Today’s Big Story

A Freudian Moment

Does everyone think America is in need of analysis?

Ever since Donald Trump won the election by an impressive margin, many have wondered how it happened. Some of his supporters were pleasantly surprised while his critics have struggled to understand his massive appeal. According to The Atlantic, many “have perhaps sensed by now that Trump’s support comes from someplace underneath conscious and rational political analyses. Who else but Sigmund Freud to help explain?”

Consider the recent post-election slogan, “Your body, my choice,” also engineered to upset and humiliate liberals: It’s an overt statement of sex and dominion. And Trump draws that out in people. “Disinhibition,” the New York Times writer Ezra Klein wrote recently, “is the engine of Trump’s success. It is a strength.” Trump is in touch with the impulses and desires that run counter to social norms, and he invites his audience to put aside the usual internal barriers to acting on or voicing them. This moment is an opportune one for a revival of Freud, whose work, with its signature focus on subterranean inner worlds, helps make sense of these tendencies and their implications for politics.

“The past few years,” the academic and critic Merve Emre wrote in an essay for The New Yorker this past June, “have given us a Freud for the pandemic, a Freud for Ukraine and a Freud for Palestine, a Freud for transfemininity, a Freud for the far right, and a Freud for the vipers’ nest that is the twenty-first-century American university.” It seems history has now given us another iteration: a Freud for the Trump movement.

And, it turns out, Freud thought a lot about what attracts humans to tyrants and strongmen. “What happens when members of the crowd are ‘hypnotized’ (that is the word Freud uses) by a tyrant?” Back in 2006, Mark Edmundson covered this topic for the New York Times magazine in a piece called Freud and the Fundamentalist Urge. “We want a strong man with a simple doctrine that accounts for our sufferings, identifies our enemies, focuses our energies and gives us, more enduringly than wine or even love, a sense of being whole. This man, as Freud says in his great book on politics, ‘Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,’ must appear completely masterful. He must seem to have perfect confidence, to need no one and to be entirely sufficient unto himself.” Yeah, that sounds about right.

House Ethics Committee Falls in Line Behind GOP

They declined to release its report on allegations against Trump’s pick for attorney general

The man picked to be America's next top law enforcement officer, Matt Gaetz, is at the center of a number of allegations which could prevent him from getting the job. That is, if these were normal times. Not long ago, nominees for high-level Cabinet jobs needed to be above reproach and even minor issues would likely derail them. But times are evidently changing.

The GOP’s decision to block the findings—against the will of Democrats on the panel—raises major questions about what happens to the highly secretive information that the ethics panel has already collected on Gaetz. He’s been accused of sexual misconduct and illicit drug use, and federal investigators established a trail of payments made by Gaetz to women (including some who testified that he had hired them for sex).

The committee did vote to meet again in December, when Republicans on the panel hope to have a finalized report, according to two people familiar with the discussions. But until then, pressure is ratcheting up across the Capitol to release the contents of the report. Speaker Mike Johnson pressured the committee last week not to release its findings on Gaetz, arguing that it would constitute a “terrible breach of protocol” to do so after a member had resigned, putting him beyond the panel’s jurisdiction.

Giraffes Are in Trouble

They’re about to join the endangered species list for the first time

I love giraffes. I don’t know why—maybe because their long, lean stature gives them a calm and graceful vibe. It’s why they’re such popular zoo animals, but the majestic mammals are about to join the endangered species list. Giraffe populations in the wild savannas of Africa have experienced a dramatic decline recently, and it’s become so severe that the U.S. government is now taking action to protect the animals.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed that the West African, Kordofan and Nubian subspecies of northern giraffe be considered endangered under the Endangered Species Act. In addition, the service proposed listing the reticulated giraffe and the Masai giraffe as threatened. According to the Washington Post, it would be the first time the animal would receive protection under the law.

About 117,000 wild giraffes are left worldwide, according to the Giraffe Conservation Foundation, down almost 30% from the 1980s. The wildlife service attributed plummeting giraffe populations to habitat loss, as people take over land for urbanization and agriculture, poaching and the impacts of drought fueled by climate change. Without addressing these main drivers, conservationists say, little progress can be made. The proposed listing would help the animals by reducing illegal hunting and trade by requiring permits to import giraffes into the U.S., the Fish and Wildlife Service said.

That Viral Banana Artwork Sold Again

And you won’t believe how much it went for …

You might remember back in 2019, when a banana duct-taped to a wall at Art Basel sold for $120,000, social media exploded and it reignited the age-old debate about the meaning of art. But artist Maurizio Cattelan’s viral creation, titled “Comedian,” has proven a sound investment for one collector: One of the artwork’s three “editions” smashed estimates to sell for $6.24 million at a Sotheby’s auction in New York on Wednesday.

Chinese-born crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun placed the winning bid—besting six other rivals, which experts said was a sign that even a struggling market would spend big on spectacle. Sun, who watched the auction from Hong Kong, said in a statement that the Cattelan work “represents a cultural phenomenon that bridges the worlds of art, memes, and the cryptocurrency community.”

Of course, he’s not getting the original banana. Or even the original duct tape. This piece is so conceptual that what Sun actually purchased was—among bragging rights—a certificate of authenticity, giving them the right to show the work and detailed instructions about how to display it. Those include the length of the strip of silver duct tape and the angle it should be placed on the wall, exactly 160 centimeters from the floor. Maybe I should get out of the newsletter business and start thinking up some art ideas.

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