The brutal mashup was shown at a Trump resort, but we shouldn’t expect any less.
If you haven’t heard about it yet, another micro-controversy has come out of the Trump presidency (I call it a micro-controversy because many will have forgotten about it by the time this is even printed). At an event sponsoring Donald Trump in Miami, an edited video of Trump violently destroying essentially everyone he has ever labeled as an opponent was shown. The video was an edit from “Kingsman: The Secret Service,” where Colin Firth’s character viciously murders everyone in a church and includes Trump’s face crudely pasted over Colin Firth’s. Replacing the faces of the victims are logos from popular news sources and social movements along with actual people whom Trump has criticized.
If you haven’t seen the edited video, you probably need to do so, not because it’s fun to watch, but because violent memes of the president slaughtering political opponents is the place we are in American politics. Crazy videos like these are being validated by people in positions of power, not so subtly justifying zealots who are honestly willing to murder political opponents (remember the pipe bomb incident?).
Perhaps the problem with the state of politics now is the way that we are able to let everything be thrown under the rug if we like the effects. Example: the hundreds of time the president has been caught blatantly lying to the public, or when he refused to be anything but an annoying and interrupting ass during every debate, or even when he refused to condemn self-proclaimed Nazis marching in Charlottesville. My personal favorite moment was when the crown prince of Saudi Arabia cut an American citizen to pieces for being a good journalist and not being afraid to criticize a government, and we were all complicit because our gas prices were lower for about six weeks. We brushed these things aside because people felt that his policy was worth it. Spoiler alert — no president calling the press the enemy of the people is worth any policy; the press is the most powerful tool the people hold over their government.
But what is there in his policy that makes people think him so easy to forgive? Many people point out the economy, but I find that there isn’t much there. We’re continuing mostly on a trend started long before he took office, and the only real developments I’ve seen are that he seems eager for an all-out trade war with China (which will hurt all of us) and that we’ve had a handful of scary declines in the stock market.
Low unemployment rate? Great, but very few are making more money — millions of people are still very poor. He also has an extremely strict view on immigration, which is apparently subsequently a war on crime, but I haven’t noticed any less crime, rape or drugs, only that the country might be a tad bit whiter. If climate change or gun control is to be the concern, there is no policy to be protected. Ultimately, even if policy were the absolute most important consideration over civil liberties and spewed rhetoric, the president still has nothing to defend him.
Say what you want about Barack Obama, he didn’t pull anything like this president. And to the Democrats who feel superior with that statement, neither Ronald Reagan nor either of the Bushs were at all like this. Iraq might’ve been a messy deal, but there’s a part of me that thinks Dubya actually thought he was doing what was right (I blame Cheney, the aptly named Dick). No president in any recent history has been as much of a demagogue as the gremlin we have in office now.
I wish I could say we deserve a better president, but we don’t. We are a country that allows Nazis to still exist and prefers mass shootings to a decent background check system; we got exactly the jaggaloon that we deserve. Therefore, I don’t ask you to look for someone whom you think you deserve. I ask you to get involved with this next election and pick the best candidate that was willing to run. If nothing else, just try to elect someone who recognizes their own faults and wants to be a good person. They’re harder to find thes
