A New Low, or Just Another Week for Donald Trump?

Trump at his Greenville, N.C. rally, where the crowd called for the deportation of Ilhan Omar. (Madeline Gray/Bloomberg)

Everyone already knows about the Tweets, and probably the press conference and the rally too at this point, so I won't waste any time rehashing the grisly details. And if you've somehow avoided it all, allow me to say that I envy the degree of insulation you have from the nightmare that passes as American politics. Your mental health is probably the better for it, even though ignorance of current events is not a luxury many of us can afford in the long run. So what is there to say about it all? It speaks for itself. But on the other hand, who can stay silent in times like these?

You will see—and probably already have seen—people say that this was a New Low for the president, his most racist moment yet, truly a record-setting show of depravity, even for the grotesque swamp creature infesting the White House. I am not so sure. Perhaps our collective national memory has shrunk over the past few years—shrunk so drastically that we have little more than an awareness of the present and a vague sense that something must have happened to get us here. Is telling a few women of color to go "home" really such a shocking new twist or escalation for the man who proposed banning all Muslims from entering the country? Or who still maintains the Central Park Five should be in prison? Or who explicitly said a judge's Hispanic descent should disqualify him from ruling on a case? To call him a racist is just to state what's long been obvious, and to do so in the mildest form possible. He has the soul of a Nazi and the wits of a hammerhead shark. He is defective on every level as a human—moral, intellectual, spiritual, emotional. To call him evil is almost to give him too much credit; in the jungle, the concept of evil has no place, and Trump operates by the laws of the jungle. He is a big, dumb beast, barely able to form a sentence or a coherent thought, constantly on the prowl for something small and vulnerable to pounce on and rip to shreds. He has no concept of truth or falsehood, good or evil, right or wrong—his only concern is what satisfies his appetites. In a sane society he would have been locked up a long time ago or banished to the wilderness of Siberia.

Our halfwit commander-in-chief is not the most worrisome part of this whole thing, in any case. To paraphrase Edward Everett Hale, he is only one, and even his daddy's fortune could only carry him so far. No, the infection runs both deeper and wider than its ugliest, most prominent boil, as we have known for some time. The real horror of the recent geek show is just how deep and how wide it really goes. Lindsey Graham, the vile little tapeworm who once pretended to care about Trump's racism, followed Master's lead by piling on and slandering "The Squad" as a bunch of antisemitic communists who hate America. Yes, if there's one lesson to take from the past few years it's to hold onto your political grudges: I never forgave this nasty little bitch for his deranged militarism, even as he posed as some kind of Principled Conservative who was Truly Shocked by Trump's racism. And I was right. Between the two of them I'll the dumb ape-man over the worm any day of the week.

Few of Lindsey's esteemed colleagues have performed any better than he did. Mitch McConnell, Trump's loyal accomplice and a bloodless mutant who's devoted his life to harming others, quickly rushed to defend Trump's honor as soon as the accusations of racism started up, and has now said he thinks "The President is on to something" with his slurs against the four Congresswomen. When House Democrats brought forth a resolution to condemn the Tweets that Trump had shat out for the world to see, it won the votes of just four Republicans, along with Justin Amash, who recently (and rightly) abandoned his former political party.

And who can be surprised? The party that chose as its patron saint a senile Apartheid-supporter can only go so long before it comes out and embraces explicit white nationalism. The racism in the modern conservative movement goes back far before most people would like to admit, from the attacks on Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights movement in William F. Buckley's vile rag the National Review through Richard Nixon, who publicly ran on "law and order" and privately mused about the necessity of aborting mixed-race pregnancies, onto Reagan's anti-welfare race-baiting and Bush Sr.'s Willie Horton ad, finally achieving its sickening climax with Donald Trump. Today's Republican Party is a party of racism, rapists and reactionaries, and it's been a long time coming. 

And when The Thing From the White House held one of his deranged rallies and provoked chants of "send her back" at the mention of Ilhan Omar—chants which he has now pathetically said he disagreed with and tried to stop, despite showing no signs of discomfort in the moment—the conservative voices that spoke out in condemnation were no less loathsome than those who had defended Trump's tweets. Arch-shithead Ben Shapiro bleated that the chants were "Vile," then immediately followed it up by affirming that "Omar is awful. She is a radical anti-Semite with terrible views" before limply concluding that she shouldn't be deported for those "terrible views." His disgusting minion Ryan Saavedra also lamely objected that the chants were "not good" while affirming that he's "one of her harshest critics." These nematodes and their ilk have maliciously smeared the country's first black Muslim congresswoman as an antisemite for her (valid) criticisms of Israel, relying on racism and Islamophobia to help the medicine go down. Now that their cynical efforts have borne fruit, they want to wash their hands of it like some modern-day Pontius Pilate. Fuck them and fuck their toothless disavowals of what they helped give birth to. If anything happens to Omar, the blame is at their feet as much as it is at Trump's. 

But these weasels do have one thing right, which is that the chants are the most disturbing aspect of this all—though for reasons they fail to comprehend. The swine-faced reprobates demanding the exile of their political opponents show that the sick, monstrous side of the American soul is still alive and kicking. These are the spiritual progeny of moral bottom-feeders throughout American history: of slaveholders who decided to break away from the Union and form their own White Man's Republic, and settled for terrorizing the newly freed black Americans after their stupid plan went sideways; of the Klansmen who ruled the South through brute force and routinely murdered anyone with the "wrong" skin color; of the soulless jackals who screamed and hurled insults at the first black children to attend integrated schools. Even to call them Nazis obscures the fact they're as American as apple pie and weekly school shootings. Yes, for all the things Trump's statements were, they were decidedly not un-American—a term that's frankly bullshit no matter who uses it or how they use it. 

And the old truism about the body dying after the head's cut off hardly applies here. Donald Trump has played his role in energizing and mobilizing these termites, but they were there long before he came along and they won't disappear just because he leaves the presidency, regardless of when that happens. These people are a long-term problem, and they have to be defeated—by any means necessary, to borrow a phrase from another black Muslim they would have wanted deported. Every attempt at unity or compromise with this sort of scum has only served as a setback for the country, whether it took the form of attempts to accommodate them before the Civil War, the end of Reconstruction that gave them unbridled reign over the Jim Crow South, or the tacit liberal acceptance of de facto segregation. The only hope for permanent change is a final, crushing defeat for these savages—which may be made easier by the fact that they're disproportionately old and often look like they're on the road to an inevitable heart attack. 

Since I started writing this post, it seems that Trump has been continually doubling, tripling and quadrupling down on his original remarks. There are certainly those who will try to spin this as some devious ploy to make "The Squad" into the face of the Democratic Party by forcing the party leadership to defend them. That sort of analysis is like looking for some sort of cunning rationale behind the actions of a rabid dog. There is no brilliant (or even average) political strategizing going on here—just an angry gorilla slamming his fists into anything that he doesn't like. It's far too early to say with any certainty whether Trump will win in 2020, but if he does it won't be because he ingeniously goaded the Democrats into going too far left, it will be his ability to turn out the chuds I mentioned above, simply because he is one of them. 

Having mentioned the Democratic Party leadership I might as well acknowledge their typically sordid role in attacking and belittling the four Congresswomen in question, but I think I've talked enough about their motives elsewhere and I'm not inclined to spill any more bile for this blog post given how it currently stands. The note that I'll close on is just that the problem at hand goes far beyond Trump and it's nothing short of delusional to think it will go away once he does—something that Joe Biden and the other appeasers in the Democratic field would do well to acknowledge, and the rest of us would do equally well to keep in mind when deciding who to vote for.