Leave Trump-trashing to real pros
President Trump’s critics in the Democratic Party aren’t exactly what you’d call a witty bunch. They’re hardly celebrated for their clever jests and jibes, for their pithy epigrams, aphorisms and bon mots.
Indeed, the best that the Democratic Party’s Trumptrashers can do is parrot pedestrian, party-hack talking points.
“Trump’s a homophobe. Trump’s an Islamophobe. Trump’s a xenophobe. Trump’s a misogynist, a racist, an anthropophagist.”
Well, okay, maybe not that last one. Nobody’s accused Trump of cannibalism. (Yet.)
But despite the absence of rapier repartee in their own ranks, party stalwarts readily pronounce Trump as dumb as a fence post — a condition possibly aggravated by the onset of dementia, they’re now saying.
It’s party liturgy to declare that Trump wants to snatch away Grandma’s Medicare, give tax breaks to rich people like himself, melt the Arctic icecaps and drown the polar bears, deny women birth control, bring back slavery, set up Gulag-style camps for Muslims and — if he has time — start a nuclear cataclysm. Soon into this ever-lengthening list, the list becomes its own parody.
The hysterical critics — the bat-guano-crazy Maxine Waters and the dingbat Nancy Pelosi — yammer on, competing to hit new decibel heights of stridency. Trump, they say, is a oneman Deepwater Horizon oil spill. He’s a one-man unremediated Superfund Site, a oneman radioactive Chernobyl. To hear Elizabeth Warren do her reprise of “Enid Strict” — Dana Carvey’s memorable “Church Lady” on Saturday Night Live — Trump is old Beelzebub personified. If you really look, you can see the horns and barbed tail.
Luckily for Democrats, however, there are Trump critics who truly know something about cutting someone a new orifice. Know how to do it with panache. Know how to craft and deliver an insult as cutting as an inmate’s shank. And — here’s the fascinating part — these master shiv-wielders are all from the conservative end of the political spectrum.
That’s right, many of these adept knife fighters are linked to The National Review, the influential journal founded by William F. Buckley Jr. He was a master intellect who could slice and dice liberal hooey like a Japanese chef working over the grill with a razor-sharp Santoku knife set.
This knife set, and the skill to use it, continues to be honed by Buckley’s successors at The National Review and other places such as The American Spectator and Commentary magazine. Democrats ought to take heed.
Pelosi, Warren, Waters — and Chuck Schumer, too, he a male version of the public scold who brings to mind a skein of honking geese passing overhead — should outsource their antiTrump tirades to the far more clever and literate conservative wordsmiths. After all, remember, the conservatives were in on the ground floor of Trumpbashing well before the liberals even got their vocal cords tuned up. The conservative polemicists took note of the Trump scourge early on, way before Democrats stumbled upon Trump’s DNA Schiklgruber link and closet Russophilia.
In the GOP primary, you’ll recall, the National Review let loose with an anti-Trump cover piece that hit the political scene with the thump of a Howitzer bombardment. “Against Trump,” the cover blared. Twenty-two conservatives writers — 22! — were conscripted as an artillery crew to pulverize the bright orange Day Glo target. The editors declared Trump “a menace to American conservatism who would take the work of generations and trample it underfoot on behalf of a populism as heedless and crude as The Donald himself.”
Let’s see you top that, Chuck, Nancy, Maxine. Only, perhaps, high-brow conservative George Will (Trinity, Oxford, Princeton) could come close to doing so.
No one, he harrumphed, “can have a sustained transaction with Trump without becoming too soiled for subsequent scrubbing.”
The danger of Trump, he continued, is not that he doesn’t know anything, or even that he doesn’t know he doesn’t know anything, but that he has not so much as the vaguest clue what it means “to know something.” Conservative worthy John Podhoretz wrote that Trump “can lie twice in the same sentence” and can “display a level of ignorance ten times the level that made Sarah Palin’s name into a punch line.”
An array of other conservative notables has eviscerated Trump. William Kristol, for example, classified the No. 1 hustler of the Trump brand a braying jackass. Trump, in turn, has felt behooved to reserve some of his most abusive invective for conservative detractors. For example, for Charles Krauthammer. Krauthammer finished Harvard Medical School despite a paralyzing accident, went on to have a distinguished career in psychiatry, then switched to journalism and proceeded to win a Puitzer Prize as a political commentator.
“An overrated clown!” snarled Trump, whose level of wit roughly parallels that of his Democratic Party hecklers.
More recently, the National Review’s Kevin Williamson did a dissection of Trump that surely made the frog specimen in Biology 101 feel like it got off easy. Trump’s politics, wrote Williamson, evokes “the politics of chimpanzee troupes, prison yards, kindergarten and other primitive environments.” Ouch.
To switch metaphors here, Williamson let fly with some alliterative rounds from his verbal 420-mm Langer Max, blasting Trump as the proximate cause of an “atavistic redneck revanchism.”
Ooo. Sounds even worse than “baskets of deplorables and irredeemables”!
Williamson also cannonaded the Trump-cap-wearing, “lock her up!” rally chanters. They are, he said, actually less bluecollar working folk than dysfunctional Caucasion versions of the black underclass. (Um, white trash?)
The manners of this white underclass are Trump’s manners, wrote Williamson — “vulgar, aggressive, boastful, selfish...”
Another verbal grenadier, also associated with the National Review, recently blasted Trump fans for taking up “the pitchfork” and forming themselves into a mob.
The Trump mob, said Jonah Goldberg, is bent on showing “the Deep State Swamp One Percenters and Globalists,” by golly, “who’s boss.”
Goldberg followed this up by pulling the pin on a second grenade and lobbing it at Trumpster Steve Bannon. Bannon’s a faux populist “multimillionaire former Goldman Sachs globalist” — whose current “racket,” added Goldberg, is pretending to be “Joan of Arc to the Trumpen proletariat.” While he was at it, Goldberg also lobbed one in the vicinity of the always apoplectic Trump defender, Sean Hannity. He taunted Hannity for marketing himself as a humble, working-stiff kind of guy when he’s really a Long Island-dwelling prince of the right-wing talk-show industrial complex. As Goldberg put it, Hannity’s a poseur who goes around “wearing his Budweiser on his sleeve.”
Some friendly advice to Democrats: Maybe you should leave the Trump-trashing to the real pros. Maybe this is no job for amateurs.