On Wednesday, MSNBC correspondent Jacob Soboroff got to tour a former Walmart turned detention facility—a prison, really—for immigrant children, many of whom have been forcibly separated from their parents by U.S. officials. There, he found a Soviet-style mural of President Trump alongside a quote from The Art of the Deal. According to Soboroff, the kids only get two hours outside a day. The prison is growing overcrowded and is only getting worse, thanks to the Trump administration’s zeal for prosecuting immigrants, some of whom were already living here legally. And these are just the kids who are accounted for. There are also, of course, over a thousand immigrant children who are now UNACCOUNTED for.
In other news, Robert De Niro said a bad word in public.
This was apparently an egregious enough offense that it merited two separate op-eds in The Washington Post, and another op-ed in The New York Times from Frank Bruni, who was once a wonderful restaurant critic and is now one of the most singularly inane political columnists working today, which is saying a lot! His column about De Niro came in the form of an open letter, because Bruni is apparently an 8th grader. It’s also full of the same tepid, tut-tutting “Take the high road” hogwash that helped get us into this mess in the first place. Worst of all, Bruni posits all of his pathetic complacency as a grand, overarching form of political strategy.
You will excuse me if I think it’s my right to kick up a din when everything is colossally FUCKED. Keep in mind that Robert De Niro isn’t a politician, and has no obligation to voters. Nor is Samantha Bee, who was targeted by a clockwork bad-faith campaign from the right when she called Ivanka Trump a feckless cunt in public. Never mind that Ivanka Trump is as corrupt as her father, and relies on that corruption—along with a hefty dose of child labor—to help pad her coffers. Calling her a bad name is the lightest possible punishment given what she deserves. But Bee said a naughty word, and so once again we find ourselves in a situation where Republicans get more mileage out of phony outrage than Democrats get out of real atrocities. Literally two people, who don’t even hold public office, have the temerity to be publicly angry at the Trump administration, and somehow that’s enough to merit an Emily Post course in dinner-table conversation from the fartsniffer set.
Bruni is far from alone in smarmily crying out THIS IS WHY TRUMP WON! every time a liberal gets angry about something they ought to be angry about. It is the laziest, stupidest theory, one that posits that the only possible way to take down Trump from his evildoing is to keep your voice so quiet that everyone else can opt out of hearing it. It’s also a clear case of naked pandering from newspapers that skew liberal but still yearn—whether for financial reasons or out of sheer vanity—to appear fair to both sides. This is how you end up with two sets of rules for each party. Republicans can be openly racist, nationalist, corrupt, and horny. Democrats have to be GOOD, because Americans apparently crave goodness even though 60 million of them voted for Donald Trump.
Would you like to know why Trump REALLY won? Cool. Donald Trump got elected because the electoral college is outdated and worthless. He got elected because of voter suppression. He got elected because of the fear and the racism of some white voters—whether that racism is out in the open, or kept in a closet in the suburbs somewhere. He got elected because his opponent had a poor election strategy. He got elected because of the great ocean patch of horseshit news that floats into every corner of the Internet, and the willingness of bad actors (Fox News, Infowars, Russia) to add to that patch. And he got elected because of the platforms of people like Frank Bruni, who continually preach adherence to norms and believe any deviation from them is a losing strategy.
“Enough with Hitler, too.” Yeah geez, guys! I mean, you guys watch Trump shake hands with a genocidal dictator, then you watch people get shot by police, and see kids consigned to prisons, and witness people ripped from their families by ICE, and you go WAY overboard! The eight crucial swing voters in Ohio aren’t gonna like that very much! You better shape up!
There are many people to blame for Trump, but celebrities who vocally oppose him are probably the last people you should target. That fabled high road that Bruni is preaching? Well, he can rest assured that the Democratic Party also has an enormous hard-on for it. Chuck Schumer has openly praised Trump and courted him. A bunch of Democrats voted for a toxic bank-deregulation vote and have confirmed nearly every crooked nominee that Trump pulled out of the sewer to further rip off the American people. They’ve also pretty much dropped cries for gun control. They’re being MORE than civil, and the result is Republicans running roughshod over our most vulnerable citizens.
Wanna know how Trump wins re-election? This is how. It’s the same goddamn reason he won in 2016. He’ll win again because both the establishment media and the Democratic kingmakers are thin-skinned dipshits who will blame literally ANYONE for Trump but themselves. They will also recognize the Republican Party as legitimate and deserving of its power, when it has long since been exposed as a wholly criminal enterprise that needs to be destroyed. I guess that’s strong language, but strong language is needed when the supposed guardians of democracy are willing to yuk it up with Sarah Sanders at a dinner and concoct 900 synonyms for the word lie, all in the name of politesse.
This is how you end up with rich puds like Howard Schultz and Mark Zuckerberg thinking they are the cure for what ails the Democrats when they are more of the same poison. And this is how you end up with liberals left utterly stranded by the party that claims to represent them: a party that cheerfully ignores its own constituents in need and instead leaves its electoral hopes at the mercy of the fickle whims of swing-state voters who exist mostly in the imagination of a Russert family member. It’s a terrible strategy, one that has already resulted in good Democrats losing and bad Democrats winning. But dare to point that out and you get accused of fucking it all up.
If Donald Trump proved anything—and that’s being generous—it’s that America is not a very nice place, nor has it ever been. All of these entreaties for decorum are in service of a delusion that is profitable only to those already in power. You have already seen the damage wrought by this kind of appeasement. There are children in prisons and thousands dead in Puerto Rico already, and Trump is just getting started. You have only begun to see the real human atrocities caused by both the Republican Party and Trump, and they will continue so long as smarm hucksters like Frank Bruni think a proper FUCK YOU to all of this is somehow out of line. That’s how Trump won, and that’s how he’ll keep coasting by.
