Thank You Mister Trump!
Our Great President is crushing it.
This is not the sort of article you normally see here at The Bulwark, the world’s largest superspreader of Trump Derangement Syndrome.
And to be honest with you, I didn’t want to write it. But somebody had to. Because, my goodness, what a week it has been for Donald J. Trump. I do not say this lightly: This might go down in history as one of the greatest—if not the greatest—demonstration of leadership the world has ever seen.
I had hoped that one of President Trump’s “just calling balls and strikes” defenders in the conservative media would have written this column so I didn’t have to but—and I know this sounds crazy—the cupboard seems to be prettttty bare when it comes to Trump attaboys out there on the internets. I mean, aside from Whiplash Survivor Association of America spokesperson Scott Walker.)
Maybe it’s because the folks in Conservatism Inc. are all just so awed by the president’s performance that they’re struggling to find the right words to describe its magnificence.
I looked around National Review, the Federalist, the Daily Caller, Fox News, and the Daily Wire. Lotta content about how bad the media is. None of the sites are very big fans of antifa. But not many pro-Trump attaboys. Trump couldn’t even get a pat on the back from Tucker Carlson. (Tucker was unhappy with the meager amount of antifa blood on the streets. Just you wait, big guy.)
Where is the commentary in support of President Trump’s red hot tweets? Why is it so hard to find a column praising Trump’s courageous decision to gas clergy members so he could hold a Bible in the air like it was a gross diaper he didn’t want to smell?
Point me to the analysis of his Six Sigma management skills juggling the twin threats of people upset about “police brutality” while also handling the economic and public health crises from the coronavirus that he, like a modern Cassandra, kept warning America about.
If this isn’t the four-dimensional chess Trump’s media cheerleaders are always talking about, then I don’t know what is. I mean, any president could hold an interfaith prayer service or try to “heal America.” It takes a special kind of leader to make sure that the peaceful protesters get roughed up while looters run free and then—just as a lagniappe—start an international incident with Australia.
Much respect.
I popped up onto the Twitter feeds of some big Trump defenders on the Hill to see if I could find some Real American Patriots over there. No dice.
Lindsey Graham thinks that Mr. Trump did a super nice job condemning China last week. Gym Jordan was happy Our President was taking on the thugs at Twitter. Marco Rubio, John Cornyn, and Ted Cruz are Very Mad about how mean the media is being to the poor fella. Kasie Hunt cornered over a dozen Republicans yesterday and only Steve Daines was willing to give a meek nod towards the president’s leadership.
This baffled me.
So I put out a request for any examples of Trump praise that was out there, and got nothing but a bunch of anti-anti Trump media criticism. What does a president have to do to get some unadulterated love around here?
Why isn’t anyone telling the president that he’s doing a great job with his poopies?
So fine. I guess I'll have to do it.
Papa Dickie is proud of little Donald.
After all, the president is delivering on everything that he promised!!!
The man is pwning people left and right. He’s instigating the kind of crackdown against minorities not seen in years. He’s making the media and all those Never Trump losers simultaneously sad and angry. We are witnessing the world’s greatest troll at the top of his game.
And that’s what the Forgotten Man has demanded from the start.
Seriously. Just look at what President Trump accomplished in the past week:
As the nation slowly unraveled over the death of George Floyd, the president quit caring about the Invisible Enemy and dedicated himself to taking on the real Enemies of the People: The media. And the Democrats.
Two days after Floyd’s death he fired off a tweet that was trademark Trump, the rascal. Brit Hume mockingly shared a snapshot of Joe Biden wearing a mask to a Memorial Day service and Trump deadpanned “I think he looks better.” BAM. I might’ve gone with the joke comparing Biden to antifa for timeliness. But overall? Pretty good; 8 out of 10.
But the Cassius Clay of trolls was just warming up. First he tossed out a token tweet about Floyd’s death being tragic to appease the normies. Then he Let. It. Rip.
Notice the subtlety of these Trump tweets amidst a nationwide uproar over racist violence spurred by an innocent man being murdered by police officers, while telling them he couldn’t breathe.
The first black president committed the greatest crime in USA history!
The first black president should be in jail, according to a random tweet from 2019 that Trump unearthed.
Wearing masks during a pandemic is similar to SLAVERY. (Just one man’s viewpoint!)
He unearthed another random tweet, this one from 2016, where a black woman says she won’t be a SLAVE to Democrats.
The Michigan governor won’t let people BREATH! [sic]
This is next level stuff. Only the groypers and guys with Pepe the Frog avatars could detect the subtle white power vibe he’s got going on.
As the protests began to escalate, it was time to activate the attorney general. No, not to address the growing violence or to commit to address the police misconduct. That would be too pat. Instead, he called in the big guns to go after TWITTER DOT COM for bIaS.
As tough as Barr is, Trump recognized that an executive order giving his fella power wasn’t enough. The first extremely online president knew the most extremely online way to draw attention to his strongman crackdown on the social media companies. He pulled out the trusty iPhone and began issuing a series of violent and racist threats against the protestors, baiting the big social media companies and the pliant media into a debate over whether his wheels-off threats should be CeNsOrEd, distracting them from the violence and economic decline.
“THUGS,” he tweeted. After 8 years of Mom Jeans Obama, we finally have a president with the courage to say the three words: Radical Antifa Thugs! And Trump was just getting going. Late into the night, as the protests raged around the country, Trump dropped the Twitter a-bomb. “LOOTING LEADS TO SHOOTING” he rhymed, invoking the segregationist George Wallace and a racist Miami police chief.
The cucked bipartisan globalist presidents of the past (meaning: all of them) might’ve called for peaceful resolution or quoted Martin Luther King Jr. or tried to bring people together to pray.
Not Trump. He’s shoving George Wallace down your throat and you are going to like it.
Hell yeah. Where’s my red hat, bitches?
The next morning, Mr. Trump called a press conference. Our virtue signaling media overlords wanted him to take this moment to turn down the temperature, give an olive branch to the protesters. That’s not my president.
Instead he tweeted in all caps—CHINA—and went out to the White House lawn to deliver an anti-China screed, after which he refused to take any questions, and strutted back into the White House. Like a boss. While everyone else hyperventilates, Trump has his eye on the Wuhan ball.
After that press conference, and a trip to see the new nerd rocket, the president executed a move that no other president else in American history—not even Jimmy Carter—would have been able to pull off.
He hid.
Yes. For two days the president of the United States bunkered down in the White House, shut off the lights, turned on “the shows,” and complained about what he saw.
Coronavirus task force? Boring.
Reopening the economy task force? Who needs it.
Listening session with the protesters? Hell no.
There was television to be watched and media to be tweeted at.
Neither riots, nor pandemic, nor economic destruction, nor sleet, nor hail will prevent this president from shitposting the FAKE NEWS.
Trump took but one break from this task: pausing the DVR during Sunday’s Fox Media Buzz program to make an important policy announcement:
Radical ANTIFA Thugs were now officially designated as Radical ANTIFA Terrorists.
This is the kind of executive leadership Constitutional Conservatives have been demanding for years. And to be fair, this bold move got at least one House member off his ass to support Our President: Matt Gaetz sent a tweet expressing his hope that the president’s announcement meant that the government would now be able to “hunt” antifa.
It’s a classic head-I-win, tails-you-lose Trumpian jujitsu. Either (a) we get to start huntin’ antifa human scum like we’ve been itching to do for a while now, or, (b) even if the “laws” keep us from huntin’, we’ve finally got us a president who encourages frat boys to engage in some vigilante cosplay.
Either way, this order is certain to be an important step in containing the violence America is seeing, once it gets a chance to ramp up.
After that, Trump put his feet up and went back to the tube. And after the next retina-burning cable-news binge sesh, the president got around to calling George Floyd’s family. He was annoyed that Biden was getting credit for being “gracious”—you people and your fucking norms—for calling the family. So he one upped Kneelin’ Joe.
When Trump called the Floyd family, he talked over them anytime they tried to get a word in edgewise.
Power move. So alpha.
Which brought Trump to his grand finale.
For years we’ve had godless heathen presidents who forbid Americans from saying “Merry Christmas,” who didn’t let the Lord’s hand guide them, and hadn’t even met one Corinthian. Those presidents would see a crisis like this and cite some scripture, or reference George Floyd’s faith, or nod to the cucked-up gospel of nonviolence.
But Mr. Trump understands how weak that is. It’s like these people have never even heard of the Golden Rule. (It’s “an eye for an eye.” Look it up.)
And so, after getting great counsel from his red-state evangelical whisperers slash former Met Gala attendees Hope, Ivanka, and Jared, Trump hatched His plan. Like a golden calf atop Mt. Sinai, President Trump would signal his deep, abiding faith with a Gold Lamé made-for-TV image of his own.
But in order to do it, he would need to emerge like Lazarus from his panic room and walk to St. John’s church, the site of the disgraceful looting and violence that he had power-tweeted through the night before.
The only problem?
Between him and the church were hippies. And the media.
The Rough Rider Teddy Roosevelt might not have known what to do here. But with President Trump, it was on like Donkey Kong.
President Trump told security to strap on the riot gear and clear out these Enemies of the People exercising their “constitutional right” to “protest.”
It didn’t matter if the hippies were clergywomen at the very church he was going to. GAS ’EM.
It didn’t matter if they were reporters professionally gathering the news. RUN ’EM OVER.
It didn’t matter if the curfew hadn’t started. RUBBER BULLETS.
And then like any other red-blooded Christian-American, Mr. Trump found a Bible, put it in his daughter’s Birkin bag, and walked to the church in the greatest parting of the waters since Moses.
With that on one image, flanked by the Seven Navy Seals and Seven Trumpers with Seven Diadems, Mr. Trump brought the wrath of the Lord down on the haters and the losers.
He has Risen!
But of course, some people didn’t get it. They focused on the negative. The establishment neocon senators turned turtle, afraid that there might get some backlash from suburban voter pansies or . . . women. The reality is these Republican senators are just a bunch of soy bois who don’t know squat about dominating the battlespace or how to appreciate a good ol’-fashioned gassing.
And so in the greatest trick the president ever pulled, he gave them an out, using vessels like Brit Hume to create an alternate fact—that maybe this was all a big coincidence. This allowed the soft Trumpers to tell themselves that protesters just happened to start attacking cops a few minutes before Mr. Trump walked through. (lulz)
If those useful idiots need to tell themselves that story in order to sleep at night, fine. That’s the swamp for you. Trump will give them a cute story to tell.
But for the Real Americans who voted for Trump? The Silent Majority? This is what we signed up for.
The riots, the gaslighting, the tweets, the divisiveness, the blaming, the bravado, the tough talk, the lib owning, the trolling, the nakedly cynical patriotism and religiosity.
This is it. This is the good shit.
What’s not to like?