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Our president is notoriously fragile. But he is not alone, either in his tendency to brag about his masculinity, or the reality of his weakness that his rhetoric aims to obscure.
[E]very U.S. president over the past 75 years—including many from the Democratic Party, such as Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and “Genocide” Joe Biden—would be in international prison if the U.S. allowed international authorities to adjudicate the crimes of our leaders.
A fragile president
Trump’s responses to critics [ [link removed] ], as well as his responses to praise [ [link removed] ], reveal the fragility of his ego. As observed [ [link removed] ] by actor & retired wrestler Dave Bautista, the president is a “Whiny Little Bitch” and “a weak [ [link removed] ], tubby toddler.”
The international arena offers many examples. He is so easily plied by praise that foreign diplomats and heads of state have made it part of their strategy [ [link removed] ].
Meanwhile, his belligerence [ [link removed] ] towards traditional allies reflects the impetuousness of a teenager eager to offend an established norm in order to prompt a response. It is classic trolling behavior.
Yet Trump bows before figures generally viewed as despots. Jair Bolsonaro, the corrupt and disgraced [ [link removed] ] former president of Brazil, counts Trump among his most committed public champions [ [link removed] ].
Similarly, Vladimir Putin has reveled in Trump’s public adoration [ [link removed] ], most recently after a summit on U.S. soil that prompted some amusing critiques. Putin’s autocracy deserves critique. Americans who decry it, however, cast stones from a glass house.
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A seemingly forceful—but ultimately weak—response
Democrats tend to think of themselves as better, perhaps more civilized, than right wing actors who rely on disinformation and hate. But, while appearing seemingly less offensive, Democrats ultimately replace the right wing’s belligerence with their own ignorance.
Only because I’ve grown tired of observing [ [link removed] ] what others seem to be unable [ [link removed] ] to recognize [ [link removed] ], I’ll leave aside for now the strategic racism [ [link removed] ] embraced by Democratic Party actors when acting to insulate [ [link removed] ] their officeholders from accountability for their documented corruption [ [link removed] ].
The pattern of ignorance among Democrats finds too many other examples to rest there.
For instance, responding to Trump’s recent meeting with Putin in Alaska (during the very same week that the state capital barely avoided [ [link removed] ] a catastrophic flood due to a nearby melting glacier [ [link removed] ]), Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) appeared [ [link removed] ] on NBC’s Meet the Press, where he fairly described the meeting as “a disaster.”
Echoing Trump’s appeal to a strongman aesthetic, Murphy claimed that their meeting “was an embarrassment for the United States. It was a failure. Putin got everything he wanted.” Murphy constructed his argument to appeal to viewers affected by the same kind of masculine fragility that possesses the president.
Worse than mimicking Trump’s discursive style (as California Governor Gavin Newsom has done to greater effect [ [link removed] ]), Murphy then revealed his ignorance of his own party’s corruption, ultimately playing into the president’s hands by inviting viewers to draw false equivalencies.
Murphy claimed [ [link removed] ] that, by giving Putin a “photo-op,” Trump helped him “be absolved of his war crimes in front of the world.” That comment seems to falsely insinuate that the rest of the world might find in Trump’s appearance with him a reason to withdraw criticism of Putin and his offensive human rights record. But the rest of the world is not blinded by the same amnesia that grips the U.S.
It was Murphy’s following comment that revealed him as painfully oblivious. He went on to claim that, “War criminals are not normally invited to the United States of America.”
In a sane country, the “journalists” interviewing him would have intervened [ [link removed] ] at that point.
Muprhy’s comment sounds like a great burn, until one recalls that every U.S. president over the past 75 years—including many from the Democratic Party [ [link removed] ], such as Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and “Genocide” Joe Biden [ [link removed] ]—would be in international prison if the U.S. allowed [ [link removed] ] international authorities to adjudicate the various crimes of our leaders.
Washington doesn’t just invite war criminals to our country. Voters elect them as heads of state, and entrench the worst of them as advisors [ [link removed] ] for decades.
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Our recent presidents are not alone. The ranks of national security officials serving under Democratic and Republican administrations alike are replete with criminals.
I was arrested in 2015 [ [link removed] ] for simply asking one of them—James Clapper, who served as Obama’s Director of National Intelligence—how he managed to evade criminal charges despite having admitted to lying to the Senate under oath [ [link removed] ].
Similarly, John Brennan, who led the CIA under Obama, helped ensure that the Agency’s torturers would never face justice [ [link removed] ]. That concession effectively compromised the Allied victory [ [link removed] ] in the Second World War, and made him no less a criminal in the eyes of the world than his henchmen (and women, including the next CIA Director, Gina Haspel [ [link removed] ]).
Their widespread complicity in war crimes is precisely why American leaders—from each of the corporate political parties—refuse to recognize the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (which, incidentally, has issued [ [link removed] ] an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the U.S. continues to ignore [ [link removed] ] despite the ICC’s support [ [link removed] ] from the rest of the world [ [link removed] ]).
From top to the bottom
It’s not just presidents and their enablers in Congress who reveal the pattern of timidity that their performative masculinity aims to obscure.
In 2022, police in Uvalde, Texas set a new standard of cowardice [ [link removed] ] when standing by as dozens of school children were murdered by a gunman who they were afraid to confront. New records released [ [link removed] ] earlier this month reveal how anguished parents pleaded with cops to intervene—only to watch them reduce themselves to observers [ [link removed] ] as a macabre spectacle unfolded that they were paid, trained, and equipped to stop.
The federal goon squads that invaded DC [ [link removed] ] this month revealed the same fragility when responding to critics. One, who works for the Justice Department, was subjected to felony charges [ [link removed] ] after injuring the feelings of an ICE agent by striking him with a sandwich. Is there any plausible reason—beyond sheer cowardice—why it took 20 officers to arrest him?
Police (and ICE agents cosplaying as police) are not the only among Trump’s enablers to reflect this pattern of belligerence-covering-for-fragility.
His Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security Advisor, Stephen Miller, could be a poster child for it. After recounting his disturbing history [ [link removed] ] as a protofascist who played a critical role in establishing Trump’s agenda, another insightful writer on this platform described Miller as:
“a coward. He avoids cameras. He hides behind Trump’s bombast. He slithers in the dark because he knows attention is kryptonite. He thrives on secrecy because power without scrutiny is the only kind he can wield. This is why most Americans don’t even know his face. And that’s exactly why we need to drag him into the light.
Stephen Miller is the architect of family separation, the saboteur of Afghan allies, the propagandist of white supremacy, the would-be executioner of habeas corpus, the parasite trying to hijack the judiciary. He is a traitor to his heritage, a disgrace to his family, a coward who hides behind Trump, and a sadist who builds his career on inflicting suffering. He is not just another political adviser. He is the venom in Trumpism’s bloodstream.”
Over their heads
I’ve ranted for decades about the constitutional and legal untenability [ [link removed] ] of allowing the belligerence of state actors to undermine [ [link removed] ] human and civil rights.
The public, the professional journalists who mislead them [ [link removed] ], and the corrupt lawmakers who they, together, elect seem to be too ignorant to understand reason. So I’m shifting in this post to arguing on the ground established by the institutionalized forces of toxic masculinity that have seized our country, and communities [ [link removed] ] on both [ [link removed] ] sides of it, in their grip.
I won’t appeal to the oath of office [ [link removed] ], or the precedent [ [link removed] ] set at the Nuremberg trials that exposes every member of Trump’s goon squad to international criminal liability, or even simple human decency.
When we find ourselves pleading with military service members [ [link removed] ] to remember their primary commitment to the Constitution, we have already lost. Members of Congress swear the same oath, but they’ve been betraying it—in the open, on both sides of the partisan aisle—for decades without consequence.
And lest we forget history, the National Guard already proved their willingness to fire on Americans in retaliation for using our constitutional rights. Four university students killed [ [link removed] ] at Kent State University in Ohio proved that point decades ago.
Fighting fire with fire
At the risk of seeming discursively inspired by Gavin Newsom—who I generally detest as a dynasty politician more committed to political theater [ [link removed] ] than substance, but who has at least emerged as among the president’s most committed public antagonists—I’ll instead note that Trump, the thugs in his ICE goon squads, and his enablers in politics and media, are whimps, pansies, fragile little boys with seemingly small penises, hiding behind badges and guns [ [link removed] ].
There’s no reason to respect any of these figures. I hope we can go out one step further in giving them the public middle finger that they all deserve.
I would share similar reflections on the various self-hating women who support and empower [ [link removed] ] the president, but having been falsely accused of misogyny by racist Democrats when I challenged Pelosi’s notorious corruption in the 2020 general election, I’ll step aside and simply observe (as I always have) the voices of strong women speaking for themselves [ [link removed] ].
We all know the emperor has no clothes. But he is far from alone.
I’m writing this post mostly in the hopes that some of these figures might eventually come to understand how weak and pathetic they—from police officers around the country, to a criminal president, to fascists who hide their faces while claiming to serve the public—appear to the rest of us.
There’s no reason to respect any of these figures. I hope we can go out one step further in giving them the public middle finger that they all deserve.
In a functioning republic, there would be measures of accountability more meaningful than public outrage and shaming.
But given the co-optation of both Congress and the courts [ [link removed] ], and the disturbing bilateral consensus among both of the corporate political parties that enabled fascism in the United States long before Trump [ [link removed] ] ever came to Washington, that might be the most we can settle for at the moment.
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