The Trump Movement is Like a 1980s Teen Sex Comedy Where the Cartoonish Bad Guys are Posited as the Heroes
When Donald Trump vowed to Make America Great Again, he asserted that our country had lost its greatness but that he was intent on winning it back.
Trump wanted to return the United States to the halcyon days of the early to mid-1950s. Trump and his followers want to escape into a whiter, righter era when the Civil Rights and Black Power movements didn’t challenge the power of wealthy straight white men. He similarly wants to journey back in time to the good old days when the LGTBQ community was expected to hide in shame and writhe in self-hatred rather than agitate for rights.
The racist, homophobic, transphobic misogynist in the White House wants to regress to a time before AIDS, MeToo and feminism, when the white man was king and uppity minorities knew their place instead of challenging the status quo.
Trump understands that diversity, equity, and inclusion are destructive and dangerous, so we must aggressively pursue the antithesis of these ideas, namely, segregation, conformity, inequity, injustice, bias, discrimination, exclusion, and omission. Those are the values our country should hold dear, not the unforgivable evil of DEI.
When Trump announced his long-shot run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, he insisted that one of the biggest problems in American life and public discourse was political correctness.
Trump waged a distressingly successful war against a cartoonish caricature of political correctness. It’s one of the reasons he’s been elected president twice despite two impeachments, thirty-four felony convictions, and a long history of saying and doing things that would instantly and conclusively destroy the careers of anyone else.
The forty-fifth and forty-seventh president wants to take us back to an era of segregation, conformity, and institutional racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia. But he also wants to take us back to a time before political correctness.
Specifically, Trump and his administration want to turn back the clock to the raunchy teen sex comedies of the Reagan decade.
The MAGA movement is like a proudly offensive 1983 teen sex comedy where the rich, intolerant bullies who almost invariably serve as cartoonish villains are instead posited as heroes.
Trump appealed to assholes who wanted to be able to use homophobic, ableist and transphobic slurs freely and enthusiastically without negative consequences.
According to an article in The Atlantic, after Joe Biden’s famous subpar debate performance, Trump wanted to use “Retarded” as his insulting nickname of choice for his opponent.
The article quotes Trump telling staffers, “The guy’s a retard. He’s retarded. I think that’s what I’ll start calling him.”
Trump’s aides were able to convince him not to use an ugly slur to insult the ex-president. So he instead called Joe Biden and Kamala Harris “mentally challenged” and “low IQ”, which is a slightly more acceptable way of calling someone an ablest slur.
Calling Kamala Harris mentally challenged or low IQ was quadrupably politically incorrect since he was calling a black, asian woman an ableist slur. Trump knew he could get away with it because he could get away with anything. He’s not being cruel or sadistic, just politically incorrect. If you can’t handle it, why not retreat to your safe space, snowflake?
Unsurprisingly, a slur ubiquitous in Porky’s knockoffs from the mid-1980s is making a huge comeback among Trump supporters.
Elon Musk, who, as both an autistic man and adult, should know better, is a big fan of the word, idea, and the Twitter account @IfindRetards, which has over 600,000 followers.
Musk uses his enormous following to promote the account and smear his enemies. Even Musk’s 76-year-old mother, Maye, got in on the action when she nominated a pair of powerful Democrats as potential candidates for what could be one of Elon’s alternate accounts.
MAGA sadists were overjoyed to see a sassy 76-year-old grandmother throw around the slur with the enthusiasm of a secondary henchman from Revenge of the Nerds. “ROFL I didn’t expect you to join in on the fun,” gushed one fan. “This is the greatest timeline,” enthused another. It certainly is a wonderful world when the richest, most powerful man in the world can behave like an unhinged 19-year-old frat boy on social media.
Maye Musk is like the rapping granny, but evil.
As part of her horrifyingly successful campaign to become the smug, crazy-eyed face of transphobic hatred, Nancy Mace used a transphobic slur during a house meeting. When she was politely informed that she had used language that many find offensive, she tripled down and used the phrase thrice in quick succession.
There was a time, not too long ago, when that would spell the end of her career, and even Republicans would feel obligated to, at the very least, express displeasure at the ugliness of her verbiage. That time has passed, unfortunately. Mace is aggressively branding herself as our preeminent political mean girl (no small feat in a world with both Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene) since cruelty and picking on the most vulnerable among us is officially back in fashion.
The 1980s teen sex comedy vibe isn’t merely a matter of slurs returning. The MAGA movement is suffused with the ugliness and casual sadism of teen sex comedies as well.
As in teen sex comedies, sexual assault and predation are no big deal in the MAGA movement. The Trump cult shares with teen sex comedies immaturity, casual cruelty, and a laissez-faire attitude towards sexual harassment and assault.
Alchoholic sex criminal Pete Hegseth looks like a frat boy villain from an obscurity called Hot Bunz or Sex Academy. The recent blunder where the Trump administration accidentally leaked war plans to a journalist they despise feels more like a gag from a 1980s slobs-versus-snobs sex comedy than something that might happen in real life, to people in positions of supreme power.
Trump likes to say that his appointees are “straight out of central casting.” In Hegseth and Matt Gaetz’s cases, the casting is for the lead bad guy in Lingerie University 3.
I’ve written about J.D. Vance as the henchman who yells, “And stay down!” after the bully beats up the hero in teen movies.
The MAGA movement shares with teen sex comedies the sense that what is seen as harassment is merely a matter of sexy pranks that only an uptight maroon could object to.
Elon Musk and Donald Trump seem like cartoonish bad guys from low-budget Animal House wannabes. They’re tacky caricatures of oblivious, deluded wealthy white bosses who think the world revolves around them and that nothing is classier than coating something in gold and then slapping their name on it.
Yet the MAGA mob inexlicably sees these ferociously selfish narcissists as working tirelessly on their behalf instead of lining their pockets while cavalierly destroying the lives of hundreds of thousands of government employees, their families, and the vulnerable people dependent on assistance from a government.
The slobs enthusiastically back snobs they delusonially think are their allies.
Everything seems backward, but it’s worth remembering that bullies are not your friends. Billionaires are not your friends. Billionaires who are also bullies and behave like supporting characters in 1980s teen sex comedies are most assuredly not your friends and should be treated like villains and not heroes for liberating the masses from the awful plague of cultural sensitivity and basic decency.
Nathan needed expensive, life-saving dental implants, and his non-existent dental plan didn’t cover them, so he started a GoFundMe at https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-nathans-journey-to-dental-implants. Give if you can!
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