The Middle Finger Election
If Trump wins, explains Rich Lowry, the editor of the journal founded by William F. Buckley Jr., it will be because he is “The Only Middle Finger Available.”
Voters will back Trump not because he stands athwart history, yelling “Stop,” or because he offers a compelling vision of a Trumpian Morning in America, writes Lowry, but because he is a giant opportunity to say F*ck You to the media, academia, Hollywood, professional athletes, and entire world of woke culture.
He’s not wrong.
Lowry’s argument is part description and part rationalization. He notes that the middle finger “may not be a very good reason to vote for a president, and it doesn’t excuse Trump’s abysmal conduct and maladministration.”
But, he explains, “Trump is, for better or worse, theforemost symbol of resistance to the overwhelming woke cultural tide.” He has become the anointed vessel “for registering opposition to everything from the 1619 Project to social media’s attempted suppression of the Hunter Biden story.”
The tweets, the insults, the bullying aren’t the bugs; they are just different versions of the middle finger — and his people love it. Conservative ideas are just the gloss.
I suspect that Buckley himself would’ve had a different word for this: nihilism.
But we are also seeing the devolution of the right, from Buckley, to Reagan, to the Flight 93 election, and now to the Election of the Raised Middle Finger. On this trajectory, 2024 will be The Grunt and Head-Butt Election (an essay by Victor Davis Hanson).
But the raised middle finger is a useful image, because it also manages to describe what a Trump second term would look like.
As Axios reported “a win next week, no matter the margin, will embolden Trump to ax anyone he sees as constraining him from enacting desired policies or going after perceived enemies.”
He is already planning a festival of retribution, which includes firing FBI Director Christopher Wray, CIA Director Gina Haspel, and Defense Secretary Mark Esper, reports Axios. A safely re-elected Trump would also be unleashed to turn the Department of Justice into a weapon of political revenge.
He has already signaled his plans to gut much of the Civil Service, issuing an order “that strips job protections from employees in policy roles across the government.”
Beyond that? There is no second term economic plan. The debt and deficit? No idea at all. He will likely purge more medical experts and continue to wield his magical thinking against the coronavirus until we get a vaccine. Hundreds of thousands of Americans will die and the economy will be weighed down for years.
On immigration, expect more cruelty, as there be no one to dissuade Trump from his pet ideas that include things like sharpened spikes on his new Wall. He may pull out of NATO. The corruption will continue, and Republicans will look the other way.
And none of this will come as a surprise, because everyone will have understood what the election was really all about.
Trump never pretended that he had a second term agenda. Last summer, longtime fluffer Sean Hannity served up a softball question when he asked Trump “What are your top priority items for a second term?"
This was Trump’s full answer. Savor it:
Afterward, he was given multiple chances to give a better answer, but he never did. As Peter Baker later wrote in the New York Times:
How would he be different in a second term? Really not much at all. “I think I’d be similar,” he said. Which is exactly what his supporters want and his opponents fear.
Beyond more of the same, he has strained lately to define what his second-term agenda would be. Asked at various points, even by friendly interviewers on Fox News, he has offered meandering answers. His fellow Republicans seem no more certain. They therefore dispensed with a party platform altogether, opting instead for a simple resolution of loyalty to the president.
“But so I think, I think it would be, I think it would be very, very, I think we’d have a very, very solid, we would continue what we’re doing, we’d solidify what we’ve done, and we have other things on our plate that we want to get done,” he said.
In other words, he has no idea. And much of the MAGAverse don’t care.
As Ben Shapiro explained, his most important reason for backing Trump this time around was that “Democrats have lost their fucking minds."
Four years ago, Shapiro had posted a six minute video on YouTube titled “Donald Trump is a Liar.” The next month, he wrote, “I Will Never Vote for Donald Trump: Here’s Why.”
But, like Lowry and National Review, he has evolved.
Shapiro explains his reversal by pointing to what he sees as Trump’s record as a conservative, but he strains to rationalize Trump’s mendacity, which he acknowledges. So he’s left to argue that however bad Trump is, the “damage that President Trump has done to the country, on a character and rhetorical level, has already been done and cannot be undone. I don’t see it as getting worse day by day. That is the new status quo unfortunately.”
In a recent endorsement video, Shapiro insisted that "I have been very clear on my feelings about Donald Trump's character. I have serious reservations to say the least...” He worried about “the soul sucking of the Republican Party to approve Trump’s bad behavior; people nodding and grinning at bad stuff Trump did….”
But, he insisted, “Trump has some good qualities.”
“He’s a hammer in search of a nail. Sometimes he hits a nail and it is super satisfying and sometimes he hits a baby and it is far less satisfying….” [Emphasis added.]
Apparently, you have to smash some babies to make an omelet, or something.
Shapiro dismisses all of this because, he says, “whatever damage he was going to do has already been done.”
But this is a Vesuvius of wrongness.
With Trump, it can always get worse, because there is no bottom. In just four years, Trump has already made the conservative movement, dumber, crueler, more dishonest, and more extreme. Rationalization has turned to acceptance. As the toll rises from the pandemic the pro-life party increasingly behaves like a death cult.
Four years into his presidency, Trump can tweet conspiracy theories about Seal Team Six, and Republicans no longer even blink.
What will be the butcher’s bill for another four years of Trump’s denialism and flimflammery?
Two years of accommodating deception, cruelty and corruption, can be a temporary bargain.
In four years, it becomes a habit.
In eight years, it becomes a culture.
_______
See surfgun, sometimes it's not shooting 10 year old girls, it's hitting a baby...but if that's what it takes to get the job done, right?
(By the way, in case you missed it, those are Ben Shapiro's words, not mine.)
But my takeaway from this article is that your love of Trump as "the anti-lefty" is exactly what the majority of the cult loves as well.
Cruelty, thuggery, sociopathic indifference to the suffering of non-cult Americans....these are desirable features, not bugs.
If Trump wins, explains Rich Lowry, the editor of the journal founded by William F. Buckley Jr., it will be because he is “The Only Middle Finger Available.”
Voters will back Trump not because he stands athwart history, yelling “Stop,” or because he offers a compelling vision of a Trumpian Morning in America, writes Lowry, but because he is a giant opportunity to say F*ck You to the media, academia, Hollywood, professional athletes, and entire world of woke culture.
He’s not wrong.
Lowry’s argument is part description and part rationalization. He notes that the middle finger “may not be a very good reason to vote for a president, and it doesn’t excuse Trump’s abysmal conduct and maladministration.”
But, he explains, “Trump is, for better or worse, theforemost symbol of resistance to the overwhelming woke cultural tide.” He has become the anointed vessel “for registering opposition to everything from the 1619 Project to social media’s attempted suppression of the Hunter Biden story.”
To put it in blunt terms, for many people, he’s the only middle finger available — to brandish against the people who’ve assumed they have the whip hand in American culture.
The tweets, the insults, the bullying aren’t the bugs; they are just different versions of the middle finger — and his people love it. Conservative ideas are just the gloss.
I suspect that Buckley himself would’ve had a different word for this: nihilism.
But we are also seeing the devolution of the right, from Buckley, to Reagan, to the Flight 93 election, and now to the Election of the Raised Middle Finger. On this trajectory, 2024 will be The Grunt and Head-Butt Election (an essay by Victor Davis Hanson).
But the raised middle finger is a useful image, because it also manages to describe what a Trump second term would look like.
As Axios reported “a win next week, no matter the margin, will embolden Trump to ax anyone he sees as constraining him from enacting desired policies or going after perceived enemies.”
He is already planning a festival of retribution, which includes firing FBI Director Christopher Wray, CIA Director Gina Haspel, and Defense Secretary Mark Esper, reports Axios. A safely re-elected Trump would also be unleashed to turn the Department of Justice into a weapon of political revenge.
He has already signaled his plans to gut much of the Civil Service, issuing an order “that strips job protections from employees in policy roles across the government.”
Beyond that? There is no second term economic plan. The debt and deficit? No idea at all. He will likely purge more medical experts and continue to wield his magical thinking against the coronavirus until we get a vaccine. Hundreds of thousands of Americans will die and the economy will be weighed down for years.
On immigration, expect more cruelty, as there be no one to dissuade Trump from his pet ideas that include things like sharpened spikes on his new Wall. He may pull out of NATO. The corruption will continue, and Republicans will look the other way.
And none of this will come as a surprise, because everyone will have understood what the election was really all about.
Trump never pretended that he had a second term agenda. Last summer, longtime fluffer Sean Hannity served up a softball question when he asked Trump “What are your top priority items for a second term?"
This was Trump’s full answer. Savor it:
"Well, one of the things that will be really great -- you know, the word experience is still good. I always say talent is more important than experience, I've always said that. But the word experience is a very important word. It's a very important meaning. I never did this before. I never slept over in Washington. I was in Washington, I think, 17 times, all of a sudden, I'm president of the United States. You know the story, I'm riding down Pennsylvania Avenue with our first lady and I say, this is great. But I didn't know very many people in Washington. It wasn't my thing. I was from Manhattan, from New York. Now, I know everybody and I have great people in the administration. You make some mistakes like, you know, an idiot like Bolton. All he wanted to do was drop bombs on everybody. You don't have to drop bombs on everybody. You don't have to kill people."
Afterward, he was given multiple chances to give a better answer, but he never did. As Peter Baker later wrote in the New York Times:
How would he be different in a second term? Really not much at all. “I think I’d be similar,” he said. Which is exactly what his supporters want and his opponents fear.
Beyond more of the same, he has strained lately to define what his second-term agenda would be. Asked at various points, even by friendly interviewers on Fox News, he has offered meandering answers. His fellow Republicans seem no more certain. They therefore dispensed with a party platform altogether, opting instead for a simple resolution of loyalty to the president.
“But so I think, I think it would be, I think it would be very, very, I think we’d have a very, very solid, we would continue what we’re doing, we’d solidify what we’ve done, and we have other things on our plate that we want to get done,” he said.
In other words, he has no idea. And much of the MAGAverse don’t care.
As Ben Shapiro explained, his most important reason for backing Trump this time around was that “Democrats have lost their fucking minds."
Four years ago, Shapiro had posted a six minute video on YouTube titled “Donald Trump is a Liar.” The next month, he wrote, “I Will Never Vote for Donald Trump: Here’s Why.”
But, like Lowry and National Review, he has evolved.
Shapiro explains his reversal by pointing to what he sees as Trump’s record as a conservative, but he strains to rationalize Trump’s mendacity, which he acknowledges. So he’s left to argue that however bad Trump is, the “damage that President Trump has done to the country, on a character and rhetorical level, has already been done and cannot be undone. I don’t see it as getting worse day by day. That is the new status quo unfortunately.”
In a recent endorsement video, Shapiro insisted that "I have been very clear on my feelings about Donald Trump's character. I have serious reservations to say the least...” He worried about “the soul sucking of the Republican Party to approve Trump’s bad behavior; people nodding and grinning at bad stuff Trump did….”
But, he insisted, “Trump has some good qualities.”
“He’s a hammer in search of a nail. Sometimes he hits a nail and it is super satisfying and sometimes he hits a baby and it is far less satisfying….” [Emphasis added.]
Apparently, you have to smash some babies to make an omelet, or something.
Shapiro dismisses all of this because, he says, “whatever damage he was going to do has already been done.”
But this is a Vesuvius of wrongness.
With Trump, it can always get worse, because there is no bottom. In just four years, Trump has already made the conservative movement, dumber, crueler, more dishonest, and more extreme. Rationalization has turned to acceptance. As the toll rises from the pandemic the pro-life party increasingly behaves like a death cult.
Four years into his presidency, Trump can tweet conspiracy theories about Seal Team Six, and Republicans no longer even blink.
What will be the butcher’s bill for another four years of Trump’s denialism and flimflammery?
Two years of accommodating deception, cruelty and corruption, can be a temporary bargain.
In four years, it becomes a habit.
In eight years, it becomes a culture.
_______
See surfgun, sometimes it's not shooting 10 year old girls, it's hitting a baby...but if that's what it takes to get the job done, right?
(By the way, in case you missed it, those are Ben Shapiro's words, not mine.)
But my takeaway from this article is that your love of Trump as "the anti-lefty" is exactly what the majority of the cult loves as well.
Cruelty, thuggery, sociopathic indifference to the suffering of non-cult Americans....these are desirable features, not bugs.
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