Somebody Poured Liquid Oxygen on the Barbecue, Man

Part II. Trump didn't build the fire. He found the oxidizer. Somebody else lit the coal, and they'd like everyone to stop asking about it.

Last time out, the Dude worked through whether Donald Trump is the Mule from Asimov’s Foundation, and ran into a wall.

The Mule is a mutation. An accident. Nothing in galactic history produced him or saw him coming. He is an asteroid.

Trump is not an asteroid.

So we need a different metaphor, and the Dude has one. It has the advantage of having actually happened.

But first there’s a smaller correction to make, and it isn’t political.

It’s chemical.

(sorry, this gets a little long, but it’s worth it)

Gasoline Is The Wrong Word

People say Trump poured gasoline on the Republican Party.

Gasoline is fuel.

Trump was never the fuel.

Picture a Weber kettle. Not one of those enormous stainless-steel outdoor kitchens with six burners, a Bluetooth thermometer and a payment schedule. A Weber. Black. Charcoal.

Somebody has spent decades stacking briquettes in there. Some are glowing. Some are smoking. A few flames flicker around the edge.

Then a guy walks onto the patio carrying a Dewar flask of liquid oxygen.

Someone says, “You probably shouldn’t pour that on there.”

He pours it on there.

WHOOOOOOOMPH.

That, man. That’s much closer.

And Somebody Actually Did This

Here’s the part that elevates this from a metaphor to a documented incident.

In the mid-nineties, a Purdue engineer named George Goble got tired of waiting for charcoal to light.

He started with a hair dryer. Escalated to a vacuum cleaner. Then a propane torch. Then an acetylene torch. Then compressed pure oxygen, because engineers are a specific kind of person and the annual picnic had long since stopped being about hamburgers.

Then he went to liquid oxygen. Yeah, the same stuff they use in rockets…

Three gallons of it. Onto sixty pounds of charcoal.

Forty of those pounds were gone in three seconds. The grill was ready to cook in three seconds. All the old grease burned off. There is video. It looks like a small municipal emergency.

He won the 1996 Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry for it, which is the correct outcome.

Now Read The Warning He Published With It

Slowly, man. This is the whole thesis, hiding inside a barbecue tip:

An ignition source, such as a lit cigarette or one glowing coal, must be present before pouring on the LOX.

You need a coal already lit.

Liquid oxygen poured on cold charcoal does nothing impressive. It sits there being extremely cold, boils off into the sky, and everybody goes home having wasted three gallons of liquid oxygen and an afternoon.

LOX is an oxidizer. It does not burn. It makes other things burn absurdly faster.

Which means the great unanswerable question of the last decade — did Trump cause this, or did this cause Trump — collapses into a much smaller question with a much more uncomfortable answer.

Who lit the coal.

The Charcoal Was Already There

The laziest available account of Donald Trump imagines a perfectly respectable Republican Party quietly grilling hamburgers and discussing entitlement reform until a deranged television personality arrived with a flamethrower.

Come on man.

The charcoal had been stacked for fifty years.

Goldwater. The Southern Strategy. The Religious Right. Reagan explaining that government is the problem. Gingrich converting Congress from a legislature into a blood sport. Limbaugh. Fox. The Clinton conspiracy cottage industry. Iraq. Palin. The Tea Party. Birtherism. Thirty years of escalating insistence that Democrats weren’t merely wrong but illegitimate, and that journalists, universities, scientists and civil servants were an occupying army.

Republican voters did not wake up one morning in June 2015 and spontaneously arrive at all that.

There was already a fire, man.

Trump changed the rate at which it burned.

Walter Objects To The Cooking Metaphor

“This wasn’t an accident,” Walter says. “These people built the fucking thing.”

Walter is now wearing a barbecue apron.

Nobody saw him put it on.

And, well — yes. That’s exactly why oxidizer works better than gasoline. It’s the distinction that lets both halves of the argument be true at once, which is why everybody’s been arguing past each other since 2016.

Trump didn’t invent evangelical grievance. Or racial resentment. Or hostility to immigration. Or anti-government conservatism. Or right-wing media. Or the conviction that liberals are enemies rather than opponents.

He inherited all of it. Fully assembled. Some of it still under warranty.

What he contributed was noticing that the valve turned further than anyone had turned it, and that nothing bad happened to him when he turned it there. That it went to eleven man.

Which Brings Us To The Bowling League

Walter once pulled a firearm on a man over a foot fault.

Insane. Indefensible. Also — and this is the part everybody skips — completely committed to the league.

Walter wants there to be rules. He wants a scoresheet, a season, a tournament, a Wednesday night. The entire deranged episode is in service of an institution he needs to keep existing. This is not ‘Nam. This is bowling. There are rules.

That was movement conservatism for fifty years. Furious, escalating, occasionally armed, and fundamentally invested in the league continuing to exist.

They wanted the anger instrumentally. Angry enough to vote. Angry enough to back the tax cut. Angry enough to confirm the judges. Angry enough to show up in a midterm.

But you still needed the Senate to function. You needed the Chamber of Commerce. You needed NATO. You needed the FBI, at least on alternate Tuesdays. You needed a bureaucracy that would operate the machinery once you’d won it. You needed elections that produced results you could take office under.

You wanted the voters angry.

You did not want them that angry.

Trump’s contribution — and the Dude does think it counts as one, in the way a hurricane counts as weather — was asking why not.

Why not tell them the whole thing is rigged? Why not tell them the experts are lying? Why not tell them an election you lost was stolen? Why not go after Republicans who cross you harder than you go after Democrats? Why not make loyalty to one guy the only test that scores?

Why keep the fire inside the grill?

The patio’s right there, man.

Donny Has A Question

“So what happens when the oxygen runs out?”

Not now, Donny.

“I’m just saying, it’s a gas, right? Doesn’t it boil off? Doesn’t it just —”

Donny, you’re out of your element.

Hold that thought. Seriously. Hold it.

Maude Explains Oxidizers

Liquid oxygen does not need to be the combustible material in order to make combustion spectacularly more violent.

Thank you, Maude.

Maude would also like to note, clinically, that the resulting coalition was never a monolith and isn’t one now.

YouGov finds ninety-five percent of MAGA-identifying Republicans approving of Trump’s job performance — sixty-eight percent of them strongly. Among non-MAGA Republicans, approval sits around fifty-four percent, with eight percent strongly approving and forty-three percent disapproving outright.

Those are two different parties sharing a jersey.

Global Strategy Group found a sixty-six-point gap between MAGA and non-MAGA Republican voters on the basic question of whether the economy is getting better or worse. Sixty-six points. Same party. Same country. Same groceries.

And More in Common, after canvassing more than eighteen thousand Americans including some eleven thousand Trump voters, ended up sorting them into four distinct clusters rather than one. A coalition, not a cult.

Which is why “Trump destroyed the Republican Party” is simultaneously true and misleading. He destroyed one version of it, using material that was already sitting there for another. The resentment. The religious grievance. The anti-institutional politics. The sealed information environment. The conviction that compromise equals surrender.

He didn’t manufacture any of it.

He gave it permission. Then amplification. Then coordination. Then a red hat.

One More Thing From Goble’s Warning Label

There’s a second line, and the Dude has been chewing on it for a while.

If charcoal is PRESOAKED in LOX first, an explosion will result. One briquette presoaked in LOX is approximately equivalent to one stick of dynamite.

Pour the oxidizer on top of burning material and you get a fast fire.

Let the material sit submerged in it first — saturated, all the way through, for a long time — and you don’t get a fire at all.

You get a detonation.

The Dude doesn’t want to over-drive this one. But somewhere in America there are people who have spent fifteen years marinating in an information environment that contains no oxygen but its own, and the Dude does not think those people are on the same curve as everybody else.

That’s not a joke, man. Moving on.

The Big Lebowski Discovers He Has No Money

Here’s the genuinely funny part, and the Dude apologizes for enjoying it as much as he does.

Republican elites spent forty years telling their voters a very specific story. Government is corrupt. The media lies. Experts are frauds. Liberals hate you. Washington is a swamp. The establishment sold you out.

Then Trump showed up and said: correct on every count, and also, the Republican establishment telling you this is the establishment.

Oh.

Huh.

They spent four decades training millions of people to distrust every institution in American life and then discovered, over roughly one primary season, that they were an institution.

And look — the movie already did this bit.

The Big Lebowski sits in his study surrounded by plaques and photographs and framed evidence of his own importance, and delivers the greatest line of establishment contempt in American cinema. Your revolution is over. Condolences. The bums lost.

Enormous authority. Tremendous conviction. Beautiful room.

And it’s all Maude’s money. Every dollar. The achievements are invented, the foundation is a tax vehicle, the briefcase is empty, and when somebody finally yanks him out of the chair he just lies there on the floor.

Forty years of telling the base that real Americans built this country while running an operation funded by donors who wanted a capital gains rate. Then the base took the story seriously and went looking for the guy who’d been laughing at them.

They found him. He was in the chair.

You can hear the charcoal catching.

The Thermodynamics Of It

This is why Trump is both cause and consequence, and why arguing about which is a waste of a perfectly good afternoon.

You cannot explain him without the preceding half-century. But you also cannot subtract him and assume the reaction proceeds at the same speed, because reaction rate is not a detail. Past a certain rate, it stops being a faster version of the same event and starts being a different event.

Politicians adapted. Donors adapted. Media adapted. Activists adapted. Primary electorates adapted.

People who couldn’t tolerate the heat left, mostly for cable contracts and book deals. People who thrived in it moved closer to the flame.

And several years later somebody looks up from the potato salad and says: when the hell did this become an inferno?

Man. You poured liquid oxygen on the barbecue. In daylight. In front of witnesses. Somebody filmed it.

So, The Mule

Which is the correction the Foundation analogy needed.

Trump is Mule-like in the narrow sense that an unusual individual dramatically altered the trajectory of a system that assumed individuals didn’t matter that much.

But Asimov’s Mule came from outside history. This guy came from inside the grill.

Movement conservatives stacked the charcoal. The Religious Right added a layer. Talk radio added another. Fox kept the coals hot. Gingrich wandered around with the lighter fluid. The Tea Party brought one of those chimney starters.

Then a guy walked onto the patio, looked at the container marked LIQUID OXYGEN — KEEP AWAY FROM OPEN FLAME, and thought:

Yeah, well, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.

WHOOOOOOOMPH.

Donny Was Right, Which Is Its Own Kind Of Tragedy

Liquid oxygen boils off. Donny had it exactly right and nobody let him finish. It’s gone in minutes.

The charcoal does not care.

The charcoal is now sixty pounds of open flame and it will go on being that for hours after the oxidizer has evaporated into the Indiana sky. You don’t get the cold grill back. You don’t get the eyebrows back either.

So when people ask what the Republican Party looks like after Trump, the Dude thinks they’re asking a comforting question with real sincerity. The answer isn’t it returns to normal. The answer is: it looks like whatever burns at that temperature.

Some of it will be recognizable. The load-bearing stuff mostly won’t.

The Dude would love to be wrong about this. The Dude is frequently wrong. It’s kind of his thing.

But nobody’s getting a new rug out of it, man. That’s not how the story goes.

The Dude abides.

The eyebrows do not.