Here’s what you need to understand about Trump: He cares about looking tough. That’s all that matters to him. We saw that back when he was stupid enough to stare directly into a solar eclipse despite scientists historically warning that’s a bad idea. To him, toughness is all that matters. If you’re a soldier who winds up getting captured, he has no respect for that; to him, John McCain wasn’t a war hero precisely because he was a POW. Tough guys don’t get captured. Tough guys get killed, although even that he doesn’t really understand. He sees people who get killed in a war as losers. He doesn’t understand the notion of sacrificing your life for your country. Then again, he comes from a family that has zero participation in the military stretching back generations. He was so personally tough that he got out of Vietnam by claiming non-existent bone spurs, so it’s clear that although he values the idea of LOOKING tough, he isn’t really himself. It’s all about appearances.
That’s why this Thursday he was busy mocking Joe Biden for wearing a mask. Biden is doing exactly what medical experts are recommending that he do, and thus, to Trump, proving that he isn’t actually tough because tough guys don’t wear masks. Indeed, polls show that eighty percent of Democrats and seventy percent of independents always mask up when going out as opposed to forty percent of GOPers. They take their lead from their bad-ášš, tough-as-nails president who is busy running on a law and order platform. He and his GOP cohorts are holding up the protests that are currently happening in Trump’s America and are blaming it on Joe Biden. Apparently he’s gotten bored with blaming everything that’s gone wrong on Obama, and so instead has taken to blaming everything that WILL go wrong on Biden. The fact that it is Trump’s America that is falling apart doesn’t seem to register on anyone proclaiming themselves part of the Right wing.
Instead he aggressively tries to play a political angle on all the rioting and disorder…while simultaneously claiming that Biden’s visiting with Jacob Blake’s family was “politicizing” the situation. Despite the fact that most everything that turns violent is the result of white supremacists, he continues to foist blame onto the Democrats. He has claimed this week that he intends to withhold federal funds from key Democratic cities where the most violent rioting is occurring, something that he legally cannot do.
Then again, legality doesn’t mean much to a tough guy. That’s why in North Carolina this week he urged citizens to attempt to vote twice. This is the same guy who over the past months urged policemen not to try and protect the physical safety of arrestees, and told people attending his rallies to beat up protestors, assuring them he’d pay their legal bills. Now he’s instructing voters to commit a class one felony for which, if they’re caught, they will do jail time.
Except no, he’s not. The White House quickly tried to rewrite his specific instructions and insisted that he was just saying that voters who mailed in their votes should then verify their votes were counted.
Well, gee, let’s see what he said in North Carolina:
“So let them send it in and let them go vote, and if their system’s as good as they say it is, then obviously they won’t be able to vote. If it isn’t tabulated, they’ll be able to vote. If it’s as good as they say it is, then obviously they won’t be able to vote. If it isn’t tabulated, they’ll be able to vote. So that’s the way it is. And that’s what they should do.”
So he is instructing his people to attempt to vote twice with the assertion that someone should be able to stop them if the system works. The fact that they will then be arrested for trying to vote twice, that doesn’t seem to factor in. Even Attorney General Bill “Low” Barr states that he isn’t sure telling people to vote twice is illegal, which it indisputably is. So is encouraging people to try and do it, which is why Trump is now desperately trying to walk it back.
He is not, however, walking back his support of squads of gunmen roaming the streets of cities already in turmoil and taking the law into their own hands. Yes, Joe Biden condemns violence, but Trump criticizes him because he’s not singling out left wing perpetrators of violence. Yet Trump himself simultaneously not only doesn’t condemn right wing violence, but defends it. You want to fire paintball guns and pepper gas at protestors? Trump has your back. You want to kill two people, as Kyle Rittenhouse did? Turns out Rittenhouse killed them in self-defense. At least that’s what his defense attorney claims, and he couldn’t possibly be biased.
The fact is that Trump endorses right wing violence and right wing militias. Except they’re not really militias. Samantha Bee said it best: “Let’s call white militias what they are: gangs.” She is absolutely right. A “militia” is supposed to be a supplement to the army. This is white guys wandering around heavily armed, serving as self-governing supplements to the police, doing exactly the things that protestors are currently trying to stop the cops from doing. If they were black, they would be called “gangs” and the cops would shoot them on sight. But because they’re white, the cops thank them for their service, turn a blind eye to their murders, and give them water. Perhaps the Bloods and Crips should change their names to the East Los Angeles Militia and the West Los Angeles Militia and that will put an end to gang violence.
Why does Trump think this way? Because to his mind, anyone who holds views opposed to his and is involved with violence is a thug, a trouble-maker, an anarchist. But anyone who commits violence or even murder but shares his views is just a tough guy.
Come November, we need to tough him out.
PAD
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The last part of this week’s Freak-Out is something I’ve been getting more and more angry about since frikkin’ high school. I know it couldn’t possibly get enough state’s support to pass, but a repeal of the Second Amendment has been needed since at least the late 1800s. The state of everything since that Amendment was drafted has changed so drastically. At the time, there was no standing military, and guns were all hand-made one-offs. Citizens (read: white male landowners) were expected to muster in times of national need, and bring their own guns with them, that they had to defend their farms from the wild animals and native peoples they’d displaced to get them.
Since then, we’ve had an Industrial Revolution, and there’s been a standing military for over a century now. The first clause of the Amendment, that most gun fanboys never quote (and I’d wonder how many even register its existence and/or meaning), says “A well-regulated militia”. We have that. It’s called the National Guard. And they provide all the matériel one needs, one doesn’t have to — in fact, isn’t allowed to — bring it with them from home. Even the Texas Rangers no longer allow its members to supply their own firearms.
No, these roving gangs of white nationalists aren’t militias. That would be the National Guard that Kenosha’s mayor called in to help put out the fires and control the kind of chaos those armed provocateurs have been exacerbating. I’m not saying — as the far-Right like to claim — the government should take away everyone’s guns. I’m saying it should be at least as much of a privilege as owning and driving a car. I’m saying one doesn’t need more than a five-round internal magazine in one’s hunting rifle, because if one misses with the first shot, the animal one is shooting at is off and running. I’m saying if one is a criminal, one should have one’s guns seized. I’m saying one should have to study and be trained and evaluated as to one’s fitness to own and potentially use a firearm. But just as there was no inalienable right enshrined in the Constitution or its Amendments to ensure everyone’s right to keep and drive a horse-and-buggy, there shouldn’t be one guaranteeing gun ownership carte blanche.
And that’s not even getting into the underlying issues of class warfare that’s been going on here since the 1600s.
I keep popping back over here every now and then to see if you’re going to plug any of your original work that I can buy, because I’ve been a fan of your fiction for… wow, way longer than I care to admit. (Probably back to your DC Star Trek days.)
Do you maintain a separate site or feed where those of us who don’t care for your politics can still see what you’re up to?