Trump, the 2016 Republican National Convention, Rage and Civility
A few years ago I made an astonishing and fortuitous discovery: the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio would be overlapping with the 2016 Gathering of the Juggalos, which was being held in nearby Thornville. That meant that I could, over the course of a single magical week, cover both what promised to be the craziest, most vulgar, and just plain insane major party Presidential convention ever (crazier even than the 1972 Democratic Convention, which required speakers to do a massive bong rip while onstage delivering speeches to signal solidarity with all the furry freaks and stoners in the audience) and Insane Clown Posse’s annual festival of arts and culture.
I wrote about the experience in 7 Days in Ohio. My overwhelming memory of the 2016 Republican National convention was rage. The sad soiree was defined by an incoherent rage towards “Them.” In Trump’s world “They” are everyone who is not a white, straight, Christian, free enterprise-worshipping arch-patriot with an eagle or American flag in their social media avatars.
Trump is like an air traffic controller of hatred. During his campaign, and afterwards, Trump gave a populace overflowing with anger and also racism, homophobia, transphobia and fear a bottomless list of people to direct their rage towards.
Trump got his followers to hate people at the very bottom of the socioeconomic ladder, targeting illegal immigrants fleeing despotic regimes and seeking a better life in the United States. He targeted black activists taking bold collective action to try to end the plague of police killing unarmed black men. He targeted Muslim-Americans whose faith he has relentlessly caricatured, distorted and demonized. He targeted the trans community.
Trump made his overwhelmingly white, straight Christian supporters feel like every win for the LGTBQ community, or African-Americans, or Hispanics, or Muslims was a huge loss for “real” Americans that must be avenged by a big white Christian savior who promised to turn the clock back culturally to a time when the white Christian man was King and everybody knew their place, which was beneath these Gods among men.
But Trump also stoked hatred and rage towards people at the top of the socioeconomic chain, like the “globalist bankers” who have long been a none too subtle euphemism for “Jews”, (the kind that filled his cabinet), Hollywood celebrities, the shadowy figures of the Obama-loving, freedom-hating Deep State and most pointedly, Hillary Clinton.
Holy fuck did Trump succeed in the exceedingly easy task of whipping up a raging hurricane of ugly, explicitly misogynistic hatred against one of the most vilified women in American political history. The energy at the convention reflected that sexist, deeply personal rage. Everywhere you went, there were signs that Trump and his minions didn’t just want to win the election but rather destroy and humiliate Clinton.
It was there in the ubiquitous chants of “Lock her up!” It was there in the wacky novelty tee-shirts reading “Trump that Bitch” and illustrated with any number of horrifying tableaus involving violence against women as a big, hilarious joke because, c’mon, Hillary not human, right? She’s a murderer and a witch who deserves all of the unchecked fury directed towards her because she had the audacity to run against the least qualified President in the history of the universe.
As a butthurt snowflake, it freaked me out but I took comfort in the delusion that what I was watching was a bizarre sideshow preceding Trump’s humiliating defeat in the upcoming election that would double as a much-needed public rejection of Trump’s ideas and ideology as far too hateful and racist and right-wing to ever be feasible.
I took comfort in knowing that the convention would end in a few days, and the race in a few more months, and then we could look back at Trump’s campaign as a bizarre aberration too crazy and extreme to ever even come close to succeeding.
That, needless to say, didn’t happen. The horrible, aggressive, deeply racist and fiercely misogynistic vibe of those days in Cleveland have continued throughout Trump’s Presidency. They have, in many ways, defined his Presidency. Anger, nastiness, a pathetic, child-like need to divide the world into “Winners” and “Losers” have come to redefine the Presidency under Trump.
That’s not going to change because Trump doesn’t change. He does not evolve. He does not mature. He does not grow. He hasn’t grown into the office; he’s dragged the office down with him.
Consequently, I have a hard time seeing these calls for “civility” coming from both side as anything other than some disingenuous bullshit. Trump has been fighting dirty and throwing cheap, illegal punches the whole time and the answer of the decorum-obsessed left seems to be to not only fight clean but lay down on the canvas and play dead.
No fucking thanks. This is not the time to give up. It’s the time to fight. And if doing so makes a professional liar like Sarah Huckabee Sanders feel a fraction as uncomfortable as I did at the Republican national convention, then I am totally okay with that. These are not polite times. They call for tactics beyond what is polite, beyond what is civil, and beyond what is acceptable to the other side. They call for tactics that are effective, and playing Pollyanna to Trump’s hatred-spewing Caligula sure hasn’t worked so far.
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