Rolling Stone (Opinion)
By Matt Taibbi
August 21, 2015
So
two yahoos from Southie in my hometown of Boston severely beat up a
Hispanic homeless guy earlier this week. While being arrested, one of
the brothers reportedly told
police that "Donald Trump was right, all of these illegals need to be
deported."
When
reporters confronted Trump, he hadn't yet heard about the incident. At
first, he said, "That would be a shame." But right after, he went on:
"I
will say, the people that are following me are very passionate. They
love this country. They want this country to be great again. But they
are very passionate. I will
say that."
This is the moment when Donald Trump officially stopped being funny.
The
thing is, even as Donald Trump said and did horrible things during this
year's incredible run at the White House, most sane people took solace
in the fact that he
could never win. (Although new polls are showing that Hillary's recent
spiral puts this reassuring thought into jeopardy.)
In
fact, most veteran political observers figured that the concrete impact
of Trump's candidacy would be limited in the worst case to destroying
the Republican Party as
a mainstream political force.
That
made Trump's run funny, campy even, like a naughty piece of
pornographic performance art. After all, what's more obscene than
pissing on the presidency? It seemed
even more like camp because the whole shtick was fronted by a veteran
reality TV star who might even be in on the joke, although of course the
concept was funnier if he wasn't.
Trump
had the whole country rubbernecking as this preposterous Spaulding
Smails caricature of a spoiled rich kid drove the family Rolls (our
illustrious electoral process
in this metaphor) off the road into a ditch. It was brilliant theater
for a while, but the ugliness factor has gotten out of control.
Trump
is probably too dumb to realize it, or maybe he isn't, but he doesn't
need to win anything to become the most dangerous person in America. He
can do plenty of damage
just by encouraging people to be as uninhibited in their stupidity as
he is.
Trump
is striking a chord with people who are feeling the squeeze in a less
secure world and want to blame someone – the government, immigrants,
political correctness,
"incompetents," "dummies," Megyn Kelly, whoever – for their problems.
Karl
Rove and his acolytes mined a lot of the same resentments to get
Republicans elected over the years, but the difference is that Trump's
political style encourages
people to do more to express their anger than just vote. The key to his
success is a titillating message that those musty old rules about being
polite and "saying the right thing" are for losers who lack the heart,
courage and Trumpitude to just be who they
are.
His
signature moment in a campaign full of them was his exchange in the
first debate with Fox's Kelly. She asked him how anyone with a history
of calling women "fat pigs,
dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals" could win a general election
against a female candidate like Hillary Clinton.
"I've
been challenged by so many people," Trump answered. "I frankly don't
have time for political correctness. And to be honest with you, the
country doesn't have time
either….We don't win anymore. We lose to China. We lose to Mexico….We
lose to everybody."
On
the surface, Kelly was just doing her job as a journalist, throwing
Trump's most outrageous comments back at him and demanding an
explanation.
But
on another level, she was trying to bring Trump to heel. The extraction
of the humiliating public apology is one of the media's most powerful
weapons. Someone becomes
famous, we dig up dirt on the person, we rub it in his or her nose, and
then we demand that the person get down on bended knee and beg
forgiveness.
The
Clintons' 1992 joint interview on 60 Minutes was a classic example, as
was Anthony Weiner's prostration before Andrew Breitbart and Chris
Christie's 107-minute marathon
apologia after Bridgegate. The subtext is always the same: If you want
power in this country, you must accept the primacy of the press. It's
like paying the cover at the door of the world's most exclusive club.
Trump
wouldn't pay the tab. Not only was he not wrong for saying those
things, he explained, but holding in thoughts like that is bad for
America. That's why we don't
win anymore, why we lose to China and to Mexico (how are we losing to
Mexico again?). He was saying that hiding forbidden thoughts about women
or immigrants or whoever isn't just annoying, but bad for America.
It's
not exactly telling people to get out there and beat people with metal
rods. But when your response to news that a couple of jackasses just
invoked your name when
they beat the crap out of a homeless guy is to salute your "passionate"
followers who "love this country," you've gone next-level.
The
political right in America has been flirting with dangerous ideas for a
while now, particularly on issues involving immigrants and minorities.
But in the last few
years the rhetoric has gotten particularly crazy.
Texas
Congressman Louie Gohmert proposed using troops and ships of war to
stop an invasion of immigrant children, whom he described as a 28 Days
Later-style menace. "We
don't even know all of the diseases, and how extensive the diseases
are," he said.
"A lot of head lice, a lot of scabies," concurred another Texas congressman, Blake Farenthold.
"I'll do anything short of shooting them," promised Mo Brooks, a congressman from the enlightened state of Alabama.
Then
there's Iowa's Steve King, who is unusually stupid even for a
congressman. He not only believes a recent Supreme Court decision on gay
marriage allows people to marry
inanimate objects, but also believes the EPA may have intentionally
spilled three million gallons of toxic waste into Colorado's Animas
river in order to get Superfund money.
Late
last year, King asked people to "surround the president's residence" in
response to Barack Obama's immigration policies. He talked about
putting "boots on the ground"
and said "everything is on the table" in the fight against immigrants.
So
all of this was in the ether even before Donald Trump exploded into the
headlines with his "They're rapists" line, and before his lunatic, Game
of Thrones idea to build
a giant wall along the southern border. But when Trump surged in the
polls on the back of this stuff, it caused virtually all of the
candidates to escalate their anti-immigrant rhetoric.
For
example, we just had Ben Carson – who seems on TV like a gentle,
convivial doctor who's just woken up from a nice nap – come out and
suggest that he's open to using
drone strikes on U.S. soil against undocumented immigrants. Bobby
Jindal recently came out and said mayors in the so-called "sanctuary
cities" should be arrested when undocumented immigrants commit crimes.
Scott Walker and Marco Rubio have both had to change
their positions favoring paths to citizenship as a result of the new
dynamic.
Meanwhile,
Rick Santorum, polling at a brisk zero percent, joined Jindal and
Lindsey Graham in jumping aboard with Trump's insane plan to toss the
14th Amendment out the
window and revoke the concept of birthright citizenship, thereby
extending the war on immigrants not just to children, but babies.
All
of this bleeds out into the population. When a politician says dumb
thing X, it normally takes ‘Murica about two days to start flirting
publicly with X + way worse.
We
saw that earlier this week, when Iowa radio host Jan Mickelson blew up
Twitter by calling for undocumented immigrants to become "property of
the state" and put into
"compelled labor." When a caller challenged the idea, Mickelson
answered, "What's wrong with slavery?"
Why
there's suddenly this surge of hatred for immigrants is sort of a
mystery. Why Donald Trump, who's probably never even interacted with an
undocumented immigrant in
a non-commercial capacity, in particular should care so much about this
issue is even more obscure. (Did he trip over an immigrant on his way
to the Cincinnati housing development his father gave him as a young
man?)
Most
likely, immigrants are just collateral damage in Trump's performance
art routine, which is an absurd ritualistic celebration of the coiffed
hotshot endlessly triumphing
over dirty losers and weaklings.
Trump
isn't really a politician, of course. He's a strongman act, a
ridiculous parody of a Nietzschean superman. His followers get off on
watching this guy with (allegedly)
$10 billion and a busty mute broad on his arm defy every political and
social convention and get away with it.
People
are tired of rules and tired of having to pay lip service to decorum.
They want to stop having to watch what they say and think and just get
"crazy," as Thomas
Friedman would put it.
Trump's
campaign is giving people permission to do just that. It's hard to say
this word in conjunction with such a sexually unappealing person, but
his message is a powerful
aphrodisiac. Fuck everything, fuck everyone. Fuck immigrants and fuck
their filthy lice-ridden kids. And fuck you if you don't like me saying
so.
Those
of us who think polls and primaries and debates are any match for that
are pretty naive. America has been trending stupid for a long time. Now
the stupid wants out
of its cage, and Trump is urging it on. There are a lot of ways this
can go wrong, no matter who wins in 2016.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
No comments:
Post a Comment