The scumbaggery is the point

It’s as simple as that

I was recently reminded of this 2020 REBID edition, published shortly after Biden’s win became apparent but before the January 6 electoral college vote/shitshow made it official, in which I suggested that “the stake has finally been driven through [Trump’s] heart.”

Though I allowed as how Republicans might renominate Trump because after four MAGA years “I doubt[ed] these voters will return to the weak tea of Josh Hawley or Ben Sasse,” the events of last year show that, though I was provisionally correct about the Republicans, I had fatally overestimated the general electorate’s capacity for self-improvement.

Ah, slightly-less-elderly and innocent days! But about this I was dead on:

In fact Donald Trump has never had any policies; he could not articulate a policy position any more than he could throw a fastball or hop a mailbox. That’s not why he was elected…

…they weren’t voting for a businessman or an entertaining celebrity or a better way of life. They didn’t vote to support or oppose policies — they never cared about policies. They weren’t even voting for racism, exactly, though it was a given that any candidate they voted for would have to be at least quietly racist.

What they were voting for was a scumbag.

You might as well read it all, filled as it is with my rough poetry, but that’s the gist. Trump’s cruelty and crudity were a turn-on to a depressingly large chunk of the 2020 electorate.

We have heard all sorts of guff about the 2024 election, but the proof is in the pudding: Trump was reelected on what he advertised, which was the same as what he advertised in 2016, and that wasn’t the price of eggs. (Every time he yelled about inflation, it was clear he didn’t even know what it was, and it didn’t matter.)

He advertised deranged fantasies of brown-skinned refugees eating suburban pets, his opponent pretending to be black, and tariffs, the latest version of A Wall And Mexico Will Pay For It. He advertised his own thuggish behavior, his evident disdain for anyone weaker than him, and his limitless self-regard, every time he appeared in public.

I could add a bunch of glosses on that theme — for example, how the corrupt malfeasance of the Federalist-Society-stuffed rightwing courts make voters ripe for this kind of nihilism by continually sending the message that actual improvement of their lives is impossible even if they vote for it — but the takeaway is that Trump once again advertised himself as a scumbag and people went for it.

If you still think it was something else, think about what he and his goons have been up to in the run-up to his installation.

First of all there’s that foreign conquest Greenland-Gulf of Mexico-Canada-Panama Canal bullshit – useless as policy (though his lickspittles pretend) but great for showing that you’re the kind of scumbag who likes to boss people around just because.

Then there’s the stuff his goons get up to on their own accord — for example, demanding that California make concessions if they want any federal assistance for their catastrophic fires from the Scumbag in Chief:

Two Republican senators have said they expect the new Republican-led Congress to ask for a laundry list of requirements to be met before allocating disaster aid to authorities in wildfire-ravaged Los Angeles…

“There can’t be a blank check on this,” [Republican Senator John] Barrasso said in an interview on CBS News’s Face the Nation. “I expect there will be strings attached to money that is ultimately approved, and it has to do with being ready the next time because this was a gross failure this time.”

The Republicans justify their crude threats with gibberish about how California’s fires are not the fault of climate change and its attendant droughts but the fault of “Gavin Newsom prioritizing a fish over his citizens or a leader like Karen Bass, the mayor, who prioritizes DEI initiatives over the readiness of first responders…”

But these idiotic charges are not meant to convince anyone — not even the people who vote Republican. They are rather pure displays of scumbaggery — made-up shit, like when a bully accuses a nerd of stepping on his foot so he can stuff him in a locker. When Texas and Florida had disasters, no one with any authority tried to blame them on their Republican governance and the very idea of doing was then ludicrous. But then, whatever their other faults, Democratic officials were not by and large scumbags.

Meanwhile conservative factota are talking about what a drag it is that we have to look at people doing sign language:

[Turning Point’s Charlie] Kirk was far from the only right-winger to attack ASL interpreters: “critical race theory” profiteer Christopher Rufo said on X that no “wild human gesticulators [are] necessary,” referring to a video of a Los Angeles County emergency management news conference; Richard Hanania said ADA requirements to have ASL interpretation “have led to a nightmare.”

And Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott, known for his advocacy of using razor wire to chop up refugees in the Rio Grande, continued his scumbag streak by decreeing the flags in Texas lowered to half-staff in respect for the passing for former President Jimmy Carter must be, despite tradition and common decency, jacked back up before their time so Trump doesn’t have his inaugural party spoiled.

The disaster-struck, the disabled, the dead — what they have in common is that they are weak, and beating on the weak is the hallmark of a scumbag. We can talk about these flexes being intentional distractions from the policy disasters to come, but the real reason they’re doing them is not to distract, but to affirm. They want their voters to be reassured, and those who voted against them to fear, that they’re every bit the hateful, dead-eyed, vicious scumbags they said they were during the election campaign.

I mean it. Adam Serwer was certainly right when he said the cruelty is the point. But the point these scumbags seek to make is not solely or even mainly about their policies — remember, Republicans don’t have policies as such. It’s about themselves, how terrible (in every sense) they are, and making themselves anti-heroes to people who feel helpless and hopeless and have been left by late-stage capitalism absolutely unable to imagine any better way out of it than to join the people who want to burn it all down.