One Step Beyond

MAGA racism has turned a corner. Or has it?

I like to joke — mordantly, as greybeards do — about how fast history is moving. But I have to say I thought it’d be a while longer before a Republican Vice-Presidential candidate promoted so outrageous and obvious a racist fantasy as the Haitians Took Over Springfield and Ate Their Cats mess JD Vance threw up yesterday.

We all knew this was how they thought and how they knew their hardcore supporters thought. When it was revealed a few years ago that an actual tape existed of Nixon and Reagan (secretly) trading racist japes, were you surprised? Was anyone, whether they were racist or anti-racist? Of course not — not if you knew any people like that (and nearly everyone in America does) and had any idea what they really loved about these two pieces of shit. The only difference was that the anti-racists were appalled to hear about it and racists were delighted — mostly secretly, at that point.

I’ve commented at length on the evaporation of anything like policy as a feature of conservatism, and how its disappearance reveals what’s always been hidden under its pretense — greed, fear, and hatred of women and minorities. Well, like Hamlet said, now the time gives it proof.

So the “reveal” as they say in showbiz is no surprise — for me (and maybe you) the only surprise is that they’re unveiling themselves so quickly.

I mean, Tubby’s been pushing out racist shit in his own Twitter account for a while:

But he doesn’t usually go so far as to attach these fantasies to any actual documented incidents. Sure, he tells his “sir” stories, and his stories of big strong men approaching him with tears in their eyes, but no one believes those actually happened — not even the alarming number of goo-brained people who worship him. It’s that famous “seriously not literally” thing his famous fraudster flack used to spread. It’s vibes, or post-truth, or whatever buzzwords you want to use instead of “full of shit.”

That’s a big part of his cover — the same cover that all those polite Republicans like Nikki Haley help tuck under his chins by claiming his viciousness and criminality don’t matter because he’s good on “policy” (as if he would even know what the word means; as it means anything to them, for that matter, besides “possible future jobs for me”). Nothing he says is supposed to be [big air-quotes] true. Just clap and laugh and wait for (depending on whether you’re rich or poor) big tax cuts/the murder of your enemies!

But JD Vance is another story. Whether it was the idea before he revealed his utter hopelessness as a candidate or a retrofit, clearly his current purpose is to do for Trump what Tim Pool, Benny Johnson, and those other stooges did for Putin — namely, misdirect.

Vance didn’t go rogue and no one on the campaign is going to walk his statement back. The Prestige Press, slow off the dime as usual, has begun to acknowledge that the whole “I saw a Haitian eat a cat and I looked at the cat and the cat looked at me” story is bullshit. But it doesn’t matter. What the Trump team is saying here is: What you used to be ashamed of saying, what your parents and grandparents used to be ashamed of saying, you can now be proud of. Every racist fable you ever heard or read, from “n*****s fuck dogs to make hippies” to this cat thing, is as real as you want it to be — and if you’re MAGA we know you want it bad.

Q.E.D.:

And just in case you think it’s all just randos:

I said up top that I was surprised they got here so fast. But now that I think of it, maybe that was just my wishful thinking. Maybe, without copping to it, I’d been hoping, just like all the sissy centrist neoliberals I like to laugh at, that they would hold back a while longer and allow me to imagine that they’re not as bad as they are.

Well, it’s a little late for that now.