The irony of anti-Trump hysteria
Correct this if I’m wrong, but presumably by now Robert De Niro has been nabbed and dragged off to Trump’s gulag. Nowadays you simply cannot sound off the way De Niro did and get away with it.
“Fxxk Trump!” the multimillionaire movie star eloquently declared. The audience including the Vass-ah-educated multimillionairess Meryl Streep roared its approval, despite the prospect of mass arrest.
De Niro isn’t the only dissenter whose whereabouts and safety remain in grave doubt. There’s also Spike Lee, the moviemaker who rakes in big bucks doing TV commercials on the side, even as he laments Trump’s Mussolini-style leadership and Ku Klux Klan proclivities. Again, correct me if I’m wrong, but presumably Lee is now in a holding cell somewhere after his return from Cannes.
At that stylish foreign film shindig, Lee did what so many Americans now fear to do — speak out against Trump. Even more eloquent than De Niro, Lee denounced Trump as “that motherxxxxer.” Surely it’s all but a certainty that Lee is now being deprived of food, water and medical care and is being worked over ‘round the clock by regime interrogators. For this is how it has come to be in the terrifying reign of the Trump-era Herrenvolk, is it not?
What else but Trump tyranny could possibly explain the fawning, worshipful treatment Trump receives from a cowed media? What else could account for the cloying, obsequious Trump coverage by MSNBC, CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, New York Daily News, Huffington Post, Salon, Politico and other major outlets?
What else could explain the shameless shilling for Trump’s agenda — immigration and trade — at such high-falutin venues as PBS, NPR and the New Yorker if not abject fear of Trump’s iron-fisted rule?
Yet, despite the dangers, there’s defiant opposition. For example, in rush-hour traffic recently a Prius was spotted flaunting an antiTrump bumper sticker. It depicted Trump’s face as a bare, puckered-up rear end. Just to make the message clear, beneath the face was the word “Axxhole.” Presumably that Prius owner is now down in a rock quarry doing hard labor with De Niro. And, presumably, the sellers of such subversive merchandise have been paid a visit by shadowy officials in trench coats. You can’t just go around thumbing your nose at those in charge. Not anymore. Not in Trump’s America.
Have you happened to notice as well the terrified timidity that’s settled over our campuses? The sheeplike kids gathered on the campus quads bleating pro-Trump slogans reminiscent of Mao’s little red book-waving Cultural Revolution? And the browbeaten professors offering up a steady output of bootlicking pro-Trump propaganda?
Surely you’ve noticed, too, how Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, Bill Maher, Conan O’Brien and John Oliver are careful to portray Trump only in the most positive light. They understand the risk! Likewise bullied into silence or servility are Joe and Mika, Rachel, Wolf, Don, Joy, Chris and Chris.
Due to the Trump totalitarianism, you don’t hear a peep anymore from Congresswoman Maxine Waters. Or so much as a critical utterance from the Council on American Islamic Relations. Chuck Schumer, once famous for being drawn to TV cameras like a moth to bright light, now runs the other way, so determined is he not to offend Trump.
So extensive is the submissive fear that has spread across the land in the path of the Trump scourge that you’d never, ever get anything like 21 million hits if you Googled “Trump dictator” — would you? Correct me if I’m wrong, but hasn’t an official list of banned words has been promulgated. Isn’t this why you never, ever see Trump described as “narcissistic,” “egotistical,” “overbearing,” “blustery,” “loudmouthed,” “ignorant,” “despotic,” “tyrannical,” “cruel,” “psychotic,” “fascistic,” “Hitlerian,” “criminal,” “racist,” “xenophobic,” “homophobic”, or “misogynistic.” All banned. Yet millions of brave souls go on using the words anyway.
Indeed, Trump’s dictatorship seems to be the first ever to be accompanied by such noisy, widespread, exuberant, fun-loving dissent. Has there ever been a tyranny in which a porno film slut, a dispenser of cinematic fellatio, sues the tyrant, becomes a celebrity attraction with her own media retinue and goes on TV as a later-day Gloria Steinem?
The Trump dissenters demurely dub themselves “The Resistance.” They’re amazingly, incredibly, admirably, wonderfully courageous. Just ask ‘em, they’ll tell you.