In the Kingdom of the Biters, the …. thick-skinned? are king?

Holy cow this is a must-read.

The thing about the Trump regime(s) is that allows people to express their worst impulses. It gives permission to the atavism, the id, the sadism.

And, as per the article, it allows deeply inadequate people to wield power (or, rather, strength) and get vengeance for the perceived (and actual) slings and arrows of misfortune – for having been judged and found wanting, for having had to see (and then not-see) their own weaknesses and frailties.

There is so much on-the-money stuff in it, I could quote the whole thing. I will restrict myself to two

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.

and

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.