Bill Ackman and the dignity wraiths
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Scott has mentioned this a couple of times, but I wanted to put an exclamation point on how just a few months in the Trump fever swamps seem to have fully liquified billionaire financier Bill Ackman’s brain. Here’s a typical re-tweet from his Twitter feed:
Ackman loves to re-tweet every crazed right wing conspiracy theory, noting that it’s “interesting.” Of course the owner of the platform is the most prominent practitioner of these Questions that are Just Being Asked.
One thing I wonder about is whether the fact that Ackman lost a huge amount of money placing a billion-dollar short bet against the MLM scam Herbalife back in 2012, only to see his nemesis the legendary corporate raider Carl Icahn swoop in five years later to undercut that bet, has some connection to his eventual red pilled meltdown, and embrace of a scammer whose various enterprises make Herbalife look like a relatively legitimate racket.
All this reminds me of the enduring brilliance of Josh Marshall’s description of Donald Trump as the creator of “dignity wraiths.”
The third theme is not really any individual post but a stream of posts and tweets over several years about “dignity loss” and “dignity wraiths” and like things, a whole bespoke vocabulary or a running gag about this pattern we’re all aware of in which Trump demands of people an ever escalating series of humiliations, dignity losses and more. Trump requires it — that part alone isn’t hard to understand. It’s that people give it … lavishly and fulsomely. Soon you’ve got some guy you may not have agreed with but seemed like a reasonably self-possessed adult, and they’re saying “thank you, sir, may I have another” each time Trump comes up with a new insult name for them, praising his far-reaching intellect and encyclopedic knowledge of history, clapping obediently on his approach. Trump somehow casts a spell over these people and soon they’re like a desiccated dignity husk. It’s like he’s a dignity black hole that no one can re-emerge from.