Trump Gets Away With Sh*tting On Half The Country Because That's The Whole GOP Platform Anyway
Name one Republican policy that isn't about hurting someone.
Over the weekend, as we all know by now, Donald Trump posted an AI video of himself flying a plane and dropping feces all over the No Kings marches. We also all know that if a Democrat had done that, people would go right off the deep end, the media would go on about it forever, and there would be 85,000 Bret Stephens op-eds and James Carville interviews talking about how we need to be sweeter to these people and not so divisive.
Indeed, Matt Yglesias took a moment this week to, apropos of absolutely nothing, lecture us all on being more tolerant of bigots.
Once again, we are all asking same question we’ve all been asking for years now. How is it that he gets away with doing this kind of thing and pundits are still talking about (and entirely misinterpreting) the time when Hillary Clinton said that she puts a small segment of Trump voters — specifically the alt-right and the out and proud neo-Nazis into a “basket of deplorables.” Is it because we don’t harp on it the way Republicans would? Because the media doesn’t run with it the way they run with any comment that could be seen as disparaging Trump voters?
Probably a little. But I have another theory — and that is that “shitting on Americans” is literally the whole GOP platform to begin with.
There are scant few Republican or conservative stances or policies that are not centered on creating and perpetuating a hierarchy of some kind, that are not about hating or denigrating or punishing one group or another. It’s a constant stream of “Who is bad? Who can we oppress? Who can we shit on?” Poor people, Black people, people of color in general, women, gay people, trans people, immigrants, college students, college professors, people who aren’t Christian, straight cis men who are insufficiently macho, people from literally any other country, unhoused people, fat people, the list goes on and on.
Indeed, I think the only one I can think of at the moment is “guns,” and I’m going to need to point out the fact that their most persistent explanation for why they need all of the guns is that they may need to kill us all if things don’t go their way someday.
So when Trump posts a video of himself dropping feces all over half of America, it feels almost a little too familiar to gin up any sincere outrage. Does he do anything aside from shit on people? Not from what I can tell!
On the other hand, the Left positions itself as wanting to protect people from harm, preferring equality over hierarchy. So if we say something “mean” about them, it has a more significant impact. It becomes “They want good things for everyone BUT us!”
At the same time, the Right does not believe we actually want equality or that anyone could possibly want that. They believe that on some level, everyone wants hierarchy — that what we really want is a hierarchy with them at the bottom and everyone else above them. This literally is their beef with intersectionality. They actually believe that it means that we believe the more oppressed groups a person belongs to, the “better” we think they are. This is why, when 4chan used to do its ridiculous fake Twitter campaigns like #EndFathersDay, they would pretend to be Black women. Their actual thesis was that everyone would just go along with them and listen to them if they were Black women, and they wanted to prove that this was true. They didn’t prove this and it was very obvious from the jump what was going on, but much of the Right believes it’s true and is quite miffed about it.
I suspect it’s part of why the Right has desperately tried to push their narrative that “Actually, it’s white Christian heterosexual cis men who are the most oppressed people in the world!” In their minds, we believe that the more oppressed a person is, the more worthy they are of being heard and believed.
Is this insane? It absolutely is. But I am telling you that a lot of them do believe this and it has driven them quite mad. They have open, gaping wounds and the slightest touch sends them reeling. It is also why they are so open to someone like Donald Trump telling them that they are special and wonderful and, you know, taking a giant dump on the rest of us for hurting them so.
Another big part of why it sticks more when the Right is insulted is because of the general perception that they are the “Real Americans” and that the Left is made up of people who would probably rather be European, anyway. We have a desire for things to be more civilized — we care about culture, we want everyone to have health care, for the unhoused and the elderly to be taken care of, for people to be able to afford rent, afford food, afford college for their kids, for all people to be treated with dignity and respect, and to have a president who does not post videos of himself flying a plane and dropping shit all over us whilst “Highway to the Danger Zone” plays in the background.
We are critical of periods of time in this country for which they are desperately nostalgic, and to them, this means “hating America” — and if you hate America, you can’t be a “Real American.” In their warped view, Trump is “punching up” by shitting all over us unReal Americans.
So, basically, we’re not that sincerely upset about it because it’s literally what we have come to expect from the Right and Donald Trump, and the Right doesn’t see it as “shitting on half of America” because, as far as they are concerned, we are not “Real Americans” and this is vengeance for making them feel bad.
Take a moment and think about how the sentence “They think they’re better than you” makes you feel. If you’re anything like me, and you probably are if you’re reading this, odds are that at most, you can muster a shrug and an “Oh, well that’s nice for them.”
But that one phrase, or the specter of that one phrase, can rile up a very large segment of Trump’s target demographic like no other. That’s their jugular. They are angry at the idea that we think we are smarter and more sophisticated than they are, that we think they are a bunch of backwards rubes clinging to their bibles and their guns and so anything that rings of that to them sends them over the edge. They are primed for it and their reaction to it is sincere.
This is also why Obama asking for Grey Poupon on a hamburger had 85,000 times the staying power than any horrid thing Trump has ever said about us.
I would argue that one of the biggest reasons for their anger at immigration is the belief that we like immigrants better than we like them — which, to be fair, is entirely true. At least it is for me. I have an enormous amount of respect for those who do what it takes to emigrate here, legally or otherwise, for people who work all week for very little, just to send half back to their families. I don’t have a ton for people who stand around crying about drag queens reading stories to children.
I’d also argue that a big reason for their hysteria over schools is because they are afraid that if their children learn to accept all kinds of people, they will reject them and think they are assholes … which, very likely, is exactly what will happen anyway.
I am not making excuses for them, mind you, or suggesting that we have done anything wrong in fighting for equality and fair treatment for everyone. Far from it. But rejection and insecurity are responsible for a great number of the world’s evils.
This isn’t to say that we haven’t been able to make things stick. We have, but only when we’ve been sincerely horrified or disgusted by them enough to sustain that outrage in spite of their attempts to downplay those things. They may not always have the effect we’d assume they’d have, but they do have staying power. “Grab them by the pussy,” January 6, and everything ICE is doing right now all have a significant amount of staying power. “Very fine people” had a lot of staying power before the Right was able to muddy the waters with their insistence that we were disingenuously claiming he said something he didn’t say (we weren’t).
There are also things they’ve had trouble getting to stick — mostly things that they are disingenuously angry or upset about. No one believes they’re actually afraid of “leftist violence” and so you’ll notice that that one has dissipated rather quickly. I’m not saying they won’t keep trying, but it did not break through and create the narrative they had hoped for, largely due to the mountains of evidence that right-wing violence is vastly more prevalent.
I’d also say that their attempts at creating a parallel culture have largely failed, because they don’t actually care enough about art to bother being any good at it. They’re not dying to make movies, they’re making them because they want to influence the culture, and that shines through everything they try to do. The Left doesn’t produce more art because we are nefariously trying to brainwash the world, we make it because it’s just what we enjoy doing and what we value.
Sincerity is everything. Authenticity is everything. We are simply more believable when we are pissed off that people don’t have healthcare or that Stephen Miller is a creepy-ass full-on Nazi than we are as deeply offended victims of Trump’s absurd and babyish AI memes.
I think that, instead of trying to make shitting on us seem just as reprehensible as shitting on them (which is never going to happen), we ought to focus on what we are sincerely outraged and sickened by, as well as the ways in which we can muddy the waters and make their nonsense less sticky. Openly discussing this double standard is, ironically, one way of doing that — because we actually are more pissed about that than we are about Trump’s shitty Top Gun homage.
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"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.” ― Lyndon B. Johnson
“The salient fact of American politics is that there are fifty to seventy million voters each of whom will volunteer to live, with his family, in a cardboard box under an overpass, and cook sparrows on an old curtain rod, if someone would only guarantee that the black, gay, Hispanic, liberal, whatever, in the next box over doesn’t even have a curtain rod, or a sparrow to put on it.”- attributed to Davis X Machina, at Balloon Juice.
“When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.” (Origin unknown)
I have a real dilemma y'all. My union just asked me to show up to my government job on overtime tomorrow so that staffing doesn't look shit, because our MAGA secretary of ______ is showing up to the building for a press tour. The job I'm currently not being paid to do. I think this is a crazy ask, and am currently a no. What say you all?