The President Is the Enemy

May 4 was the 50th anniversary of the Kent State Massacre, where the National Guard opened fire on Vietnam War protesters on the campus of Kent State University, killing 4 people. The authorities shooting unarmed protesting Americans was a thing that happened with ludicrous regularity in the 1960s and early 1970s. Really, for most of our history, but it was particularly intense five decades ago during the era of civil rights unrest and antiwar marches. Still, Kent State was different because of the involvement of the National Guard, because it wasn't state police or local cops doing the shooting, but an arm of the military. President Nixon, the commander-in-chief, was the enemy that needed to be stopped.

Another incident shortly after was not met with bullets. On May 8, 1970, a large group of construction workers stormed through an antiwar protest on Wall Street in New York City. They were violently confrontational with the protesters, and then they stormed City Hall, where Mayor John Lindsay had had the American flag flown at half-mast in honor of those killed at Kent State.  According to the New York Times, "A postal worker who had joined the fray managed to climb onto the roof and raise the stars and stripes to its proper, prideful position. When city officials returned it to half-mast, the workers rushed the building, leaping over police barricades and running over the hoods of cars. Fearing a disaster, officials raised the flag back to full mast." The protest at Kent State had been non-violent. The Hard Hat Riot, as it came to be known, was not, with workers wrecking property and beating protesters, with 70 people injured. The marches of the hard hats continued for days after. Nixon embraced the movement, made up of white conservative men who supported the president and hated hippies, and, after a huge march in NYC on May 20, he invited the leaders of the construction unions involved to the White House to honor them. 

Nothing is new. Not chaos of the MAGA movement. Not the conservative hatred of the left. Not the racism and violence. And not the idea that the president has become the enemy of the people. 

We have example after example, an overwhelming amount of evidence, really, that Donald Trump is actively trying to harm the large numbers of people of the United States, and I don't mean in the usual way that policies affect people. I'm not even thinking about his rollback of environmental rules or his gutting of regulations on food and drugs. It's not even his embrace of the gun lobby to the point that the only thing that slows down massacre after massacre is a pandemic. Hell, all that's just your run-of-the-mill Republican murder racket. 

Donald Trump's actions during this pandemic show a callous disregard for the lives of Americans. It's not that he tried to do something and he failed. Putting aside his nearly useless limitations on travel from China, he has refused to act or acted grudgingly in small ways to mitigate some of the damage caused by COVID-19 in the United States. His hyping of hydroxychloroquine was harmful, his musing about the positive effects of disinfectant on the human body was a ludicrous (and harmful) distraction, and his refusal to wear a mask and support even the simplest measure, social distancing, gave a message to his followers that what his own CDC and own medical team were saying was a lie. We know that his failure to respond with the urgency that many of his own advisers were asking for allowed for the explosion of coronavirus. We know, for sure, that tens of thousands of people died not just because he bumbled the response. They died because he abjectly, proudly refused to respond. He is essentially the parent who thinks God is going to heal their sick child. The parents are to blame for the kid's death, not an invisible sky wizard, not the kid. 

Again and again, President Trump says things that are meant to show his toughness - and, to be fair, the coterie of morons, freaks, and goons that support him probably believe this pampered pansy of a man is tough - but are ultimately signals for violence against what he perceives as undesirables, or those who don't love him, which, honestly, is the majority of the country. His tweet in reaction to the riots against the racist actions of police in Minneapolis is only the latest call to harm Americans. "Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts," he wrote, in an echo of racist cops and leaders in the 1960s. That isn't a racist dog whistle. It's a racist air horn, especially since he also called the people rioting "THUGS" (his caps, not mine). And that's on top of Trump's support of armed white people having protests to reopen businesses, undermining governors and medical experts, and probably leading to even more death just to get the economy moving again and boost his standing in the polls.

And I haven't even talked about Trump actively trying to make climate change worse by promoting coal and other fossil fuels while hindering the development of alternative energy sources. That's the massacre to come. Or the continued mistreatment of migrants, which has gotten worse during the pandemic. 

The capper to all of this is Trump's stern refusal to mourn deaths properly. He can shed crocodile tears, as he has done disgustingly over the murder of George Lloyd, but this is the same man who said he wanted cops to rough up suspects. This is the same man who just called for extrajudicial killings of unarmed thieves. He has said barely a word about the over 100,000 Americans who die and continue to die of coronavirus, as if acknowledging them is a weakness, as if they were too weak and deserved to die. 

The message that sends is that those deaths don't matter, they are an inconvenience, they are to be swept under the lumpy rug of failures because they just distract from the one thing that Trump wants you to believe: That Trump is great. 

The President is the enemy of the American people. He's not just a buffoon or a loser or an idiot. I've used the word before, but it becomes clearer and clearer all the time. He's evil. He's actively, intently evil. Yes, the cruelty is still the point. But the impulse behind the cruelty isn't merely the will to power. It's actually evil. 

I don't use that word lightly. Donald Trump doesn't see people as individual human beings, he doesn't want to lead the nation, and he sure doesn't care who lives or dies, as long as he lives. He sees the world as divided into for him and against him. Only the former deserve to exist, and he's doing everything he can to make sure the latter don't.

I don't know what other word you'd use. 

He had a chance today to say something about Lloyd and about the civil unrest in Minneapolis and elsewhere. He refused not just because he's incapable of empathy, but because he is capable of apathy.

The President is the enemy. Not just of Democrats. One thing about evil people: if they aren't going after you yet, they will be soon.

Oh, Fuck You, Trump Voters. Just Fuck You

Do you think they realize how fucking stupid they look, these man-children (and the occasional woman-child) playing soldier dress-up except with real guns who show up at these rallies to try to force states to open up while we're deep in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic? It's just pathetic that they believe they seem strong when they just look like a bunch of people who have been rendered brainless from a toxic stew of oxy, Facebook conspiracy madness, and One America News. And when I say they look fucking stupid, I mean objectively stupid, as in anyone looking at them from outside the whole bullshit zeitgeist we're damned to live through would think, "That's hilarious and absurd, and, c'mon, they can't be serious."

Think about that for a second. Think of someone arriving here with no understanding of American gun culture or the fetishizing of militia chic or the condemnation of science and education or the really warped ideas of "liberty" and "tyranny," and then they see the protest yesterday in California or last week in Michigan. Think about informing that outside someone that the costume cavalry was protesting for the right to gather in large groups and go to stores and salons and they don't care if those actions end up causing mass death. Oh, and, by the way, the president of the whole goddamn country thinks they're awesome for doing it. Oh, and, by the way, that same president has refused to do anything to make the nation safer for supermarkets and salons during the two months the country was shut down.

Everything that Trump has done and is doing is fuckin' owned by his voters, and their utter refusal to believe that Trump has fucked up just about every aspect of the response to the COVID-19 crisis is on each and every one of them. They fucked up this country worse than it was already fucked up, and they will stand on a pile of corpses to bray their devotion to Trump while popping hydroxycholoroquine with bleach shooters. If that corpse pile happens to contain their family members, well, fuck, they died so the rest of us could go eat at the Longhorn Steakhouse by the highway because freedom or some such shit.

Story after story about what went wrong and what continues to go wrong with the federal coronavirus response shows that the Trump administration has screwed the pooch on it. Fuck, they screwed the pooch then turned the pooch over and screwed it again and then when that pooch was dead from all the screwing, they tossed it aside and took another pooch from the Strategic Pooch Reserve and screwed that one, going through all the pooches they could screw and then they imported pooches from China which were flawed but screwable so they screwed those. Alas, pooches. Alas, America.

See, it’s not just that you’ve been fooled, Trump voters. It’s that you stick by your foolishness. You listen to bloviating assholes loudly farting from their home studios about how you need to get out there for the good of the “economy.” You insist that everything Trump says is real, on the useless drugs, on the bullshit cures, on the supposedly fake death toll, on the masks, on the drive-thru testing centers, on the number of tests, on every fucking thing, despite the absolute proof, in a factual way, as in indisputably, that he's totally fucking lying or just making shit up.

Most contempt-worthy is the fact that you think we who haven’t drunk the tainted Diet Coke straight from Trump’s dangly nipples actually want to be in quarantine, that we want tens of millions of people out of work, that we want schools closed and restaurants closed and supermarket shelves bereft of toilet paper. No, you poor, dumb motherfuckers. We’ve lost jobs, too, and we’re sick of having nothing to do but post memes about how fucking stupid you look. But we know that the price of reopening is the likelihood of all the gains we’ve made being erased and far more death, and, well, I guess we’re just pro-life.

And it pains us, really, it pains us deep in our souls that you can’t be reasoned with. That Trump, by any measure, has failed and continues to fail at this monumental task and that the reason he has failed so enormously and tragically is because he thought the virus was just there to spoil his chances at reelection. He is going to toss out truth and reality and replace it with everything filtered through his selfishness, his avarice, and his unending, crazed belief in his own superiority. Yet you'll just go the fuck along with it. It's fucking sad, man. The deepest wells of Obama worship never even came close to the cultish, mindless Trump veneration. I mean, c'mon, Trump refuses to wear a mask, but his campaign is going to start selling official MAGA masks. That's how stupid he thinks you are. That's how cynical this whole thing is.

And you know what else pains us? It’s that it would have been so ludicrously easy for Trump to have been the big shot hero, ordering companies to produce swabs and masks, amping up testing far exceeding any other country (for real, not in his fantasy world), demanding Congress pass funding for salaries so everyone could keep their jobs, and telling people to stay home. He could have led a genuinely positive national reawakening of community and patriotic service. He's not actually capable of that, but he could have faked it, like he's faked being a successful businessman.

And what pains us even more? You credulous simpletons would have bought into it whole hog. And you would derided anyone telling you to go back to work as an unpatriotic dick who just wants Trump supporters to die. Your media would have said that Trump was the greatest man who cares so much about us that he's willing to sacrifice the economy for your lives. In other words, you have no beliefs. You only have Trump. Goddamn, how empty you must be to think that's all you need.

Trump has wrecked our alliances and degraded our country to the point that the world thinks we’re just a pathetic vestige of our former selves, worthy of pity and derision, and that’s because of you, and you’re so full up with gobbling his shit that you don’t even think that matters as long as he lets you be openly racist and keeps owning the libtards, which means “anyone who doesn’t gobble shit from the MAGA trough in Donald Trump’s pig pen." It’s too bad. We could have used the help of the world, which, even in good times, we do need to buy our goods or your job is in permanent jeopardy. (Which, to be fair, it already is.)

You just don't believe in what the country ever aspired to be, to the world and to itself. Instead of believing scientists and doctors, you believe TV bullshit artists like Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity and Rush “How the fuck is he still a thing?” Limbaugh, agreeing with Trump that popularity somehow equals depth and knowledge. Instead of people qualified to lead an effort, you think that feckless pricks like Jared fuckin’ Kushner are true polymath visionaries and not just vile charlatans and egomaniacs. Instead of seeking those who have earned the right to lead you, you turn to Donald Trump and Donald Trump, Jr., a devolved version of his devolved father, a pile of shit that has dried out.

This is all on you. You’re fucking adults, for fuck’s sake, and I just won’t treat you like children who need to be forgiven and hope you learned your lesson. You decided to overlook Trump’s blatant greed and corruption. You decided that someone accused of more than a dozen rapes and sexual assaults, including multiple under oath allegations, is just a jocular party guy you wanna hang with. You decided that it was better to spend money on his trips to golf and on tax cuts for the wealthy than on roads and health care and fucking pandemic preparation.

I know that we’re supposed to feel some kind of pity for you, that you’ve spent decades being inundated with talk radio and Fox “news” and YouTube videos and conspiracy mongers and politicians and preachers who either believe this shit or fake it because they know how easily you’re manipulated. You have been hit hard by the wealth disparity in the nation, with shitty jobs for shitty pay and shitty people telling you that your shitty job for shitty pay is somehow honorable and that it’s better that you suffer than government take care of your medical needs. You would rather walk around with your guns and your camo and pretend you're free than admit how much Trump has fucked you over. And when he's no longer president, you'll whine about how it's all rigged and unfair, echoes of his miserable voice. Yet we're supposed to feel sorry for you.

Fuck that. And fuck you. You are to blame for this madness and this death. You did this to our country. You made this decision. You won't see what's right before your eyes. You proudly refuse to take off your orange-tinted glasses with the sphincter-shaped lenses. So you're into it. You're good with it. You don't care how many people are hurt, how many people die, how many people suffer. You're good with it. As long as you can blame anyone but the wealthy in this country for every fucking misery, you're good with it. As long as the racism continues, you're good with it.

You decided that Trump isn’t evil. Or else you decided that he is evil and you just fuckin’ like being evil.