother?” Hulk Hogan roared from the stage.
With a wrestler offering a rallying cry to “Trumpamaniacs” to “run wild”, on Sunday another whiplash-inducing handbrake turn in the chaos: Joe Biden finally dropping out of the race, as the pressure reached a point where there was no more possibility for any kind of value to release it. Once more, the waters churn. Once more, they stretch uncharted.
A 1997 New Yorker profile on Trump detailed the former (and likely future) US president’s approach to watching Jean-Claude Van Damme’s Bloodsport, assigning his son, Eric, the task of fast-forwarding through all the plot exposition and boring bits until all that was left was a supercut of all-action fighting. “Admit it, you’re laughing!” Trump shouted at the journalist observing this madness, Mark Singer, as one scene involving someone being whacked in the scrotum played. “You want to write that Donald Trump was loving this ridiculous Jean-Claude Van Damme movie,” Trump said, “but are you willing to put in there that you were loving it, too?”
If 2016′s campaign was characterised by shock and panic, then 2024 has a different edge. It’s one of rumbling terror. How does the movie end? The daily plot twists, as extraordinary as they are, appear right now to be leading to a grim grand finale.