On this episode of your favorite podcast, Bob and Abe discuss the mutiny that overthrew the New York Times editorial board over the last week, and how that relates to a bone somebody on the recording has to pick with the Black Lives Matter movement. Plus a quick Trump monologue and a pop quiz! What could be more fun?
Here’s a text-version of the Trump essay, for those who like to read along.
It’s easy to forget how bad at politics Donald Trump really is, sometimes, because the bare facts remain that he is the president and the primary focus of our shared national attention because of his, ahh, success in the political arena. He’s good at one thing: behaving in such a way as to maximize media attention. Everything else he does, he is bad at, mostly because he is stupid. This is the primary reason the camera loves him and the audience can’t turn away: because he is so stupid. It’s why Kurt Andersen and Graydon Carter put him on the cover of satirical SPY Magazine in the 1980s as the face of the stupidest excesses of the ME DECADE. He later parlayed the very image SPY sought to satirize--brash, ostentatious, vulgar, and very obviously stupid--into a wildly popular network television show, in which he pretended to be a successful billionaire businessman rather than the oft-bankrupt failson that he really was, living on someone else’s money and the happy gullibility of the American public. But people watched because they loved the idea that someone so self-evidently stupid could live the gold-plated American dream if only they insisted on it hard enough. And then, after listening to countless hours of Levin and Limbaugh and Hannity, he rose to his final, stupidest form: the guy who calls in to the radio talk show and regurgitates the fetid rhetoric stew he’s subsumed while watching the cable news on mute for any mention of his name in the news ticker. “Here’s Donnie from Queens with a take on the Mets and Obama’s birthplace--Donnie, whaddya’ got?!” And we looked upon that final, stupidest form, and we made him president.
But our collective idiocy doesn’t resolve his into brilliance. Tuesday morning, Trump tweeted that the 75-year-old man who last week was knocked to the ground by police in Buffalo might be an “antifa provocateur” who was using secret scanning technology to interfere with police business, and faked his injuries. He based this on a report he saw on One America News Network, which is a “news network” in the same way that this podcast is a “news network,” except that the president tweets about them and they have substantially lower editorial standards than we do. The report based its absurd claims on unfounded assertions by an anonymous blogger and distortedly slowed down video of the event. And the President tweeted it!
The exact way in which this is stupid may not be immediately clear: obviously, the president shouldn’t be amplifying nonsense conspiracy theories about private citizens. In that way, it is just bad. But it’s stupid because it goes against the entire message he’s trying to send about Antifa.
Antifa is a winning issue for you, Donald! Tweet the video of the burning church! Tweet the video of blocks of burned out Minneapolis storefronts, the fire-hollowed-out cars, the extra-crispy police station! Blame it all on the “radical terrorist anarchist organization!” Lie and hyperbolize and just make shit up about them! Make them the scary boogeymonsters of chaos and disorder, and pretend to be the big bad man America needs right now to clean up the streets in your toughest big boy LAW AND ORDER underpants! A substantial majority of Americans are happy to eat all that scary nonsense up, no matter the depth of the obfuscation.
But what you don’t do, you don’t call the geriatric liberal volunteer who endured a traumatic brain injury because the riot-geared police lightly shoved him, you don’t call him Antifa! “Antifa is doddering old dudes with bad balance, I guess,” is not the message Bill Barr is trying to send when he designates it a “domestic terrorist organization” for you! Unless, of course, you’re actually just a complete fucking moron, a “visceral reaction machine” with less messaging discipline than a pop-up ad.
So the next time you read or hear some dread-fucking-pundit marvel at Trump’s secretly brilliant political mind--some Hugh Hewitt or Limbaugh or Bret Stephens--remember that in a moment with endless opportunities to (disingenuously) point to actual violence and chaos on the streets in his push for TOTAL DOMINANCE, Trump chose instead to take an unarmed 75-year-old victim of unnecessary police violence and make him the face of the anarchist agents of chaotic terror.
Because he is actually very, very bad at the most basic things about politics, because he is a deeply, truly, and very obviously, stupid, stupid person.