Clownwashing

 Susie Wiles's unexpectedly revealing interview with Vanity Fair this week is being widely interpreted as an unforced error on the administration's part. In the course of the discussion, Wiles reportedly offered a shocking number of seemingly unvarnished opinions on her colleagues—most of which have been interpreted as damaging for the administration she serves. All of this has left many media observers baffled as to what Wiles was thinking. 

I wonder though—for my part—if there wasn't something more calculated behind this. Yes, Wiles in the interview did offer a lot of apparently damning verdicts on her boss and his friends: Trump has an "alcoholic's personality"; Vance is implied to be a cynical opportunist who made a heel-turn in his political convictions in order to advance his career; Musk is a weirdo who sleeps during the daytime; Vought is a right-wing extremist; etc. 

But all of this fits in—to some extent—with what some people like about this administration: the non-stop reality TV spectacle of it all. Wiles's apparent candor plays the whole thing for laughs: what a bunch of idiots and egotists!—which they obviously are; but in the process, she obscures the element of genuine horror in what this administration does.

By disarmingly admitting to the administration's various stumbles—"no rational person could think the USAID process was a good one," she reportedly said—she suddenly neutralizes them as grounds for criticism. The administration comes across as absurd, chaotic, and incompetent—but also willing to laugh at itself. Suddenly, in Wiles's telling, the dumpster fire of this presidency just seems like a big joke, rather than a catastrophe with real human consequences. 

Instead of whitewashing the administration's record, then—what we have here is clownwashing. 

Beneath the apparent candor of the interview, then, I think there may be a strategy; some "soft deceitful wiles" if you will (Blake). 

I would encourage us to look past the buffoonery and the clown paint—even though these are all too real. As I've said many times before, this administration is indeed a farce; but we also have to "see the horror in the heart of farce," as Brecht once wrote, of a different tin-pot autocrat and his band of cartoonish cronies. We have to remember that this is also an administration that has starved children to death and deported people to concentration camps, for instance.

Susie Wiles certainly earns some laughs, to be sure, for portraying Elon Musk as a socially incompetent klutz—an "odd duck"—with bizarre personal habits. But she appears to regard him as a kind of "nutty professor," which fits in with the mythology he likes to project about himself: the absent-minded "genius," as Wiles called him, who generates chaos around himself solely in pursuit of the kind of "creative destruction" needed to realize his dreams. 

The actual, much-darker reality of Elon is thereby occluded: such as the fact that the world's richest man destroyed foreign aid programs that often mean the difference between life and death for people in internment camps in Burma or refugee facilities in Bangladesh. An Associated Press story this morning describes how Rohingya refugee children were forced into abusive premature marriages or human trafficking as the only means to survive, after US aid was withdrawn. 

That's the handiwork of this particular "odd duck"; this particular "genius": children starving, dying of hunger and easily-preventable diseases, or forcibly trafficked in the Global South: all because Trump endowed Musk with powers to which he was never elected, and because Musk didn't care enough about the potential effects of his actions to inquire whether anything bad might come of precipitously cutting off a critical lifeline for millions of people. 

That's the reality of this administration that Wiles's apparent truth-telling manages to hide. Beneath the clown paint there is something infinitely more hideous. "[L]o, the lashes had been eaten away / From the oozy eye-lids; / The eye-balls were seared with a milky mucus; / The madness of a dying soul / Was written on her face / But the multitude saw why she wore the bandage" (Edgar Lee Masters).