'Make the world pay': Inside America's worst addiction

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U.S. President Donald Trump reacts while speaking to members of the media on board Air Force One en route to the U.S., October 30, 2025. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein

Intelligencer writer Sam Adler-Bell admits that pointing out MAGA hypocrisy ‘is a chump’s game,’ as is looking for “consistency” or “integrity.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson recently took a question about a MAGA-minded Jan. 6 Trump parolee caught conspiring to kill a Democrat. He then tried to blame Democrats for the Trump supporter’s attempted violence by saying: “They call every Republican a fascist now.”

“For sanity’s sake, I will state the plain facts: A man pardoned by the sitting president after engaging in a riot on his behalf was apprehended a second time, for allegedly threatening to kill a leading Democrat — and this, according to the Speaker of the House, is the fault of leftists,” said Adler-Bell.

“Amid a syncopated cascade of assaults, partisans play a perverted game of hot potato: Whoever is holding the ball when the music stops is responsible,” Adler-Bell argued. “If the latest shooter is plausibly left wing, the right is faultless, and vice versa, until the next round begins. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, but everybody plays. (And sometimes, of course, you cheat. In the Moynihan case, Johnson found himself holding the ball and threw it at his opponent’s chest.)

But that’s not the story, said Adler-Bell. The story is that the U.S. public remains fascinated with the idea of fixing things through violence, and our illness is going to burn the world.

“Today, American film and television are lousy with special-forces units, police detectives, and secret agents who use illegal and inhumane means (often including torture) to restore order and protect the innocent. Sometimes these bad but necessary men, like [John] Wayne in Liberty Valance, are consumed by guilt and drink — and, in a last feeble gesture of moral purgation, die alone in despair,” Adler-Bell said. “We Americans love these stories for their psychic parsimony: They redeem the violence underpinning the social order while allowing us to remain, at once, tut-tutting bystanders to its cruelty and deliciously complicit in its excess.”

Americans keep “looking for some new order born from the ashes of the old,” said Adler-Bell. For the right, Donald Trump is “the gunslinger who has come to slay the forces of liberal chaos and break a few rules, like habeas corpus and the First and Fourth Amendments, to establish a conservative empire.

Liberals, meanwhile. "await an avenging authority — a new kind of candidate, a sufficiently ballsy prosecutor, a judge or general — to come along and clean up the neighborhood,” said Adler-Bell. “The authoritarian chaos of the past decade demands a renewal of the liberal order in a more muscular form.”

We keep hoping that we can get “a new civilized order” from violence, but that’s simply not how you build anything.

Our “perennial American delusion,” said Adler-Bell, quoting writer Susan Sontag, is that purgative violence can be used to restore our blamelessness and our purity. It was okay to affectionately jeer at American barbarism, but that was before the American empire held the planet’s “historical future in its King Kong paws.”

“It is incredible that a country so idiotic and prone to neurotic excess has managed to keep the world in its meaty grasp for so long, fondling it like Lennie with his mouse, said Adler-Bell. “America has made the world pay for its priggish delusions of sanity. It will surely make the world pay for its nervous breakdown.”

Read the Intelligencer report at this link.

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