In the run-up to Trump’s inauguration, his advisers made it clear that they were going to pursue a shock-and-awe strategy, a blitzkrieg of Executive Orders and rule changes aimed at disorienting, and overwhelming, their opponents and at taming the “Deep State” once and for all.
Let no-one say they haven’t been true to form.
After the unholy spectacle of a lawless, felony-convicted, twice-impeached president swearing the country’s most sacred oath of office, Trump promptly took off for a stadium event, signing one malignant Executive Order after the next, to the roars of the crowd, and then throwing the signing pens into the audience like a demented version of a sports superstar doling out his sweaty towels to adoring fans. This wasn’t democracy in action; this was the Hunger Games, a reality TV spectacle with heinous real-world consequences.
The Fourteenth Amendment, guaranteeing birthright citizenship, ended – at least in Trump’s twisted fantasy – with the flourish of a signature pen on page (Of course, the justice system may beg to differ, and a judge has already temporarily blocked the order from being implemented). The issue of desperate migrants trekking northward to seek dreams, or, if not dreams then at least a modicum of safety and economic dignity, wiped away by an order closing the border and sending thousands of US troops south. The pesky problem of refugees fleeing wars in places like Ukraine and Afghanistan, and relying on American goodwill to remake their lives, ended with a flourish as the refugee admissions system was shuttered. Diversity, Equity and Inclusion—gone, along with all federal employees even remotely connected with such programs. The Department of Justice’s decades-long commitment to pursue civil rights cases ordered into deep freeze. The CDC as a pro-active force tracking global disease outbreaks, eradicated by orders preventing basic data collection. US membership of the World Health Organization, erased. US participation in the Paris climate accords, obliterated.
And, the sin to swamp all other Trumpian sins, the 1,500 insurrectionists who launched a violent effort to prevent the peaceful transfer of power in 2021, released from prison and lionized by the President and his inner circle. Like the participants in Hitler’s 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, sentenced to prison for their treasonous acts, only to first be turned into martyrs to the Nazi cause and then released, as heroes, from behind bars, so the January 6th insurrectionists have been reinvented as “hostages” and as “patriots,” and have now been freed to go about their violent, paramilitary, ways.
All of this has been applauded by a crazed Elon Musk, who twice denoted his enthusiasm by giving the Sieg Heil Nazi salute to express his fealty to America’s new strongman. After the fact, some commentators tried to excuse Musk’s Nazi ritual by saying that he was notoriously awkward, that his body language has always been bizarre, and that he is beset by nervous tics. I’m not buying it; I know lots of people with tics. I myself have a few – I bite my nails, for example; I fidget when I’m anxious. But what I don’t do is accidentally perform the Nazi salute. There’s not a nervous tic in my body that would generate that particularly swinish gesture.
If you’re of a mind to say I’m exaggerating, I suggest you read the news reports on Trump’s and Musk’s actions.
Trumplandia isn’t for the faint of heart. Just ask Mariann Budde, the brave Episcopalian bishop in DC who gave a stunningly important sermon last week in front of the Trumps, Vance, and other members of the barbarian brigade asking them to “show mercy” in their dealings with immigrants, with the LGBTQ community and with other vulnerable groups in the crosshairs of the new administration. The bishop asked the new masters of the universe to have a heart for “the people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings, who labor in poultry farms and meatpacking plants, who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shifts in hospitals.” Budde continued that, “The vast majority of immigrants are not criminals. They pay taxes and are good neighbors.”
Watch the Trump clan’s reactions to the sermon: the stony faces, the blank stares, and in Donald Trump senior’s case the little piggy eyes staring maliciously at the Bishop as if he wished he could jump out of his seat and throttle her. Hunched over, his face a paradigm of fury, he looked startlingly like Hermann Goering – an obese kleptocratic narcissist staring uncuriously out at the wide world through his porcine peepholes, unable to even begin to make the intellectual journey that would permit the sort of empathy that Budde was asking of him.
Trump has launched a barrage of attacks against Budde on social media since her dignified, humanitarian sermon. His thuggish followers have taken note, and Budde has been bombarded with death threats over the past week.
This is the new America. Trump says it is a golden age. I beg to differ. One can’t spin gold out of the barnyard effluence that Mr. Piggy Eyes is peddling.