The White House recently attempted to justify Donald Trump’s “quiet, piggy” response to Bloomberg News correspondent Catherine Lucey’s questions about late, likely assassinated sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The administration said the philanderer-in-chief’s remarks reflected his “frankness and transparency.” And the folks who supported and/or voted for Herr Trump still silently (even if somewhat less enthusiastically) stood by their “man.”
It’s really a terrific indicator of how “great” or, actually, grating America is right now, not in the distance, through your front windshield, or in your rearview mirror, slowly fading — but right now. It is entirely unprecedented and, regardless of how fiercely Trump Nation demonstrate their furor for Herr Fuhrer, Trump needs to be un-presidented and his cadre of enablers deposed. The current White House displays no modicum of decency, class, or ethics, and there has never been a more blatant instance of dereliction of presidential duty regarding American ideals.
To be fair, however, the primary apologists who stood with disgraced former president Richard Nixon, including Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Fox News creator Roger Ailes, did pretty well, remaking the Republican Party in Nixon’s image and becoming fixtures in the halls of power. All three are dead now, but the damage they did (especially Ailes’ “GOP TV”) still lingers, and Trump was their final triumph, regardless of Cheney’s dim view of a monster he helped create. As American Nobel laureate Paul Krugman recently noted, the current stewardship of the nation is not vibing positively. Frankly, and, yes, transparently, Trump is quite piggy.
Trump Nation does not care. Its denizens have been radicalized.
For years — a couple of decades, really — we’ve been subjected to hundreds of thousands of mentions, accusations, and warnings about the radicalization of Muslims. Osama bin Laden, ISIS, Hamas, and so on, bad infinitum.
But from the very beginning, it’s been a false flag and a predominantly Republican red herring. It’s been a wildly profitable hysteria that justifies disenfranchising brown folks in oil-rich countries, repeatedly ramping up the American military-industrial complex, and taking our war machine out for vapidly patriotic, rabid spins.
The rides have been swindles and lies.
Lies as American as apple pie.
Radicalization may be a problem in Islam, yes, but it does not nearly compare to the radicalization of our friends and neighbors here in America. Ailes’ network has become a preeminent, perversely profitable driver of radicalization in America, turning normal people into hateful fearmongers and hardcore conservatives practically genocidal. GOP TV specializes in blatant logical fallacies, insulting rhetorical inferences, and a staggering promulgation of assentient behaviorisms across its viewership. So much so that large swathes of its audience — who claim to be American patriots — no longer even espouse, much less believe in, American ideals. In fact, in a nation of immigrants, often referred to as the “Great Melting Pot” and a “Great Experiment,” Fox News viewers suffer from a virulent communal neurosis blatantly adverse to our national motto, E pluribus unum, and passionately reject the aforementioned profound metaphors for the assimilation of immigrants of diverse cultures in the United States, blending together to form a new, unified American culture.
Trump Nation doesn’t want a new, arguably improved, unified culture. Damn due process, fuck protected speech, target protesters, and kill the free press. Trump Nation demands the white primacy, white patriarchy, and white privilege of old (which obsequious brown and Black citizens can taste alongside or behind), and they will shamelessly shill for and — more and more frequently — somehow blamelessly kill to reserve and preserve it.
At a time when ICE is a sanctioned regiment of conservative profiteering, an even more merciless campaign is being waged against American intellect and conscience, because Trumpers are on board with neutering our libraries, retarding our universities, and attempting to ensure future degenerations of American exceptionalism.
Trump Nation is a vile American abomination, and their votes and views created our current state of civil repugnance — but Fox News has them thinking they’re our only hope. Their radicalization is near impenetrable and terrifying.
It’s certainly much worse than anything that happened on 9/11, but, no, that’s not President Piggy’s head on a pike. That’s the pig’s head from Lord of the Lies.
Sorry, I meant Lord of the Flies. — E.R. Bills
This column reflects the opinions and fact-gathering of the author(s) and only the author(s) and not the Fort Worth Weekly. To submit a column, please email Editor Anthony Mariani at Anthony@FWWeekly.com. He will gently edit it for clarity and concision.
