Don Trump Finally Beat Medicare. Republicans Could Care Less.
PLUS: A review of "Romance" by Fontaines D.C.
Look, if you’re wondering where all the cats have gone in Springfield, I might have an idea:
Maybe that’s why J.D. Vance has a thing against childless cat ladies.
The widespread consensus about last week’s presidential debate is that Trump bombed while Harris performed very well. The vice president came across as a plausible president—knowledgeable, poised, tough, compassionate, reasonable—redirected criticism of her back onto Trump, baited the ex-president into indulging his worst instincts, and emerged from the 90-minute debate gaffe-free.
I do wonder how pleased the Harris campaign is with the outcome, though. On the one hand, if you’re going to participate in a nationally-televised debate with Don Trump, it may be that the best you can hope for is that he spends the time reminding people that he’s a massive jackass. Not a bad result at all. Yet if you ever find yourself sharing the stage with a discombobulated hippopotamus that keeps shitting itself, don’t be surprised if all anyone wants to talk about is the incontinent hippo. Harris had many good moments during that debate. She was able to make a lot of points in ways that should resonate with the American people. Yet the national conversation is about unfounded claims that immigrants are eating people’s pets.
The double whammy is that some finicky voters will hold Harris accountable for what happened merely for sharing a television screen with a presidential candidate who lacks self-control. For them, it’s further proof the candidates aren’t talking about the things that matter to them as voters, even though Harris said nothing that was patently crazy. Unfortunately, that’s the effect Trump has on our country: Trump tarnishes everything he comes into contact with. For that reason, I’d encourage Harris to drop the call for another debate and focus instead on appealing to voters directly through appearances on talk shows, YouTube channels, and podcasts.
Still, those finicky voters need to take a moment if they think Kamala Harris is as much to blame for that disaster of a debate as Donald Trump. Trump started off fine I suppose, but fifteen minutes into the debate it was clear he was on tilt. Fifteen minutes later, following a jab from Harris about crowd sizes, he erupted, spewing racist and xenophobic lies about canine consumption before belching a steady stream of syllabic lava all over the remaining hour. It was at various times sad, hilarious, preposterous, perplexing, unbelievable, and disgraceful. I’ve harped on this for years, but this is a guy who has no business being president. You wouldn’t trust him as your school’s principal. You’d never let him serve as the treasurer of your church. You wouldn’t want him as your boss. You’d never buy a car from him. Yet somehow he’s a major political party’s presidential nominee.
It’s worth reading the transcript of the debate to understand just how unhinged Trump was in that moment:
DEBATE MODERATOR DAVID MUIR: Let me just ask, though, why did you try to kill [the immigration bill] and successfully so? That would have put thousands of additional agents and officers on the border.
FORMER PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: First let me respond as to the rallies. She said people start leaving. People don’t go to her rallies. There’s no reason to go. And the people that do go, she’s busing them in and paying them to be there. And then showing them in a different light. So, she can’t talk about that. People don’t leave my rallies. We have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics. That’s because people want to take their country back. Our country is being lost. We’re a failing nation. And it happened three and a half years ago. And what, what’s going on here, you’re going to end up in World War 3, just to go into another subject. What they have done to our country by allowing these millions and millions of people to come into our country. And look at what’s happening to the towns all over the United States. And a lot of towns don’t want to talk -- not going to be Aurora or Springfield. A lot of towns don’t want to talk about it because they’re so embarrassed by it. In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating -- they’re eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what’s happening in our country. And it’s a shame. As far as rallies are concerned, as far -- the reason they go is they like what I say. They want to bring our country back. They want to make America great again. It’s a very simple phrase. Make America great again. She’s destroying this country. And if she becomes president, this country doesn’t have a chance of success. Not only success. We’ll end up being Venezuela on steroids.
MUIR: I just want to clarify here, you bring up Springfield, Ohio. And ABC News did reach out to the city manager there. He told us there have been no credible reports of specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community --
TRUMP: Well, I’ve seen people on television
MUIR: Let me just say here this ...
TRUMP: The people on television say my dog was taken and used for food. So maybe he said that and maybe that’s a good thing to say for a city manager.
MUIR: I’m not taking this from television. I’m taking it from the city manager.
TRUMP: But the people on television say their dog was eaten by the people that went there.
MUIR: Again, the Springfield city manager says there’s no evidence of that.
TRUMP: We’ll find out.
For context, I think it’s worth putting that exchange next to another rather noteworthy moment from a recent presidential debate:
DEBATE MODERATOR JAKE TAPPER: President Biden, I want to give you an opportunity to respond to this question about the national debt.
PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: He had the largest national debt of any president four-year period, number one. Number two, he got $2 trillion tax cut, benefited the very wealthy. What I’m going to do is fix the taxes. For example, we have a thousand trillionaires in America – I mean, billionaires in America. And what’s happening? They’re in a situation where they, in fact, pay 8.2 percent in taxes. If they just paid 24 percent or 25 percent, either one of those numbers, they’d raised $500 million – billion dollars, I should say, in a 10-year period. We’d be able to right – wipe out his debt. We’d be able to help make sure that – all those things we need to do, childcare, elder care, making sure that we continue to strengthen our healthcare system, making sure that we’re able to make every single solitary person eligible for what I’ve been able to do with the COVID – excuse me, with dealing with everything we have to do with. Look, if – we finally beat Medicare.
If the June debate demonstrated Biden was losing his mental acuity, last week’s debate proved Trump is a raging lunatic. In his own way, Trump finally beat Medicare.
And if what Biden said was enough for his party to intervene and push him from the race, the question has to be why Republicans aren’t scrambling to boot Trump from their ticket as we speak. Instead, they’re covering for him, in some cases claiming people can’t prove immigrants weren’t eating pets, at other times expressing greater outrage that the moderators of the debate declared Trump’s assertion untrue than that Trump actually said something outlandish and despicable.
Which brings me to another topic: Nazis.
You may have missed this story from the week before the debate, but former FOX News host and current podcaster Tucker Carlson interviewed and nodded along with a bad armchair historian named Darryl Cooper as Cooper tried to pass off a vile revisionist history of World War II. Now I’ve spent some time searching for background on Cooper and can’t find anything: I don’t know what colleges he attended, what his most advanced degree is, if he’s ever been employed by a legit academic institution, or if he’s ever published any peer-reviewed work. His Substack (for context’s sake, it’s called Martyr Made; I visited so you don’t have to) doesn’t even list his credentials. That’s important to remember because a professional historian isn’t simply someone who knows some facts about the past. A professional historian studies the past, is familiar with and knows how to interpret historical sources, and can bring that information to bear on other scholarship about the past. Cooper just seems like a guy who spends hours falling down rabbit holes on the Internet.
Still, Carlson introduced his guest as “maybe the best and most honest popular historian in the United States,” adding that he wants Cooper “to be widely recognized as the most important historian in the United States.” And the two big points Cooper made during his appearance with Carlson were:
Winston Churchill was the main “villain” of World War II because he pushed for war with Germany after Hitler invaded Poland in 1939. The loss of life and devastation of WWII could have been avoided had the United Kingdom and France simply allowed Germany to take of Europe what they wanted. (That of course absolves Hitler of his role in igniting World War II by, you know, invading other countries, and ignores the concern that a war-crazed and unchecked Nazi Party might start invading other European nations, which Stalin, who split Poland with Germany and agreed to a non-aggression pact with Hitler, learned the hard way.)
The Holocaust just kind of happened by accident because Hitler’s armies were too successful and unprepared to deal with the large number of prisoners, refugees, and civilians they encountered in conquered land. (That of course ignores the genocide Hitler carried out within German borders, the well-documented policy of Lebensraum, the fact that Nazi Germany mobilized the state to carry out the Final Solution, and the fact that the millions of civilians who died during the Holocaust didn’t die due to neglect but were murdered en masse.)
All of which is to say that Cooper is a Nazi apologist, which this social media post from the weekend after the opening ceremonies of the 2024 Paris Olympics confirms:
To clarify, no one in the picture on the right is responsible for the genocide of 17 million people. Can’t say the same about the picture on the left. (For more details on Carlson’s interview with Cooper, see this article from Media Matters by Matt Gertz.)
Make no mistake: Tucker Carlson didn’t give Cooper a platform in the spirit of intellectual exchange. Carlson wanted to share the views of a Nazi apologist with his audience. And Carlson isn’t a bit player in American politics. Sure, he no longer has the reach he once had as the host of a primetime commentary show on FOX, but he did just surpass Joe Rogan as the most listened to podcaster on Spotify. (Carlson doesn’t come close to passing Rogan among YouTube subscribers—19.2 million vs. 2.6 million—but Carlson has slightly more followers on Twitter/X with 13.3 million.) Carlson was also given a primetime speaking slot on the fourth night of the RNC.
And that’s not the only news we learned about in the past two weeks placing Nazi sympathizers and white supremacists in Trump’s orbit. NPR reported a few days ago that Trump’s New Jersey golf club hosted at least two events this past summer featuring speeches made by a Nazi sympathizer convicted of four misdemeanors stemming from his involvement in the January 6 riot. Here’s a picture of the guy:
This Hitler cosplayer, who’s left behind an ugly anti-Semitic paper trail, received an award at one of those events alongside, among others, Rudy Giuliani.
Multiple news outlets have also reported Trump is now palling around with Laura Loomer, a far-right, “pro-white-nationalism” (her words, not mine) activist and former 2020 Republican congressional nominee in Florida’s 17th district. Loomer has celebrated the deaths of migrants, spread anti-Semitic conspiracy theories despite being a Jew herself, described herself as “sympathetic” to Kanye West after he praised Hitler and the Nazis, and has spoken at events with white supremacist Nick Fuentes (who has dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago as recently as 2022). Just last week, Loomer said “the White House will smell like curry & White House speeches will be facilitated via a call center” if Harris wins the election, and joined Trump at the Ground Zero ceremony honoring those who lost their lives on 9/11 even though she has said 9/11 was an inside job.
Megan Garber wrote an article in The Atlantic last week attempting to explain what Carlson is up to by hosting a Nazi apologist on his show. Garber argued
What becomes clear during the interview, as Cooper makes his convoluted case (“maybe I’m being a little hyperbolic,” he allows at one point), is that the true villains of his story are not, in the end, Hitler or Churchill, Axis or Allies. Instead, they are the culture warriors of the present: the woke, the mobs, the ruling class—the people who will be offended by claims such as “Winston Churchill Ruined Europe.” And the true heroes, consequently, are those who dare to say the unsayable. “There are just certain things you’re not allowed to question,” Cooper told Carlson, as he questioned the “myths” of World War II. (“Literally, it’s a crime to ask questions?” Carlson replied, before answering his own query: “Yes.”) One might not go to jail for the myth-busting, Cooper allowed; still, “you might have your life ruined and lose your job.” (“You might absolutely go to jail in this country,” Carlson countered.)
Garber is half-right. One important point she leaves out—in part because it’s become so obvious—is that Trump really is seeking the support of neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and homegrown ethno-nationalists. Like many political analysts, Trump senses there’s a ceiling to his support. A lot of Americans—including many independents and some conservatives—refuse to consider supporting him. Unless a bunch of voters inclined to support the Democratic presidential nominee sit the election out, Trump will never come close to winning 50% of the popular vote. His strategy is predicated on losing the popular vote but eking out victories in enough states to net himself 270 electoral votes. He came within 45,000 votes spread across three states of doing that in 2020. Trump needs to find those votes, and he’s not ashamed to extend a hand to a bunch of tiki-torch-bearing wannabe goosesteppers to make up the difference.
But Garber’s point still stands, because the number of Trump supporters who don’t rest easy in a coalition that includes Nazi sympathizers and white supremacists far outnumber the actual Nazi sympathizers and white supremacists in the coalition. Hence the utility of Trump and the GOP’s anti-woke and anti-political-correctness campaign: In order to provide cover for people like Donald Trump who lie compulsively, say idiotic things, and propagate ideas most decent people find repulsive, right-wingers position themselves as champions of free thought and free speech who claim to speak unpopular truths and ask the questions no one dares to ask while blasting liberals and elites as an overly censorious lot who aim to silence/cancel those who don’t adhere to their woke norms and worldview. That gives Trump’s supporters the chance to take a stand for the First Amendment rather than, say, Mein Kampf, while granting Trump and the MAGAverse a license to behave badly.
As Garber points out later in her article, a big hole in Carlson’s case is that no one in the United States is actually throwing people like him in jail for apologizing for Hitler. Instead, people are criticizing him for playing footsie with Nazi sympathizers. And that’s how the First Amendment is supposed to work. If someone says something stupid, false, or repulsive, the First Amendment creates the space for others to call them out on that. That’s not cancel culture but rather the marketplace of ideas working as it should. And that marketplace has demonstrated time and again that this particular line of alt-right thought is rubbish.
I’m well aware there are ongoing debates in the United States about the freedom of speech, but Americans would be well-served this election if they moved past the question of whether or not someone can say something provocative in this country and focused instead on the merits of what someone is saying. That’s always been fair play. If Americans of all political stripes held Trump to that simple standard, he’d be exposed as a serial liar, a wannabe autocrat, a buffoon, and a bigot. That’s disqualifying for a presidential candidate and should be condemned as such in the political arena.
As of publication, Tucker Carlson is still scheduled to appear with J.D. Vance at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania this Saturday. Trump, despite saying he disagrees with Laura Loomer, defended her at a press conference Friday, stating, “Laura’s been a supporter of mine, just like a lot of people are supporters, and she’s been a supporter of mine. She speaks very positively of the campaign….I don’t control Laura. Laura has to say what she wants. She’s a free spirit.” And Republicans continue to fluff Trump’s racist bullshit story about pet-eating immigrants by either claiming they’re just trolling Democrats (that’s not how trolling works, you idiots!) or insisting that even if the story isn’t true (it’s not!) that it draws attention to a national problem. Yet by spreading these lies, they also spread hate, with the town of Springfield and its Haitian community on edge after three straight days of bomb threats, including one directed at an elementary school. (It was only last month when a group of Nazi sympathizers descended on Springfield during a jazz festival.)
The American people should be asking themselves this week why, if the Democrats replaced their presidential nominee following a disastrous debate a few months ago, Republicans haven’t done the same. They may even ask themselves why, after this most recent debate and after all these years and after everything Trump’s done, Republicans keep covering for the guy. Trump can believe anything he wants and hang out with anyone he wants, but not only is the Republican Party under no obligation to provide him with a platform, the American people are under no obligation to take the GOP seriously as a major American political party so long as Trump remains their nominee.
Signals and Noise
The Presidential Debate
“I’m going to actually do something really unusual and I’m going to invite you to attend one of Donald Trump’s rallies because it’s a really interesting thing to watch. You will see during the course of his rallies he talks about fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter. He will talk about windmills cause cancer. And what you will also notice is that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom. And one thing you will not hear him talk about is you. You will not hear him talk about your needs, your dreams and your desires, and I’ll tell you, I believe you deserve a president who actually puts you first, and I pledge to you that I will.”—Vice President Kamala Harris during the debate
About a minute later: “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating—they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”—Don Trump.
For context (and the debunking) see this article by Layla Ferris for CBS News or this one by Sarah Ellison and Jeremy B. Merrill of the Washington Post.
Alicia Victoria Lozano of NBC News reports the woman responsible for the original post on social media claiming immigrants were eating pets in Springfield said she has no first hand knowledge of any such incident and regrets making the post.
While many Republican lawmakers are running with Trump’s baseless assertion, Republican Ohio Governor Mike DeWine confirmed officials have no evidence to back up Trump’s claims.
Miriam Jordan of the New York Times takes readers inside Springfield, Ohio, to see how the town’s leaders and its Haitian community are struggling in the wake of Trump’s comments.
David A. Graham of The Atlantic has good commentary on the debate moment, including the observation that conservative efforts to troll liberals with the falsehoods actually led Trump to amplify them.
Ian Millhiser of Vox explains the racist undertones to the claim that immigrants are eating dogs and cats.
Christianity Today editor Russell Moore holds nothing back in an article in The Atlantic titled “Trump’s Lie Is Another Test for Christian America”.
Trump on Thursday claimed immigrants in Springfield where “destroying [the residents’] way of life” and said he would begin his aggressive deportation initiative in Springfield. (The vast majority of Haitian immigrants in Springfield are in the country legally.) On Saturday he claimed Springfield had been “taken over” by illegal immigrants. Donald Trump, Jr., told Charlie Kirk that Haitian immigrants have low IQs and will turn the United States into a third world country; he also added such comments were not racist.
Trump’s response when his claim was debunked by the debate moderators: “I’ve seen people on television!” Like, these people?
Another classic, when Trump was asked if he still wants to replace Obamacare: “I have concepts of a plan.” The plan is basically to keep Obamacare unless something better and less expensive comes along (which suggests to me he made it through the first day of Econ 101) and that we’ll be hearing about his plan soon.
DAVID MUIR: You were the president. You were watching [the January 6 riot] unfold on television. It’s a very simple question as we move forward toward another election. Is there anything you regret about what you did on that day? Yes or no.
FORMER PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I had nothing to do with that other than they asked me to make a speech. I showed up for a speech.
Counterpoint:
Also: “Now, it is up to Congress to confront this egregious assault on our democracy. And after this, we’re going to walk down, and I’ll be there with you, we’re going to walk down, we’re going to walk down. Anyone you want, but I think right here, we're going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them. Because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong.”—Trump, at the “big protest in D.C. on January 6th.”
Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post fact-checked the debate. There’s a reason the ABC moderators called Trump out a few times. (Trump even lied once to counter a fact check.)
By Bill Sher of Washington Monthly: “Kamala Harris Is Good at This”
By Charlie Wetzel of The Atlantic: “Kamala Harris’s Secret Weapon”
By Lisa Lerer and Reid J. Epstein of the New York Times: “In Debate With Trump, Harris’s Expressions Were a Weapon”
By Jess Bidgood of the New York Times: “Is Donald Trump Too Emotional for This?”
By Will Saletan of The Bulwark: “The Narcissist Lost the Debate”
By Michael Tomasky of The New Republic: “This Was the Beginning of Donald Trump’s Final Unraveling”
By Dan Balz of the Washington Post: “Harris Dominated Trump in Debate, but Will It Matter?”
The 2024 Election: Policy
Ana Swanson of the New York Times writes about Trump’s solution to every problem: Tariffs. And Burgess Everett of Semafor writes about how that divides a Republican Party that’s worried they may not be able to corral Trump on the issue.
The 2024 Election: The Campaign Trail
Hugo Lowell of The Guardian reports GOP operatives are worried Trump’s get-out-the-vote operation in swing states has been neglected. Trump has largely outsourced his GOTV efforts to a group of inexperienced PACs, but they have yet to scale up.
By Christian Paz of Vox: “Can We Trust the Polls This Year?”
Trump repeated in his new coffee table book the debunked rumor that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is the son of Fidel Castro.
This Week in “WTF is Wrong With J.D. Vance?”
The whole immigrants-eating-pets thing went viral thanks to none other than J.D. Vance, who repeated the viral hoax on social media last Monday. Other Republicans began repeating the rumor. Vance seemed to kind of sort of try to walk it back while kind of sort of trying to gain more mileage from it by beginning a social media post on Tuesday this way: “In the last several weeks, my office has received many inquiries from actual residents of Springfield who’ve said their neighbors’ pets or local wildlife were abducted by Haitian migrants. It’s possible, of course, that all of these rumors will turn out to be false.” It’s also possible the rumor that Vance f*cks couches is false, but why operate under the assumption he doesn’t? (Kaitlin Collins called Vance out on this after the debate during an interview on CNN using the example of Bigfoot.)
Vance also told Collins the Haitian immigrants in Springfield were responsible for a rise in HIV and tuberculosis, which is not true.
“I don’t think most Americans – whether they like her music or fans of hers or not – are gonna be influenced by a billionaire celebrity who I think is fundamentally disconnected from the interests and the problems of most Americans. When grocery prices go up 20%, it hurts most Americans. It doesn’t hurt Taylor Swift. When housing prices become unaffordable, it doesn’t affect Taylor Swift or any other billionaire.”—Vance, explaining why Taylor Swift’s endorsement of Kamala Harris won’t hurt the campaign of the billionaire celebrity who is fundamentally disconnected from the interests and problems of most Americans.
Ian Ward of Politico considers Vance’s long game as someone at the vanguard of the New Right movement. (“In fact, Vance increasingly embodies a much-discussed archetype that has been theorized about at length in New Right-adjacent books and podcasts [many of which Vance has read and listened to]. By forging an alliance between the New Right and MAGA, Vance, according to this reading, could be the vanguard of a new political elite that, though not popular itself, would institute an illiberal and explicitly reactionary social order. The details of this alliance differ between the various writers and thinkers that have influenced Vance — people like Patrick Deneen, Curtis Yarvin and Peter Thiel. But taken together, their prescriptions amount to a kind of three-step blueprint for the New Right’s project: Identify a member of the conservative elite who can tap into the energies of an ascendant right-wing populist movement, leverage that alliance into political power, and then unleash the New Right elite to carry out a top-down transformation of American society along illiberal lines. It is, in effect, a plan to use populism to constrain the popular will [though Vance and his allies of course don’t see it that way] — and Vance increasingly fits the part of its executor.”)
Sofia Nelson picks up on a similar theme in their article for MSNBC about Vance’s position within the post-liberal right.
Democracy Watch
The New York Times and NBC News both look at Trump’s vow to prosecute his political enemies.
The Washington Post takes a look at Elon Musk and the role he plays as the planet’s greatest disseminator of misinformation.
Trump Media shares continue to plummet, dropping to their lowest levels since they began trading. They rebounded on Friday, however, after Trump announced he would not be selling his shares of stock next week.
More than thirty House members (including six Republicans) have signed a pledge to certify the results of the 2024 election no matter the outcome.
Congress
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson’s attempts to find a way to get his fellow Republican House members to keep the government open are going as poorly as expected. Trump is now starting to say he wants the government shut down.
Independent West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin dropped his pledge not to vote for judicial nominees that do not have bipartisan support, meaning Democratic Majority Leader Chuck Schumer can start confirming Biden’s judges again. So long as Manchin was refusing to confirm judges, Democrats couldn’t get work done on this front with their fifty votes since the tie-breaking vote in the Senate—Vice President Kamala Harris—is busy on the campaign trail.
Republican Wisconsin Senator and some medium-sized town’s local idiot Ron Johnson wondered without evidence if the Deep State was behind the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. Said Johnson, “When you don’t know the federal government’s involvement in the JFK assassination, when you really don’t know what happened with Nixon … that might’ve been the second coup. The first coup is you take out Kennedy, the second coup you take out Nixon, and then you take out Trump.” Hey Ron: If the Deep State is so nefarious and all-powerful, why didn’t you lose your re-election campaign in 2022? Hey Ron: What if the Deep State doesn’t exist?
Tim Alberta writes in The Atlantic about Republican Utah Senator Mike Lee, who went from warning the nation about the dangers posed by Trump in 2016 to helping Trump overturn the 2020 election. From the article: “To hear Lee’s friends, allies, and former staffers tell it—and they did, by the dozens, though many requested anonymity to avoid retaliation from the senator—Lee is all but unrecognizable. Once a good-natured Latter-day Saint whose idea of edgy was doing corny impersonations of his fellow senators, he now regularly engages in crude conspiracy theories. Once a politician who seemed to be fashioning himself as a modern Daniel Patrick Moynihan of the right, Lee is now a very online MAGA influencer. It’s as if Ned Flanders became a 4chan troll.”
State and Local Government
The Miami Herald reports Floridians are disturbed plainsclothes police officers sent by Republican Governor Ron DeSantis are coming to their homes to verify signatures on petitions used to place an abortion rights amendment on the ballot this fall.
The Economy
Inflation fell to 2.5% in August, the lowest level since February 2021.
The Biden administration signaled they will not act in the short term to block the sale of U.S. Steel to a Japanese firm.
International News
Russia launched a counterattack against Ukrainian forces in the Ukrainian-occupied Russian region of Kursk.
Vladimir Putin warned that NATO would be at war with Russia if the alliance lifted restrictions keeping Ukraine from attacking Russia with long-range missiles.
Top 5 Records Music Review: Romance by Fontaines D.C.
Every emerging generation confronts the mess of a world they inherit in their own unique way. Baby Boomers were appalled by it and revolted against it. Gen Xers rolled their eyes at it and rejected it. Millennials felt victimized by it and sought to change it.
The newest generation to come along, often referred to as Gen Z or Zoomers, have come of age in a world spoiled by Donald Trump, the alt-right, online trolls, conspiracy theorists, a global pandemic, and global warming. They’re living in a reality their elders had presumably rendered inconceivable, yet here they are. Perhaps that’s proof the world is inherently rotten. And perhaps that means they’re rotten, too. Gen Z loathes the world and loathes themselves. Instead of Zoomers, maybe we should call them Brats.
Every generation also needs its Voice, and when it comes to Gen Z, the Irish band Fontaines D.C. (yes, it’s a terrible name) have used their latest album, Romance, to stake their claim to the title. Their first two albums (Dogrel [2019] and A Hero’s Death [2020]) were grounded indie/punk rock records, what you might hear if you entered a Dublin pub full of twentysomethings on a Friday night. Their next release, Skinty Fia (2022) found the band sliding toward a more subdued, moodier sound. Romance, however, is made for arenas. That makes Fontaines D.C. something we haven’t seen in a while: A rock band intent on speaking to and for the masses.
On Romance, Fontaines D.C.’s has turned to 90s-era alternative rock, Britpop, and electronica artists for inspiration. They’ve even overhauled their look along these lines, scanning now as an ironic 90s rock or electronica band masquerading as pop stars. Listen closely, however, and you’ll realize no band has influenced the sound of Romance more than (gasp!) Coldplay. You can hear it in the album’s atmospheric swell and in the Chris Martin-esque vocals of lead singer Grian Chatten as his voice thins to reach the high notes. But Fontaines D.C. are like a dystopian version of Coldplay. Whereas Coldplay (like their forerunners U2) aimed to create a massive sound that could elevate their global fanbase into a sky full of stars, Fontaines D.C., on songs like “Here’s the Thing”, puncture their own sonic drone with spiky, buzzsaw guitars and siren-like keyboard riffs:
It’s hardly a stretch to imagine Fontaines D.C. songs like “In the Modern World” popping up on a Coldplay album, but only if Coldplay aimed to numb the pain rather than transcend it. During that song’s chorus, Chatten and fellow bandmate Conor Deegan sing
In the modern world (What?)
In the modern world
I don’t feel anything
In the modern world
And I don’t feel bad, Charlene
It’s a drugged-out song, but it feels less about escape than acceptance. The track’s murky production isn’t meant to simulate a pharmaceutically-induced mental haze but rather the suffocating effects of the modern world itself, a gift that has left their generation stunted and damaged. When Deegan sings, “I don’t feel anything”, it comes across as an accusation. Like a lost Lana Del Rey song, “In the Modern World” burrows into the band’s psyche so they can acknowledge their own defects.
Listening to Romance, one is left wondering why all these decades of self-help and psychotherapy haven’t done more to improve the human condition. “Desire” feels like binge-watching social media, with each clip triggering the release of a micro-dose of endorphins that keeps us churning through mind-numbing thirty-second videos for hours on end. The standout 90s-electronica-inspired single “Starburster”, which seems destined to enter the song-of-the-decade conversation, channels a panic attack induced by hyperactivity:
Perhaps the problem is that we’ve disarmed ourselves, that we’ve embraced our fragility in a world that’s actually more vicious than we assumed. A word I kept circling back to as I listened to Romance for the first time was “trust.” I wasn’t sure why, but it just seemed in short supply. That theme, however, became explicit on the ninth track “Horseness is the Whatness” (a phrase drawn from James Joyce’s Ulysses; the band originally bonded over their love of poetry and have released two collections of poems.) On that song, Chatten sings
And never
Never I would trust
It sticks around for some
While always stays for none
It feels like those words were written by a vulnerable person who’s been taken advantage of. It also seems full of regret.
As Fontaines D.C. see it, it’s a lousy world, and we all make for lousy company. “Into the darkness again/ In with the pigs in the pen” Chatten sings on the album-opening title track, a This is Hardcore homage that sounds like a vindictive reactionary scorching the sky.
When he adds, “I will be beside you/ Till you’re dead”, it comes across as an awful realization for all involved. In the 2020s, company gets misery. Somewhere, Morrissey is having a laugh.
Yet Fontaines D.C. ends Romance with “Favourite” (see Exit Music) a jangly love song. “You’ve been my favourite for a long time” Chatten and O’Connell sing in the chorus, admitting that finding that person who can bring the most light to a miserable existence is perhaps the best we can hope for. To be beside you, two pigs in a pen, is such a heavenly way to die. How romantic.