I'm Concerned That the Response of So Many on the Left to Trump's Re-Election is to Give Up, Give In or Switch Sides and Go Full MAGA
It speaks to how backward and virulently misogynistic our nation is that wearing pussy hats at the 2017 Women’s March to protest the election of a predator and sex criminal hurt Democrats more than Donald Trump, a man some Conservative Christians consider anointed by God, getting caught on tape bragging, “You know, I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything…Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.”
Though Trump’s abhorrent comments about the appropriate way to greet attractive women were leaked about a month before the 2016 election, they did not cost him the presidency.
Trump’s deplorable remarks didn’t even cost him the support of white women, who voted for him over an insanely over-qualified rival who would have made history as the first woman elected Commander-in-chief.
Trump’s comments were instantly forgiven and forgotten as nothing more than harmless locker room talk, the kind that literally EVERY MAN IN THE HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSE ENGAGES IN CONSTANTLY.
Besides, Trump was a mere lad of fifty-nine when he said things to a member of a prominent political dynasty like, “I moved on her like a bitch. But I couldn’t get there. And she was married. Then all of a sudden, I see her; she’s now got the big phony tits and everything.”
Holding someone so young responsible for their words and deeds would be poor form.
The Access Hollywood tapes should have ended Trump’s political career. Trump has committed DOZENS of transgressions that should have destroyed his chances of getting elected to public office.
We forgot and forgave Trump’s rapey locker room talk, but the Alt-Right will never let us forget about pussy hats. It’s been seven years since they made an indelible mark as the hatwear of choice at the Women’s March.
Yet pussyhats remain fixtures of Conservative memes.
In the Conservative imagination, EVERYONE on the left is crying, getting angry about Trump, overweight, wearing unflattering, ill-fitting clothes, and wearing a pussy hat.
They perfectly fit the Alt-Right conception of feminists as man-hating, radical extremists intent on thrusting their sexuality and ideas on an innocent world. Trump might easily be our most crass and vulgar president, but the right will never forget or forgive hats designed to shame Donald Trump for his innocuous comments (boo!), look like kitty-cat ears (double boo! Death to childless cat ladies!) and resemble female genitalia (triple boo!) For being crass and vulgar.
Pussy hats appeared on the cover of the New Yorker and Time. “The Resistance Rises: How a March Becomes a Movement” are the words accompanying the picture of a pussy hat and its shadow on the Time cover.
Time explicitly linked the Women’s March and pussy hats to a nationwide movement to keep Trump and his administration from achieving their sinister ends.
The left’s objection to Trump became known, somewhat hyperbolically, as The Resistance. Objections from the right, meanwhile, were known as the NeverTrump movement.
It speaks to the weaknesses of The Resistance and NeverTrump that they were seen, not inaccurately, as hashtags rather than a movement with a solid, consistent set of goals, ideals, and leaders.
When Trump was defeated in 2020 by a horrifyingly small margin, his cultists were so angry that they stormed the Capitol in an unsuccessful attempt to keep Biden from being ratified as the 46th president.
This stands in sharp contrast to the left’s response to Trump being re-elected.
Though there are plenty of folks like myself who will do everything in their power to keep Trump from realizing his odious agenda, it feels like the left’s primary response was to give up, /give in, or switch sides and go full MAGA.
Giving up preceded the election. Amazon owner Jeff Bezos, who has a personal fortune of 240 billion dollars and can consequently afford to do the right thing, prevented The Washington Post, which he also owns, from publishing an endorsement of Kamala Harris even though doing so hurt his paper’s credibility and integrity and inspired disgusted readers to cancel their subscriptions to an ostensibly left-wing paper moving steadily to the right.
Bezos wasn’t going to wait until Trump was elected to prostrate himself before the senile con man/sex criminal. Bezos preemptively bent the knee and kissed the ring to let the man-baby in Chief know that while The Washington Post had done something naughty in criticizing him, he was now ready to play ball.
The Amazon mogul, who looks like Lex Luthor and acts like him, met with Trump at Mar-A-Lago and donated one million dollars to his inauguration.
This is who the richest people in the word are sucking up to.
Bezos wasn’t alone in cravenly capitulating to Trump for selfish, mercenary, and deeply amoral reasons. A parade of top tech bros made a pilgrimage to Mar-A-Lago to suck up to the once and future president, including Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Trump claims that Zuckerberg apologized to him and vowed not to support Democrats. Trump is famously a goddamn liar, but the fact that Zuckerberg just added Trump super-fan and Republican convention speaker Dana White to the Meta board underscores the spineless piece of shit’s desperate need to pander to the MAGA contingent. Oh, and Zuckerberg also axed the fact-checking program that enraged Trump supporters and moved part of his business from California to Texas on account of California being so woke.
In pathetic, cringe-inducing posts laying out these changes, Zuckerberg spoke of Trump’s re-election being a tipping point.
I suspect that Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos thought Trump would be an anomaly. He was, and remains, a deeply embarrassing political figure who depicted big tech and the media as personal enemies and, consequently, enemies of the American people. Bezos and Zuckerberg have egos commensurate with their massive personal worth. I’m guessing Zuckerberg did not look kindly to Trump saying that he had conspired against him in the 2020 election and would throw him in jail if he did it again.
Either getting elected or nearly elected in three consecutive elections made it abundantly clear that Trump is not an anomaly. He’s not a fluke. Trump and his cultists are here to stay. People like Zuckerberg and Bezos see the MAGA movement as a new mainstream to be pandered to and BLM, LGTBQ, and MeToo feminists as extremists out of touch with the will of the American people whose interests and concerns they can now safely ignore.
Corporations don’t have political convictions; they have market considerations. Right now, the cynical money is on Trump and the anti-woke “free speech” brigade.
Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg aren’t Left or Right. They’re capitalists, and that means going where the money is.
Trump repeatedly railed against Zuckerberg and Bezos as America-hating Marxists who loved censorship and were biased against him. Bezos and Zuckerberg’s tardy response to those charges was to disingenuously concede that they were guilty of bias and censorship, and very much appreciate Trump bringing those issues to their attention by threatening to imprison them, and will try to do better for MAGA in the future.
These cynical monsters know how petty and small Trump is.
They understand the transactional nature of Trump’s mindset and behavior. For example, they noticed that former Democrats like Elon Musk, RFK Jr., and Tulsi Gabbard endorsed Trump and were rewarded with cabinet positions.
Trump is so grateful to Musk for buying him the presidency as a thoughtful early Christmas present that he made up a phony baloney department named after a meme coin called the Department Of Government Efficiency to indulge Musk’s sick fetish for ruining the lives of government employees and their families.
Morning Joe Scarbrough and his wife Mika have been consistent targets of Trump’s rage. He doesn’t just dislike them; he despises them and wants to see them punished and humiliated.
That did not keep the dastardly duo from traveling to Mar-A-Lago to beg forgiveness from the Emperor for displeasing him.
Even John Fetterman, once the Democrats’s Great White Working Class Hope and now a shameful embarrassment to his country and his party, has embraced this awful new paradigm by joining Truth Social, wishing Trump well and agitating for Biden to pardon Trump.
When Trump sued ABC News for saying that Trump was a convicted rapist rather than someone convicted of sexual assault, they gave him sixteen million dollars in a clear-cut attempt to curry favor, or at least avoid his bottomless rage.
It’s easy to see why this is happening. If you travel to Mar-A-Lago, donate money for his inauguration, and tell him that you also want to Make America Great Again, he’ll go easier on you than if you don’t prostrate yourself before him and his awful, awesome power.
Trump will be substantially more powerful now than in his first term in office. He has not been shy about weaponizing what’s left of the government to punish people he sees as his enemies.
Trump responded to this new paradigm by marveling that everyone suddenly wants to be his friend. It would be more accurate to say that powerful people don’t want to be seen as their enemy.
These billionaires and oligarchs are grateful to have someone committed to lowering their taxes and making life worse for their workers. They know that Trump uses his power to punish enemies and reward friends, and they do not want to be punished.
It’s fucking pathetic, is what it is. The press feels so bad about underestimating Trump and his supporters that they’ve gone to the ridiculous extreme of portraying Trump as a political savant with a special connection to the American people, primarily the working class that they do not understand but must respect.
I’m tired. The presidential race is exhausting. Donald Trump is exhausting. His followers are exhausting. Everything about him and his rise to infamy is exhausting, but we can’t give up, we can’t give in, and we can’t sleep, metaphorically, because everything is so goddamn tiring and difficult. That means we have to work harder and be even more focused.
Fuck all these quitters. I’m not giving up. I’m not giving in. Though I am exhausted and dispirited, I will keep fighting. I encourage you to do likewise. Trump may have triumphed in the election, but we can’t let the bastards win.
Nathan needed expensive, life-saving dental implants, and his dental plan doesn’t cover them, so he started a GoFundMe at https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-nathans-journey-to-dental-implants. Give if you can! It’s Christmas, after all, the most