Trump gets bitten by his snake story
He explicitly equated snakes and immigrants
On the 100th day of Donald Trump’s presidency, what did this peculiar man talk to his nation about? Snakes.
He could have held forth on health care, taxation, trees in springtime, how Democrats and Republicans can get along, the instinct to bomb, driverless cars, how much to tip, whether argan oil is the new shea butter, anything he liked.
But no, he read song lyrics (he calls them poems) about a snake. Who likes snakes? Almost no one.
Snakes are meat ropes, living string. They are long, soft pencils, fleshy tubes that slide leglessly. They hide easily and move faster than you’d ever think. They spool, which is normal for thread but not for an animal.
When animals hunt you in dreams, their nastiest ability is transcending habitats. It is not fair that snakes can slither, and swim, and rise up to strike, and make their way up trees where they coil, lie in wait and drop on your head.
So why did Trump publicly read “The Snake?”
I had not known that he occasionally read this thing to audiences during his 2016 campaign rallies. This is the kind of careless normalizing of Trump that happens when there are too many outrages to fit in a traditional news story, and when the reading takes three minutes and 11 seconds, too long for traditional TV or video.
The Snake was missed because of the assumption that American voters have no nose for subtlety in a crass and violent campaign. This may or may not be true. Either way, the song would seem more campaignlike than presidential.
In an era when superlatives pepper the air, I say honestly that this was the ugliest thing I have ever seen Trump do.
Before, he was likely referring to terrorists. This time he explicitly equated snakes and immigrants, as if they were trails of vermin. He said, “Let’s dedicate this to Gen. Kelly, the border patrol, and the ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents for doing such an incredible job. This was written by Al Wilson, a long time ago.” (Not true. It was written by Oscar Brown Jr., in 1963, and released by Wilson in 1968, not that long ago in the version of history that Trump wets his feet in.)
He told the story, based on an Aesop’s fable, of a tender-hearted woman who found a poor-half frozen snake down by the lake. “Take me in, oh tender woman,” says the snake. Charmed by its “pretty coloured skin,” she wraps it in a comforter, lays it by the fireside and feeds it honey and milk.
“She stroked his pretty skin again and kissed him and held him tight. But instead of saying thank you, that snake gave her a vicious bite.”
Oh please. What else does a snake do in a song but cause trouble? The words rhyme — snake, sake, lake — as I take it all Trump poems do and then he added an extra “vicious.”
When you watch Trump reading “The Snake,” watch the Harrisburg, Pa., crowd selected to surround him, 17 fully shown faces including those of four women and three small children.
One woman has a huge fixed smile on her face for the entire segment, and that’s not easy to do. I’ve tried it. Ah, the placatory smile of women. The children are restless. A pale man in glasses has heard it before. He stolidly sits and with a tiny smile recites the words along with Trump. There’s always one.
The late Oscar Brown Jr. sang a ’60s version of the song online that sounds retroactively sinister in 2017. As Trump, mid-recital, refers to “the border,” I think of Springsteen in the song “Matamoros Banks” about the corpses of Mexican migrants floating down the Rio Grande. “The turtles eat the skin from your eyes, so they lay open to the stars.”
Brown Jr.’s daughter, Africa Brown, told the CBC that her father would have objected to Trump twisting his words. “I know he would have said, ‘It’s about him.’”
And, indeed, it is. Trump is the snake. He was portrayed as within the norm, if not normal. Reporters duly filed traditional news stories, ignoring what psychiatrists are now calling a “duty to warn.” Trusting Americans carried Trump inside the White House and gave him every luxury.
And he bit them, viciously. Careful with the snake analogies, President Trump, this one just bit you back.