Republicans’ hypocritical reaction to President Biden’s use of the F-word.
by WILLIAM SALETAN
Republicans are furious over President Biden’s recent remarks linking Donald Trump and his supporters to “semi-f*****m.” For days, they’ve been all over TV and social media, denouncing Biden’s use of the F-word. But Biden was right. Many of the ideas and tactics deployed by Trump and his apologists, including those who decry Biden’s comparison, fit the dictionary definition of f*****m.
Consider Rep. Jim Jordan, who will chair the House Judiciary Committee if Republicans retake the House this fall. Jordan says Biden is dividing America by “calling Republicans ‘semi-f*****ts.’” But three years ago, when Trump committed an openly authoritarian act, Jordan endorsed it.
In January 2019, the House of Representatives, which had a new Democratic majority, refused to fund a border wall demanded by Trump. So the president declared a national emergency to build the wall, seizing from Congress its constitutional authority over appropriations. No president had ever claimed such emergency powers to override the will of Congress. But Jordan stood with Trump. “We tried for 35 days . . . to get the Democrats to do what everyone knows needs to happen,” said Jordan. “I support the national emergency declaration 100 percent.”
You could argue that confiscating money for the wall was only semi-authoritarian. To be fully authoritarian, you might say, a leader would have to use illegal means not just to exercise power, but to seize power or stay in power. But Trump and his henchmen meet that standard, too.
Take the case of Rep. Andy Biggs, who led the conservative House Freedom Caucus during Trump’s presidency. Biggs now accuses Biden of “demonizing people and making them villains” by invoking the F-word. But after the 2020 e******n, Biggs, Jordan, and several other congressional Republicans directly participated in Trump’s attempted c**p.
In December 2020—more than a month after Biden had won the presidency, and several days after the E*******l College had certified the results—Biggs made an incendiary video for a “Stop the Steal” rally in Arizona. He urged Trump’s supporters to “keep fighting” so Trump could stay in power. Biggs also participated in a subsequent White House meeting in which Trump unsuccessfully pressured Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the e******n.
Astickler might say that an attempt to overturn an e******n isn’t really f*****t unless it involves the use of state power or mob violence. But Trump and his allies tried to use both.
Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s right-hand man in several abuses of power, says it’s Biden, not Trump, who runs America like “a damned dictatorship.” But in December 2020, after the E*******l College had certified Biden’s e******n, Giuliani—at Trump’s direction—phoned the acting deputy secretary at the Department of Homeland Security to ask whether DHS could seize v****g machines from states. Then, at Trump’s J****** 6th rally on the Ellipse, Giuliani exhorted the crowd: “Let’s have trial by combat!”
Giuliani didn’t just help to incite the attack on the Capitol. To this day, he continues to whitewash it and excuse the perpetrators. On his radio show last weekend, Giuliani said of Rep. Adam Schiff: “He’s a damned liar when he starts calling J****** 6th an i**********n, a revolt.” Giuliani went on: “I’m not saying the people that did wrong and pushed around cops and did what they did shouldn’t be punished appropriately. I am saying that by putting them in jail for 14 months and leaving them there, you got a f*****t state going on.”
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, another apologist for the J****** 6th perpetrators, says Biden’s talk of f*****m is ridiculous because “Democrats are the f*****ts.” But in 2018 and 2019, Greene repeatedly endorsed calls for political violence. She “liked” Facebook posts saying that FBI agents “need to be hung for treason” and suggesting a “bullet to the head” of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Greene didn’t just hit the “like” button. When a commenter asked how long it would be before “we get to hang” Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, Greene replied: “Stage is being set. Players are being put in place.” In videos, she said Pelosi was “guilty of treason,” a “crime punishable by death.” And this year, Greene spoke at an openly f*****t—that is, pro-Hitler—political action conference.
The dictionary definition of f*****m doesn’t just talk about autocracy. It also includes ethnic nationalism. But by this standard, too, Trump and many of his propagandists are semi-f*****t. Kayleigh McEnany, who served as Trump’s White House press secretary, calls Biden’s reference to f*****m a baseless “message of hatred.” But in the summer of 2016, Trump, the de facto Republican p**********l nominee, declared a federal judge unfit to preside over a fraud case against Trump University because “he’s a Mexican.” And McEnany defended this attack.
Trump’s campaign against the judge, Gonzalo Curiel—who was born in America—was an overt play to target an ethnic minority, undermine faith in the judiciary, and shield Trump from legal accountability. But McEnany, who was then a CNN commentator, stood by the candidate. She said Trump’s rationale—that Curiel’s “Mexican heritage” presented “an inherent conflict of interest” because Trump was “very strong on the border”—was just an extrapolation from the common observation that Latinos opposed Trump’s hardline views on immigration.
You could argue that an out-and-out f*****t would use nationalist bigotry to persecute a whole minority group, not just a single judge. That’s what Trump did in 2015, when he called for a “complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” McEnany, in her role as a commentator, excused this proposal, too. It was only a “temporary ban on non-U.S. citizen Muslims,” she reasoned.
McEnany had no direct role in Trump’s campaign against Muslims. But Stephen Miller, the chief architect of the Trump administration’s anti-immigration policies, was centrally involved in the Muslim ban. In 2015, as a liaison from Sen. Jeff Sessions, Miller started working with Trump’s campaign on immigration policy. On Dec. 3, 2015, he wrote an email scorning “Muslim Resettlement” in the United States. Four days later, on Dec. 7, Trump proposed his ban on Muslim immigration. A month after that, the campaign officially brought Miller on board.
The timing of those events might be coincidental. But this we know: When Trump became president, Miller helped to craft his executive order suspending travel to the United States from several majority-Muslim countries. And when a judge blocked the travel ban, Miller asserted that Trump’s authority was virtually imperial. “We have a judiciary that has taken far too much power,” said Miller. “Our opponents, the media, and the whole world will soon see, as we begin to take further actions, that the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned.”
Miller, without apparent irony, now says it’s preposterous that Democrats are “accusing their opponents of being f*****t.”
Trump’s cult includes many other components common to previous f*****t movements—paranoia, fantastic lies, anti-intellectualism, a mythologized national past, selective appeals to law and order, and propaganda about enemies of the state. When Sen. Lindsey Graham went on TV Sunday to warn that “there literally will be r**ts in the street” if Trump is prosecuted for breaking national security laws by hiding classified documents at Mar-a-Lago—Graham repeated the line twice, to make it clear that he was serious—that’s another page from the f*****t playbook: invocation of mob violence to protect the movement’s leader.
But the clearest illustration of the MAGA elite’s descent into f*****m might be its embrace of a like-minded leader from another country: Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.
As Cathy Young, Charles Sykes, David Baer, and other writers have explained in The Bulwark, Orbán is an increasingly authoritarian ethnonationalist. In a speech on July 23, he warned, “There is a world in which European peoples are mixed together with those arriving from outside Europe.” Orbán called this a “mixed-race world” and concluded, “We are willing to mix with one another, but we do not want to become peoples of mixed-race.”
Orbán’s speech was so grotesque that one of his own advisers resigned, calling the speech “a purely N**i diatribe worthy of Joseph Goebbels.” But a week later, Orbán was welcomed as the keynote speaker at a Dallas meeting of the Conservative Political Action Conference, which reveres Trump and is one of his favorite venues. Two days after that, Trump spoke to the same gathering. The two aspiring autocrats were warmly applauded.
This past Monday, CPAC chairman Matt Schlapp stoutly defended Orbán. “We support leaders who reject globalism, socialism, illegal migration and care about defending families, national sovereignty, and traditional values,” Schlapp tweeted.
Then, on Wednesday, Schlapp posted a video of himself rebuking Biden for using the F-word. “It’s the left that are the f*****ts,” he charged.
Say what you will about the American semi-f*****ts. They certainly have a sense of humor.
slatten49 wrote:
Republicans’ hypocritical reaction to President Biden’s use of the F-word.
by WILLIAM SALETAN
Republicans are furious over President Biden’s recent remarks linking Donald Trump and his supporters to “semi-f*****m.” For days, they’ve been all over TV and social media, denouncing Biden’s use of the F-word. But Biden was right. Many of the ideas and tactics deployed by Trump and his apologists, including those who decry Biden’s comparison, fit the dictionary definition of f*****m.
Consider Rep. Jim Jordan, who will chair the House Judiciary Committee if Republicans retake the House this fall. Jordan says Biden is dividing America by “calling Republicans ‘semi-f*****ts.’” But three years ago, when Trump committed an openly authoritarian act, Jordan endorsed it.
In January 2019, the House of Representatives, which had a new Democratic majority, refused to fund a border wall demanded by Trump. So the president declared a national emergency to build the wall, seizing from Congress its constitutional authority over appropriations. No president had ever claimed such emergency powers to override the will of Congress. But Jordan stood with Trump. “We tried for 35 days . . . to get the Democrats to do what everyone knows needs to happen,” said Jordan. “I support the national emergency declaration 100 percent.”
You could argue that confiscating money for the wall was only semi-authoritarian. To be fully authoritarian, you might say, a leader would have to use illegal means not just to exercise power, but to seize power or stay in power. But Trump and his henchmen meet that standard, too.
Take the case of Rep. Andy Biggs, who led the conservative House Freedom Caucus during Trump’s presidency. Biggs now accuses Biden of “demonizing people and making them villains” by invoking the F-word. But after the 2020 e******n, Biggs, Jordan, and several other congressional Republicans directly participated in Trump’s attempted c**p.
In December 2020—more than a month after Biden had won the presidency, and several days after the E*******l College had certified the results—Biggs made an incendiary video for a “Stop the Steal” rally in Arizona. He urged Trump’s supporters to “keep fighting” so Trump could stay in power. Biggs also participated in a subsequent White House meeting in which Trump unsuccessfully pressured Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the e******n.
Astickler might say that an attempt to overturn an e******n isn’t really f*****t unless it involves the use of state power or mob violence. But Trump and his allies tried to use both.
Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s right-hand man in several abuses of power, says it’s Biden, not Trump, who runs America like “a damned dictatorship.” But in December 2020, after the E*******l College had certified Biden’s e******n, Giuliani—at Trump’s direction—phoned the acting deputy secretary at the Department of Homeland Security to ask whether DHS could seize v****g machines from states. Then, at Trump’s J****** 6th rally on the Ellipse, Giuliani exhorted the crowd: “Let’s have trial by combat!”
Giuliani didn’t just help to incite the attack on the Capitol. To this day, he continues to whitewash it and excuse the perpetrators. On his radio show last weekend, Giuliani said of Rep. Adam Schiff: “He’s a damned liar when he starts calling J****** 6th an i**********n, a revolt.” Giuliani went on: “I’m not saying the people that did wrong and pushed around cops and did what they did shouldn’t be punished appropriately. I am saying that by putting them in jail for 14 months and leaving them there, you got a f*****t state going on.”
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, another apologist for the J****** 6th perpetrators, says Biden’s talk of f*****m is ridiculous because “Democrats are the f*****ts.” But in 2018 and 2019, Greene repeatedly endorsed calls for political violence. She “liked” Facebook posts saying that FBI agents “need to be hung for treason” and suggesting a “bullet to the head” of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Greene didn’t just hit the “like” button. When a commenter asked how long it would be before “we get to hang” Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, Greene replied: “Stage is being set. Players are being put in place.” In videos, she said Pelosi was “guilty of treason,” a “crime punishable by death.” And this year, Greene spoke at an openly f*****t—that is, pro-Hitler—political action conference.
The dictionary definition of f*****m doesn’t just talk about autocracy. It also includes ethnic nationalism. But by this standard, too, Trump and many of his propagandists are semi-f*****t. Kayleigh McEnany, who served as Trump’s White House press secretary, calls Biden’s reference to f*****m a baseless “message of hatred.” But in the summer of 2016, Trump, the de facto Republican p**********l nominee, declared a federal judge unfit to preside over a fraud case against Trump University because “he’s a Mexican.” And McEnany defended this attack.
Trump’s campaign against the judge, Gonzalo Curiel—who was born in America—was an overt play to target an ethnic minority, undermine faith in the judiciary, and shield Trump from legal accountability. But McEnany, who was then a CNN commentator, stood by the candidate. She said Trump’s rationale—that Curiel’s “Mexican heritage” presented “an inherent conflict of interest” because Trump was “very strong on the border”—was just an extrapolation from the common observation that Latinos opposed Trump’s hardline views on immigration.
You could argue that an out-and-out f*****t would use nationalist bigotry to persecute a whole minority group, not just a single judge. That’s what Trump did in 2015, when he called for a “complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” McEnany, in her role as a commentator, excused this proposal, too. It was only a “temporary ban on non-U.S. citizen Muslims,” she reasoned.
McEnany had no direct role in Trump’s campaign against Muslims. But Stephen Miller, the chief architect of the Trump administration’s anti-immigration policies, was centrally involved in the Muslim ban. In 2015, as a liaison from Sen. Jeff Sessions, Miller started working with Trump’s campaign on immigration policy. On Dec. 3, 2015, he wrote an email scorning “Muslim Resettlement” in the United States. Four days later, on Dec. 7, Trump proposed his ban on Muslim immigration. A month after that, the campaign officially brought Miller on board.
The timing of those events might be coincidental. But this we know: When Trump became president, Miller helped to craft his executive order suspending travel to the United States from several majority-Muslim countries. And when a judge blocked the travel ban, Miller asserted that Trump’s authority was virtually imperial. “We have a judiciary that has taken far too much power,” said Miller. “Our opponents, the media, and the whole world will soon see, as we begin to take further actions, that the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned.”
Miller, without apparent irony, now says it’s preposterous that Democrats are “accusing their opponents of being f*****t.”
Trump’s cult includes many other components common to previous f*****t movements—paranoia, fantastic lies, anti-intellectualism, a mythologized national past, selective appeals to law and order, and propaganda about enemies of the state. When Sen. Lindsey Graham went on TV Sunday to warn that “there literally will be r**ts in the street” if Trump is prosecuted for breaking national security laws by hiding classified documents at Mar-a-Lago—Graham repeated the line twice, to make it clear that he was serious—that’s another page from the f*****t playbook: invocation of mob violence to protect the movement’s leader.
But the clearest illustration of the MAGA elite’s descent into f*****m might be its embrace of a like-minded leader from another country: Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.
As Cathy Young, Charles Sykes, David Baer, and other writers have explained in The Bulwark, Orbán is an increasingly authoritarian ethnonationalist. In a speech on July 23, he warned, “There is a world in which European peoples are mixed together with those arriving from outside Europe.” Orbán called this a “mixed-race world” and concluded, “We are willing to mix with one another, but we do not want to become peoples of mixed-race.”
Orbán’s speech was so grotesque that one of his own advisers resigned, calling the speech “a purely N**i diatribe worthy of Joseph Goebbels.” But a week later, Orbán was welcomed as the keynote speaker at a Dallas meeting of the Conservative Political Action Conference, which reveres Trump and is one of his favorite venues. Two days after that, Trump spoke to the same gathering. The two aspiring autocrats were warmly applauded.
This past Monday, CPAC chairman Matt Schlapp stoutly defended Orbán. “We support leaders who reject globalism, socialism, illegal migration and care about defending families, national sovereignty, and traditional values,” Schlapp tweeted.
Then, on Wednesday, Schlapp posted a video of himself rebuking Biden for using the F-word. “It’s the left that are the f*****ts,” he charged.
Say what you will about the American semi-f*****ts. They certainly have a sense of humor.
Republicans’ hypocritical reaction to President Bi... (
show quote)
LOL
"R****t" "Homophobe" "Sexist" "T***sphobe" "Xenophobe" "Misogynist"
Now "Facist"
What will I be next week?
slatten49 wrote:
Republicans’ hypocritical reaction to President Biden’s use of the F-word.
by WILLIAM SALETAN
Republicans are furious over President Biden’s recent remarks linking Donald Trump and his supporters to “semi-f*****m.” For days, they’ve been all over TV and social media, denouncing Biden’s use of the F-word. But Biden was right. Many of the ideas and tactics deployed by Trump and his apologists, including those who decry Biden’s comparison, fit the dictionary definition of f*****m.
Consider Rep. Jim Jordan, who will chair the House Judiciary Committee if Republicans retake the House this fall. Jordan says Biden is dividing America by “calling Republicans ‘semi-f*****ts.’” But three years ago, when Trump committed an openly authoritarian act, Jordan endorsed it.
In January 2019, the House of Representatives, which had a new Democratic majority, refused to fund a border wall demanded by Trump. So the president declared a national emergency to build the wall, seizing from Congress its constitutional authority over appropriations. No president had ever claimed such emergency powers to override the will of Congress. But Jordan stood with Trump. “We tried for 35 days . . . to get the Democrats to do what everyone knows needs to happen,” said Jordan. “I support the national emergency declaration 100 percent.”
You could argue that confiscating money for the wall was only semi-authoritarian. To be fully authoritarian, you might say, a leader would have to use illegal means not just to exercise power, but to seize power or stay in power. But Trump and his henchmen meet that standard, too.
Take the case of Rep. Andy Biggs, who led the conservative House Freedom Caucus during Trump’s presidency. Biggs now accuses Biden of “demonizing people and making them villains” by invoking the F-word. But after the 2020 e******n, Biggs, Jordan, and several other congressional Republicans directly participated in Trump’s attempted c**p.
In December 2020—more than a month after Biden had won the presidency, and several days after the E*******l College had certified the results—Biggs made an incendiary video for a “Stop the Steal” rally in Arizona. He urged Trump’s supporters to “keep fighting” so Trump could stay in power. Biggs also participated in a subsequent White House meeting in which Trump unsuccessfully pressured Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the e******n.
Astickler might say that an attempt to overturn an e******n isn’t really f*****t unless it involves the use of state power or mob violence. But Trump and his allies tried to use both.
Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s right-hand man in several abuses of power, says it’s Biden, not Trump, who runs America like “a damned dictatorship.” But in December 2020, after the E*******l College had certified Biden’s e******n, Giuliani—at Trump’s direction—phoned the acting deputy secretary at the Department of Homeland Security to ask whether DHS could seize v****g machines from states. Then, at Trump’s J****** 6th rally on the Ellipse, Giuliani exhorted the crowd: “Let’s have trial by combat!”
Giuliani didn’t just help to incite the attack on the Capitol. To this day, he continues to whitewash it and excuse the perpetrators. On his radio show last weekend, Giuliani said of Rep. Adam Schiff: “He’s a damned liar when he starts calling J****** 6th an i**********n, a revolt.” Giuliani went on: “I’m not saying the people that did wrong and pushed around cops and did what they did shouldn’t be punished appropriately. I am saying that by putting them in jail for 14 months and leaving them there, you got a f*****t state going on.”
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, another apologist for the J****** 6th perpetrators, says Biden’s talk of f*****m is ridiculous because “Democrats are the f*****ts.” But in 2018 and 2019, Greene repeatedly endorsed calls for political violence. She “liked” Facebook posts saying that FBI agents “need to be hung for treason” and suggesting a “bullet to the head” of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Greene didn’t just hit the “like” button. When a commenter asked how long it would be before “we get to hang” Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, Greene replied: “Stage is being set. Players are being put in place.” In videos, she said Pelosi was “guilty of treason,” a “crime punishable by death.” And this year, Greene spoke at an openly f*****t—that is, pro-Hitler—political action conference.
The dictionary definition of f*****m doesn’t just talk about autocracy. It also includes ethnic nationalism. But by this standard, too, Trump and many of his propagandists are semi-f*****t. Kayleigh McEnany, who served as Trump’s White House press secretary, calls Biden’s reference to f*****m a baseless “message of hatred.” But in the summer of 2016, Trump, the de facto Republican p**********l nominee, declared a federal judge unfit to preside over a fraud case against Trump University because “he’s a Mexican.” And McEnany defended this attack.
Trump’s campaign against the judge, Gonzalo Curiel—who was born in America—was an overt play to target an ethnic minority, undermine faith in the judiciary, and shield Trump from legal accountability. But McEnany, who was then a CNN commentator, stood by the candidate. She said Trump’s rationale—that Curiel’s “Mexican heritage” presented “an inherent conflict of interest” because Trump was “very strong on the border”—was just an extrapolation from the common observation that Latinos opposed Trump’s hardline views on immigration.
You could argue that an out-and-out f*****t would use nationalist bigotry to persecute a whole minority group, not just a single judge. That’s what Trump did in 2015, when he called for a “complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” McEnany, in her role as a commentator, excused this proposal, too. It was only a “temporary ban on non-U.S. citizen Muslims,” she reasoned.
McEnany had no direct role in Trump’s campaign against Muslims. But Stephen Miller, the chief architect of the Trump administration’s anti-immigration policies, was centrally involved in the Muslim ban. In 2015, as a liaison from Sen. Jeff Sessions, Miller started working with Trump’s campaign on immigration policy. On Dec. 3, 2015, he wrote an email scorning “Muslim Resettlement” in the United States. Four days later, on Dec. 7, Trump proposed his ban on Muslim immigration. A month after that, the campaign officially brought Miller on board.
The timing of those events might be coincidental. But this we know: When Trump became president, Miller helped to craft his executive order suspending travel to the United States from several majority-Muslim countries. And when a judge blocked the travel ban, Miller asserted that Trump’s authority was virtually imperial. “We have a judiciary that has taken far too much power,” said Miller. “Our opponents, the media, and the whole world will soon see, as we begin to take further actions, that the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned.”
Miller, without apparent irony, now says it’s preposterous that Democrats are “accusing their opponents of being f*****t.”
Trump’s cult includes many other components common to previous f*****t movements—paranoia, fantastic lies, anti-intellectualism, a mythologized national past, selective appeals to law and order, and propaganda about enemies of the state. When Sen. Lindsey Graham went on TV Sunday to warn that “there literally will be r**ts in the street” if Trump is prosecuted for breaking national security laws by hiding classified documents at Mar-a-Lago—Graham repeated the line twice, to make it clear that he was serious—that’s another page from the f*****t playbook: invocation of mob violence to protect the movement’s leader.
But the clearest illustration of the MAGA elite’s descent into f*****m might be its embrace of a like-minded leader from another country: Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.
As Cathy Young, Charles Sykes, David Baer, and other writers have explained in The Bulwark, Orbán is an increasingly authoritarian ethnonationalist. In a speech on July 23, he warned, “There is a world in which European peoples are mixed together with those arriving from outside Europe.” Orbán called this a “mixed-race world” and concluded, “We are willing to mix with one another, but we do not want to become peoples of mixed-race.”
Orbán’s speech was so grotesque that one of his own advisers resigned, calling the speech “a purely N**i diatribe worthy of Joseph Goebbels.” But a week later, Orbán was welcomed as the keynote speaker at a Dallas meeting of the Conservative Political Action Conference, which reveres Trump and is one of his favorite venues. Two days after that, Trump spoke to the same gathering. The two aspiring autocrats were warmly applauded.
This past Monday, CPAC chairman Matt Schlapp stoutly defended Orbán. “We support leaders who reject globalism, socialism, illegal migration and care about defending families, national sovereignty, and traditional values,” Schlapp tweeted.
Then, on Wednesday, Schlapp posted a video of himself rebuking Biden for using the F-word. “It’s the left that are the f*****ts,” he charged.
Say what you will about the American semi-f*****ts. They certainly have a sense of humor.
Republicans’ hypocritical reaction to President Bi... (
show quote)
Hey slatten, have you been v******ted for c***d ? If yes, have you also taken booster shots ?
Liberty Tree wrote:
Our closet ELWNJ is back
Never one to disappoint, my troll is back.
Wolf counselor wrote:
Hey slatten, have you been v******ted for c***d ? If yes, have you also taken booster shots ?
Slatten does not worry about c***d--But does needs to get the monkey pox shot and several boosters!!!!!
slatten49 wrote:
Republicans’ hypocritical reaction to President Biden’s use of the F-word.
by WILLIAM SALETAN
Republicans are furious over President Biden’s recent remarks linking Donald Trump and his supporters to “semi-f*****m.” For days, they’ve been all over TV and social media, denouncing Biden’s use of the F-word. But Biden was right. Many of the ideas and tactics deployed by Trump and his apologists, including those who decry Biden’s comparison, fit the dictionary definition of f*****m.
Consider Rep. Jim Jordan, who will chair the House Judiciary Committee if Republicans retake the House this fall. Jordan says Biden is dividing America by “calling Republicans ‘semi-f*****ts.’” But three years ago, when Trump committed an openly authoritarian act, Jordan endorsed it.
In January 2019, the House of Representatives, which had a new Democratic majority, refused to fund a border wall demanded by Trump. So the president declared a national emergency to build the wall, seizing from Congress its constitutional authority over appropriations. No president had ever claimed such emergency powers to override the will of Congress. But Jordan stood with Trump. “We tried for 35 days . . . to get the Democrats to do what everyone knows needs to happen,” said Jordan. “I support the national emergency declaration 100 percent.”
You could argue that confiscating money for the wall was only semi-authoritarian. To be fully authoritarian, you might say, a leader would have to use illegal means not just to exercise power, but to seize power or stay in power. But Trump and his henchmen meet that standard, too.
Take the case of Rep. Andy Biggs, who led the conservative House Freedom Caucus during Trump’s presidency. Biggs now accuses Biden of “demonizing people and making them villains” by invoking the F-word. But after the 2020 e******n, Biggs, Jordan, and several other congressional Republicans directly participated in Trump’s attempted c**p.
In December 2020—more than a month after Biden had won the presidency, and several days after the E*******l College had certified the results—Biggs made an incendiary video for a “Stop the Steal” rally in Arizona. He urged Trump’s supporters to “keep fighting” so Trump could stay in power. Biggs also participated in a subsequent White House meeting in which Trump unsuccessfully pressured Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the e******n.
Astickler might say that an attempt to overturn an e******n isn’t really f*****t unless it involves the use of state power or mob violence. But Trump and his allies tried to use both.
Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s right-hand man in several abuses of power, says it’s Biden, not Trump, who runs America like “a damned dictatorship.” But in December 2020, after the E*******l College had certified Biden’s e******n, Giuliani—at Trump’s direction—phoned the acting deputy secretary at the Department of Homeland Security to ask whether DHS could seize v****g machines from states. Then, at Trump’s J****** 6th rally on the Ellipse, Giuliani exhorted the crowd: “Let’s have trial by combat!”
Giuliani didn’t just help to incite the attack on the Capitol. To this day, he continues to whitewash it and excuse the perpetrators. On his radio show last weekend, Giuliani said of Rep. Adam Schiff: “He’s a damned liar when he starts calling J****** 6th an i**********n, a revolt.” Giuliani went on: “I’m not saying the people that did wrong and pushed around cops and did what they did shouldn’t be punished appropriately. I am saying that by putting them in jail for 14 months and leaving them there, you got a f*****t state going on.”
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, another apologist for the J****** 6th perpetrators, says Biden’s talk of f*****m is ridiculous because “Democrats are the f*****ts.” But in 2018 and 2019, Greene repeatedly endorsed calls for political violence. She “liked” Facebook posts saying that FBI agents “need to be hung for treason” and suggesting a “bullet to the head” of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Greene didn’t just hit the “like” button. When a commenter asked how long it would be before “we get to hang” Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, Greene replied: “Stage is being set. Players are being put in place.” In videos, she said Pelosi was “guilty of treason,” a “crime punishable by death.” And this year, Greene spoke at an openly f*****t—that is, pro-Hitler—political action conference.
The dictionary definition of f*****m doesn’t just talk about autocracy. It also includes ethnic nationalism. But by this standard, too, Trump and many of his propagandists are semi-f*****t. Kayleigh McEnany, who served as Trump’s White House press secretary, calls Biden’s reference to f*****m a baseless “message of hatred.” But in the summer of 2016, Trump, the de facto Republican p**********l nominee, declared a federal judge unfit to preside over a fraud case against Trump University because “he’s a Mexican.” And McEnany defended this attack.
Trump’s campaign against the judge, Gonzalo Curiel—who was born in America—was an overt play to target an ethnic minority, undermine faith in the judiciary, and shield Trump from legal accountability. But McEnany, who was then a CNN commentator, stood by the candidate. She said Trump’s rationale—that Curiel’s “Mexican heritage” presented “an inherent conflict of interest” because Trump was “very strong on the border”—was just an extrapolation from the common observation that Latinos opposed Trump’s hardline views on immigration.
You could argue that an out-and-out f*****t would use nationalist bigotry to persecute a whole minority group, not just a single judge. That’s what Trump did in 2015, when he called for a “complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” McEnany, in her role as a commentator, excused this proposal, too. It was only a “temporary ban on non-U.S. citizen Muslims,” she reasoned.
McEnany had no direct role in Trump’s campaign against Muslims. But Stephen Miller, the chief architect of the Trump administration’s anti-immigration policies, was centrally involved in the Muslim ban. In 2015, as a liaison from Sen. Jeff Sessions, Miller started working with Trump’s campaign on immigration policy. On Dec. 3, 2015, he wrote an email scorning “Muslim Resettlement” in the United States. Four days later, on Dec. 7, Trump proposed his ban on Muslim immigration. A month after that, the campaign officially brought Miller on board.
The timing of those events might be coincidental. But this we know: When Trump became president, Miller helped to craft his executive order suspending travel to the United States from several majority-Muslim countries. And when a judge blocked the travel ban, Miller asserted that Trump’s authority was virtually imperial. “We have a judiciary that has taken far too much power,” said Miller. “Our opponents, the media, and the whole world will soon see, as we begin to take further actions, that the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned.”
Miller, without apparent irony, now says it’s preposterous that Democrats are “accusing their opponents of being f*****t.”
Trump’s cult includes many other components common to previous f*****t movements—paranoia, fantastic lies, anti-intellectualism, a mythologized national past, selective appeals to law and order, and propaganda about enemies of the state. When Sen. Lindsey Graham went on TV Sunday to warn that “there literally will be r**ts in the street” if Trump is prosecuted for breaking national security laws by hiding classified documents at Mar-a-Lago—Graham repeated the line twice, to make it clear that he was serious—that’s another page from the f*****t playbook: invocation of mob violence to protect the movement’s leader.
But the clearest illustration of the MAGA elite’s descent into f*****m might be its embrace of a like-minded leader from another country: Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.
As Cathy Young, Charles Sykes, David Baer, and other writers have explained in The Bulwark, Orbán is an increasingly authoritarian ethnonationalist. In a speech on July 23, he warned, “There is a world in which European peoples are mixed together with those arriving from outside Europe.” Orbán called this a “mixed-race world” and concluded, “We are willing to mix with one another, but we do not want to become peoples of mixed-race.”
Orbán’s speech was so grotesque that one of his own advisers resigned, calling the speech “a purely N**i diatribe worthy of Joseph Goebbels.” But a week later, Orbán was welcomed as the keynote speaker at a Dallas meeting of the Conservative Political Action Conference, which reveres Trump and is one of his favorite venues. Two days after that, Trump spoke to the same gathering. The two aspiring autocrats were warmly applauded.
This past Monday, CPAC chairman Matt Schlapp stoutly defended Orbán. “We support leaders who reject globalism, socialism, illegal migration and care about defending families, national sovereignty, and traditional values,” Schlapp tweeted.
Then, on Wednesday, Schlapp posted a video of himself rebuking Biden for using the F-word. “It’s the left that are the f*****ts,” he charged.
Say what you will about the American semi-f*****ts. They certainly have a sense of humor.
Republicans’ hypocritical reaction to President Bi... (
show quote)
In September of 2023 Biden, in a clearly authoritarian move, usurped the constitutional authority of the house by relieving $10,000 in student loan debt. This illegal and unconstitutional EO is supported by all democrats. $5 billion for a wall to protect the sovereignty of our country, which is a federal "requirement", as opposed to 10 to 20 times that amount to buy v**es. Which is more f*****t?
Biden implemented a completely f*****t/authoritarian v*****e mandate, which was not only illegal and unconstitutional but also unethical and immoral.
The Muslim ban was for countries that sponsor terrorism only. Nothing f*****t about that
Victor Orban is a democratically elected leader of a foreign country who is hugely popular, much more so than Biden could ever dream of.
Why do you not want an American leader, or any American, to fight against globalism, socialism, and i*****l i*********n? As well as supporting families, traditional American values, and national sovereignty?
If the facts actually point to the left being f*****t, as well as r****t, why can't you see these facts?
F*****m is a left political ideology after all
WEBCO wrote:
In September of 2023 Biden, in a clearly authoritarian move, usurped the constitutional authority of the house by relieving $10,000 in student loan debt. This illegal and unconstitutional EO is supported by all democrats. $5 billion for a wall to protect the sovereignty of our country, which is a federal "requirement", as opposed to 10 to 20 times that amount to buy v**es. Which is more f*****t?
Biden implemented a completely f*****t/authoritarian v*****e mandate, which was not only illegal and unconstitutional but also unethical and immoral.
The Muslim ban was for countries that sponsor terrorism only. Nothing f*****t about that
Victor Orban is a democratically elected leader of a foreign country who is hugely popular, much more so than Biden could ever dream of.
Why do you not want an American leader, or any American, to fight against globalism, socialism, and i*****l i*********n? As well as supporting families, traditional American values, and national sovereignty?
If the facts actually point to the left being f*****t, as well as r****t, why can't you see these facts?
F*****m is a left political ideology after all
In September of 2023 Biden, in a clearly authorita... (
show quote)
From Shayn McCallum....PhD in Politics, Monash University
The N**is were described as far right in their own time because that is exactly what they were. The name “National Socialist” needs to be understood in a specific context and too many people trying to revise history are seeing “left” and “right” in ways that do not apply and that ignore history and the specific circumstances that produced both N**ism and f*****m.
Sociologically, the conditions that created f*****m and N**ism in the 1920s and 1930s were very similar to what produced Trumpism in the USA. The demographics are similar, the catch-all populist ideology is similar, the lack of any real substance or principle is similar.
The first mistake people make is trying to see N**ism as a coherent ideology- it never was. The N**is largely made it up as they went along and it was a catch-all for violent, angry discontent and people who wanted to “make the Left bleed”. The enemy, from the very beginning, was always the Left- the Socialists and c*******ts.
The German Right had a long history of coopting the term “socialism” to demobilize the Left. It started with Bismarck, a pillar of the German conservative Right.
Which brings me to the next great error of those who try to see the N**is as “left wing”. European conservatism at that time had little in common with what people of the Anglo-Saxon “liberal conservative” tradition think of as conservative. Central European conservatism was feudal-nostalgic, highly collectivist, statist and militarist. The signature of the Right was a disdain for democracy, a strong belief in hierarchy and a devout love of order. Capitalism was not a priority although the preservation of private property certainly was.
The N**is were 100% in line with the classical German Right in many ways, except that, rather than the Prussian military aristocracy favored by Bismarck, N**ism expressed primarily the anger and sentiments of the petitte-bourgeoisie, the fearful middle class that h**ed both the socialists, with their demands to end private property, and the large capitalists whose power threatened to drive small businesses out of the market. That sense of threatened privilege and lost glory and the desire to make some scapegoat pay is the entirely of the mass appeal of f*****m and N**ism.
Now, the N**is and f*****ts were movements consciously driven by a desire for power. They were populist in appeal but elitist and oligarchical in organization and they were happy to say or do anything to get into power.
The adoption of the “Socialist” label by the N**is was inspired by two things. When the party was first founded, it did have a left wing that genuinely advocated a type of anti-Marxist socialism but Hitler and those around him murdered all of these in the Night of the Long Knives. They retained the “socialist” label for branding purposes.
This was a good strategy because the Left in Germany was huge and, in fact, had the c*******ts and socialists not h**ed each other so much, they could have taken the government themselves. Almost the entire working class was one or other shade of red and the N**is knew that to change red into brown, they needed to be able to use some socialist sounding rhetoric. Bismarck had done the exact same thing.
Furthermore, by redefining clearly (especially for their business audience) what they meant by “socialism” (i. e. Making it clear that they were in favor of private property) they were able to make the capitalist class understand that they were not really socialists at all, attracting considerable support from industrialists.
The entire pitch of the N**is to the capitalists and conservatives was that they were the only effective antidote to the Left.
The exact same strategy was at work in Italian f*****m.
So, long story short, the attempt to claim the N**is and F*****ts were left wing is based on an extremely shallow, highly ignorant bit of historical revisionism that deliberately ignores all but the most superficial of details.
slatten49 wrote:
Republicans’ hypocritical reaction to President Biden’s use of the F-word.
by WILLIAM SALETAN
Republicans are furious over President Biden’s recent remarks linking Donald Trump and his supporters to “semi-f*****m.” For days, they’ve been all over TV and social media, denouncing Biden’s use of the F-word. But Biden was right. Many of the ideas and tactics deployed by Trump and his apologists, including those who decry Biden’s comparison, fit the dictionary definition of f*****m.
Consider Rep. Jim Jordan, who will chair the House Judiciary Committee if Republicans retake the House this fall. Jordan says Biden is dividing America by “calling Republicans ‘semi-f*****ts.’” But three years ago, when Trump committed an openly authoritarian act, Jordan endorsed it.
In January 2019, the House of Representatives, which had a new Democratic majority, refused to fund a border wall demanded by Trump. So the president declared a national emergency to build the wall, seizing from Congress its constitutional authority over appropriations. No president had ever claimed such emergency powers to override the will of Congress. But Jordan stood with Trump. “We tried for 35 days . . . to get the Democrats to do what everyone knows needs to happen,” said Jordan. “I support the national emergency declaration 100 percent.”
You could argue that confiscating money for the wall was only semi-authoritarian. To be fully authoritarian, you might say, a leader would have to use illegal means not just to exercise power, but to seize power or stay in power. But Trump and his henchmen meet that standard, too.
Take the case of Rep. Andy Biggs, who led the conservative House Freedom Caucus during Trump’s presidency. Biggs now accuses Biden of “demonizing people and making them villains” by invoking the F-word. But after the 2020 e******n, Biggs, Jordan, and several other congressional Republicans directly participated in Trump’s attempted c**p.
In December 2020—more than a month after Biden had won the presidency, and several days after the E*******l College had certified the results—Biggs made an incendiary video for a “Stop the Steal” rally in Arizona. He urged Trump’s supporters to “keep fighting” so Trump could stay in power. Biggs also participated in a subsequent White House meeting in which Trump unsuccessfully pressured Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the e******n.
Astickler might say that an attempt to overturn an e******n isn’t really f*****t unless it involves the use of state power or mob violence. But Trump and his allies tried to use both.
Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s right-hand man in several abuses of power, says it’s Biden, not Trump, who runs America like “a damned dictatorship.” But in December 2020, after the E*******l College had certified Biden’s e******n, Giuliani—at Trump’s direction—phoned the acting deputy secretary at the Department of Homeland Security to ask whether DHS could seize v****g machines from states. Then, at Trump’s J****** 6th rally on the Ellipse, Giuliani exhorted the crowd: “Let’s have trial by combat!”
Giuliani didn’t just help to incite the attack on the Capitol. To this day, he continues to whitewash it and excuse the perpetrators. On his radio show last weekend, Giuliani said of Rep. Adam Schiff: “He’s a damned liar when he starts calling J****** 6th an i**********n, a revolt.” Giuliani went on: “I’m not saying the people that did wrong and pushed around cops and did what they did shouldn’t be punished appropriately. I am saying that by putting them in jail for 14 months and leaving them there, you got a f*****t state going on.”
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, another apologist for the J****** 6th perpetrators, says Biden’s talk of f*****m is ridiculous because “Democrats are the f*****ts.” But in 2018 and 2019, Greene repeatedly endorsed calls for political violence. She “liked” Facebook posts saying that FBI agents “need to be hung for treason” and suggesting a “bullet to the head” of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Greene didn’t just hit the “like” button. When a commenter asked how long it would be before “we get to hang” Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, Greene replied: “Stage is being set. Players are being put in place.” In videos, she said Pelosi was “guilty of treason,” a “crime punishable by death.” And this year, Greene spoke at an openly f*****t—that is, pro-Hitler—political action conference.
The dictionary definition of f*****m doesn’t just talk about autocracy. It also includes ethnic nationalism. But by this standard, too, Trump and many of his propagandists are semi-f*****t. Kayleigh McEnany, who served as Trump’s White House press secretary, calls Biden’s reference to f*****m a baseless “message of hatred.” But in the summer of 2016, Trump, the de facto Republican p**********l nominee, declared a federal judge unfit to preside over a fraud case against Trump University because “he’s a Mexican.” And McEnany defended this attack.
Trump’s campaign against the judge, Gonzalo Curiel—who was born in America—was an overt play to target an ethnic minority, undermine faith in the judiciary, and shield Trump from legal accountability. But McEnany, who was then a CNN commentator, stood by the candidate. She said Trump’s rationale—that Curiel’s “Mexican heritage” presented “an inherent conflict of interest” because Trump was “very strong on the border”—was just an extrapolation from the common observation that Latinos opposed Trump’s hardline views on immigration.
You could argue that an out-and-out f*****t would use nationalist bigotry to persecute a whole minority group, not just a single judge. That’s what Trump did in 2015, when he called for a “complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” McEnany, in her role as a commentator, excused this proposal, too. It was only a “temporary ban on non-U.S. citizen Muslims,” she reasoned.
McEnany had no direct role in Trump’s campaign against Muslims. But Stephen Miller, the chief architect of the Trump administration’s anti-immigration policies, was centrally involved in the Muslim ban. In 2015, as a liaison from Sen. Jeff Sessions, Miller started working with Trump’s campaign on immigration policy. On Dec. 3, 2015, he wrote an email scorning “Muslim Resettlement” in the United States. Four days later, on Dec. 7, Trump proposed his ban on Muslim immigration. A month after that, the campaign officially brought Miller on board.
The timing of those events might be coincidental. But this we know: When Trump became president, Miller helped to craft his executive order suspending travel to the United States from several majority-Muslim countries. And when a judge blocked the travel ban, Miller asserted that Trump’s authority was virtually imperial. “We have a judiciary that has taken far too much power,” said Miller. “Our opponents, the media, and the whole world will soon see, as we begin to take further actions, that the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned.”
Miller, without apparent irony, now says it’s preposterous that Democrats are “accusing their opponents of being f*****t.”
Trump’s cult includes many other components common to previous f*****t movements—paranoia, fantastic lies, anti-intellectualism, a mythologized national past, selective appeals to law and order, and propaganda about enemies of the state. When Sen. Lindsey Graham went on TV Sunday to warn that “there literally will be r**ts in the street” if Trump is prosecuted for breaking national security laws by hiding classified documents at Mar-a-Lago—Graham repeated the line twice, to make it clear that he was serious—that’s another page from the f*****t playbook: invocation of mob violence to protect the movement’s leader.
But the clearest illustration of the MAGA elite’s descent into f*****m might be its embrace of a like-minded leader from another country: Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.
As Cathy Young, Charles Sykes, David Baer, and other writers have explained in The Bulwark, Orbán is an increasingly authoritarian ethnonationalist. In a speech on July 23, he warned, “There is a world in which European peoples are mixed together with those arriving from outside Europe.” Orbán called this a “mixed-race world” and concluded, “We are willing to mix with one another, but we do not want to become peoples of mixed-race.”
Orbán’s speech was so grotesque that one of his own advisers resigned, calling the speech “a purely N**i diatribe worthy of Joseph Goebbels.” But a week later, Orbán was welcomed as the keynote speaker at a Dallas meeting of the Conservative Political Action Conference, which reveres Trump and is one of his favorite venues. Two days after that, Trump spoke to the same gathering. The two aspiring autocrats were warmly applauded.
This past Monday, CPAC chairman Matt Schlapp stoutly defended Orbán. “We support leaders who reject globalism, socialism, illegal migration and care about defending families, national sovereignty, and traditional values,” Schlapp tweeted.
Then, on Wednesday, Schlapp posted a video of himself rebuking Biden for using the F-word. “It’s the left that are the f*****ts,” he charged.
Say what you will about the American semi-f*****ts. They certainly have a sense of humor.
Republicans’ hypocritical reaction to President Bi... (
show quote)
Both parties are working against us. Getting drawn into the labelling game is ultimately pointless
slatten49 wrote:
From Shayn McCallum....PhD in Politics, Monash University
The N**is were described as far right in their own time because that is exactly what they were. The name “National Socialist” needs to be understood in a specific context and too many people trying to revise history are seeing “left” and “right” in ways that do not apply and that ignore history and the specific circumstances that produced both N**ism and f*****m.
Sociologically, the conditions that created f*****m and N**ism in the 1920s and 1930s were very similar to what produced Trumpism in the USA. The demographics are similar, the catch-all populist ideology is similar, the lack of any real substance or principle is similar.
The first mistake people make is trying to see N**ism as a coherent ideology- it never was. The N**is largely made it up as they went along and it was a catch-all for violent, angry discontent and people who wanted to “make the Left bleed”. The enemy, from the very beginning, was always the Left- the Socialists and c*******ts.
The German Right had a long history of coopting the term “socialism” to demobilize the Left. It started with Bismarck, a pillar of the German conservative Right.
Which brings me to the next great error of those who try to see the N**is as “left wing”. European conservatism at that time had little in common with what people of the Anglo-Saxon “liberal conservative” tradition think of as conservative. Central European conservatism was feudal-nostalgic, highly collectivist, statist and militarist. The signature of the Right was a disdain for democracy, a strong belief in hierarchy and a devout love of order. Capitalism was not a priority although the preservation of private property certainly was.
The N**is were 100% in line with the classical German Right in many ways, except that, rather than the Prussian military aristocracy favored by Bismarck, N**ism expressed primarily the anger and sentiments of the petitte-bourgeoisie, the fearful middle class that h**ed both the socialists, with their demands to end private property, and the large capitalists whose power threatened to drive small businesses out of the market. That sense of threatened privilege and lost glory and the desire to make some scapegoat pay is the entirely of the mass appeal of f*****m and N**ism.
Now, the N**is and f*****ts were movements consciously driven by a desire for power. They were populist in appeal but elitist and oligarchical in organization and they were happy to say or do anything to get into power.
The adoption of the “Socialist” label by the N**is was inspired by two things. When the party was first founded, it did have a left wing that genuinely advocated a type of anti-Marxist socialism but Hitler and those around him murdered all of these in the Night of the Long Knives. They retained the “socialist” label for branding purposes.
This was a good strategy because the Left in Germany was huge and, in fact, had the c*******ts and socialists not h**ed each other so much, they could have taken the government themselves. Almost the entire working class was one or other shade of red and the N**is knew that to change red into brown, they needed to be able to use some socialist sounding rhetoric. Bismarck had done the exact same thing.
Furthermore, by redefining clearly (especially for their business audience) what they meant by “socialism” (i. e. Making it clear that they were in favor of private property) they were able to make the capitalist class understand that they were not really socialists at all, attracting considerable support from industrialists.
The entire pitch of the N**is to the capitalists and conservatives was that they were the only effective antidote to the Left.
The exact same strategy was at work in Italian f*****m.
So, long story short, the attempt to claim the N**is and F*****ts were left wing is based on an extremely shallow, highly ignorant bit of historical revisionism that deliberately ignores all but the most superficial of details.
From Shayn McCallum....PhD in Politics, Monash Uni... (
show quote)
"The 20th century will be one of socialism and the left" Benito Mussolini
Italy had the highest amount of state owned businesses in the 1930s, even higher than Russia
So tell me again how f*****m is an ideology of the right
slatten49 wrote:
Republicans’ hypocritical reaction to President Biden’s use of the F-word.
by WILLIAM SALETAN
Republicans are furious over President Biden’s recent remarks linking Donald Trump and his supporters to “semi-f*****m.” For days, they’ve been all over TV and social media, denouncing Biden’s use of the F-word. But Biden was right. Many of the ideas and tactics deployed by Trump and his apologists, including those who decry Biden’s comparison, fit the dictionary definition of f*****m.
Consider Rep. Jim Jordan, who will chair the House Judiciary Committee if Republicans retake the House this fall. Jordan says Biden is dividing America by “calling Republicans ‘semi-f*****ts.’” But three years ago, when Trump committed an openly authoritarian act, Jordan endorsed it.
In January 2019, the House of Representatives, which had a new Democratic majority, refused to fund a border wall demanded by Trump. So the president declared a national emergency to build the wall, seizing from Congress its constitutional authority over appropriations. No president had ever claimed such emergency powers to override the will of Congress. But Jordan stood with Trump. “We tried for 35 days . . . to get the Democrats to do what everyone knows needs to happen,” said Jordan. “I support the national emergency declaration 100 percent.”
You could argue that confiscating money for the wall was only semi-authoritarian. To be fully authoritarian, you might say, a leader would have to use illegal means not just to exercise power, but to seize power or stay in power. But Trump and his henchmen meet that standard, too.
Take the case of Rep. Andy Biggs, who led the conservative House Freedom Caucus during Trump’s presidency. Biggs now accuses Biden of “demonizing people and making them villains” by invoking the F-word. But after the 2020 e******n, Biggs, Jordan, and several other congressional Republicans directly participated in Trump’s attempted c**p.
In December 2020—more than a month after Biden had won the presidency, and several days after the E*******l College had certified the results—Biggs made an incendiary video for a “Stop the Steal” rally in Arizona. He urged Trump’s supporters to “keep fighting” so Trump could stay in power. Biggs also participated in a subsequent White House meeting in which Trump unsuccessfully pressured Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the e******n.
Astickler might say that an attempt to overturn an e******n isn’t really f*****t unless it involves the use of state power or mob violence. But Trump and his allies tried to use both.
Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s right-hand man in several abuses of power, says it’s Biden, not Trump, who runs America like “a damned dictatorship.” But in December 2020, after the E*******l College had certified Biden’s e******n, Giuliani—at Trump’s direction—phoned the acting deputy secretary at the Department of Homeland Security to ask whether DHS could seize v****g machines from states. Then, at Trump’s J****** 6th rally on the Ellipse, Giuliani exhorted the crowd: “Let’s have trial by combat!”
Giuliani didn’t just help to incite the attack on the Capitol. To this day, he continues to whitewash it and excuse the perpetrators. On his radio show last weekend, Giuliani said of Rep. Adam Schiff: “He’s a damned liar when he starts calling J****** 6th an i**********n, a revolt.” Giuliani went on: “I’m not saying the people that did wrong and pushed around cops and did what they did shouldn’t be punished appropriately. I am saying that by putting them in jail for 14 months and leaving them there, you got a f*****t state going on.”
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, another apologist for the J****** 6th perpetrators, says Biden’s talk of f*****m is ridiculous because “Democrats are the f*****ts.” But in 2018 and 2019, Greene repeatedly endorsed calls for political violence. She “liked” Facebook posts saying that FBI agents “need to be hung for treason” and suggesting a “bullet to the head” of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Greene didn’t just hit the “like” button. When a commenter asked how long it would be before “we get to hang” Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, Greene replied: “Stage is being set. Players are being put in place.” In videos, she said Pelosi was “guilty of treason,” a “crime punishable by death.” And this year, Greene spoke at an openly f*****t—that is, pro-Hitler—political action conference.
The dictionary definition of f*****m doesn’t just talk about autocracy. It also includes ethnic nationalism. But by this standard, too, Trump and many of his propagandists are semi-f*****t. Kayleigh McEnany, who served as Trump’s White House press secretary, calls Biden’s reference to f*****m a baseless “message of hatred.” But in the summer of 2016, Trump, the de facto Republican p**********l nominee, declared a federal judge unfit to preside over a fraud case against Trump University because “he’s a Mexican.” And McEnany defended this attack.
Trump’s campaign against the judge, Gonzalo Curiel—who was born in America—was an overt play to target an ethnic minority, undermine faith in the judiciary, and shield Trump from legal accountability. But McEnany, who was then a CNN commentator, stood by the candidate. She said Trump’s rationale—that Curiel’s “Mexican heritage” presented “an inherent conflict of interest” because Trump was “very strong on the border”—was just an extrapolation from the common observation that Latinos opposed Trump’s hardline views on immigration.
You could argue that an out-and-out f*****t would use nationalist bigotry to persecute a whole minority group, not just a single judge. That’s what Trump did in 2015, when he called for a “complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” McEnany, in her role as a commentator, excused this proposal, too. It was only a “temporary ban on non-U.S. citizen Muslims,” she reasoned.
McEnany had no direct role in Trump’s campaign against Muslims. But Stephen Miller, the chief architect of the Trump administration’s anti-immigration policies, was centrally involved in the Muslim ban. In 2015, as a liaison from Sen. Jeff Sessions, Miller started working with Trump’s campaign on immigration policy. On Dec. 3, 2015, he wrote an email scorning “Muslim Resettlement” in the United States. Four days later, on Dec. 7, Trump proposed his ban on Muslim immigration. A month after that, the campaign officially brought Miller on board.
The timing of those events might be coincidental. But this we know: When Trump became president, Miller helped to craft his executive order suspending travel to the United States from several majority-Muslim countries. And when a judge blocked the travel ban, Miller asserted that Trump’s authority was virtually imperial. “We have a judiciary that has taken far too much power,” said Miller. “Our opponents, the media, and the whole world will soon see, as we begin to take further actions, that the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned.”
Miller, without apparent irony, now says it’s preposterous that Democrats are “accusing their opponents of being f*****t.”
Trump’s cult includes many other components common to previous f*****t movements—paranoia, fantastic lies, anti-intellectualism, a mythologized national past, selective appeals to law and order, and propaganda about enemies of the state. When Sen. Lindsey Graham went on TV Sunday to warn that “there literally will be r**ts in the street” if Trump is prosecuted for breaking national security laws by hiding classified documents at Mar-a-Lago—Graham repeated the line twice, to make it clear that he was serious—that’s another page from the f*****t playbook: invocation of mob violence to protect the movement’s leader.
But the clearest illustration of the MAGA elite’s descent into f*****m might be its embrace of a like-minded leader from another country: Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.
As Cathy Young, Charles Sykes, David Baer, and other writers have explained in The Bulwark, Orbán is an increasingly authoritarian ethnonationalist. In a speech on July 23, he warned, “There is a world in which European peoples are mixed together with those arriving from outside Europe.” Orbán called this a “mixed-race world” and concluded, “We are willing to mix with one another, but we do not want to become peoples of mixed-race.”
Orbán’s speech was so grotesque that one of his own advisers resigned, calling the speech “a purely N**i diatribe worthy of Joseph Goebbels.” But a week later, Orbán was welcomed as the keynote speaker at a Dallas meeting of the Conservative Political Action Conference, which reveres Trump and is one of his favorite venues. Two days after that, Trump spoke to the same gathering. The two aspiring autocrats were warmly applauded.
This past Monday, CPAC chairman Matt Schlapp stoutly defended Orbán. “We support leaders who reject globalism, socialism, illegal migration and care about defending families, national sovereignty, and traditional values,” Schlapp tweeted.
Then, on Wednesday, Schlapp posted a video of himself rebuking Biden for using the F-word. “It’s the left that are the f*****ts,” he charged.
Say what you will about the American semi-f*****ts. They certainly have a sense of humor.
Republicans’ hypocritical reaction to President Bi... (
show quote)
Even this shovel isn't big enough to move that much bullshit.
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