Where’s Tom Lehrer when you really need him?
Not to deny Stephen Miller all the opprobrium he so richly deserves, Jonathan Chait comments on Donald Trump’s pet psychopath’s call to Armageddon on Sunday.
Chait observes:
Republicans have never stopped complaining that Hillary Clinton once described a portion of Trump’s base as “a basket of deplorables.” Yet over the weekend the president’s most powerful adviser depicted half the country as worthless, irredeemably wicked, and fated for destruction.
“We are the storm,” Miller shouted (leaving “troopers” off the end). “We” are the builders, the heirs to the Greeks and the Romans, the source of all things bright and beautiful, etc. You, dear Readers, are destined to be ground under his boot heel.
MAGA disciples who once raged at Clinton over her deplorables comment bristle today at comparisons to 1930s Germany. Just not enough to reconsider behaviors that evoke them.
Chait lampoons Trump 2.0 as less gleaming than Miller’s depiction of Trumpism bearing western culture on its shoulders:
I feel less confident than Miller does that future historians will laud Trump’s distinct additions of legalized bribery, casino-style decor, and Ultimate Fighting Championship matches on the White House lawn as cultural and philosophical advances. Yet Miller confidently conscripted the pillars of Western civilization into his domestic political war.
David French laments that MAGA in fact gets Christianity upside down and inside out. It has adopted Trump’s gnawing malice as God’s instrument and Miller as MAGA’s high priest of grievance. There is no sign of them coming back to Jesus.
Chait sees the irony:
Having nothing to share but bitterness is a strange insult for Stephen Miller, of all people, to hurl. But part of the Miller worldview is an almost proud insistence on holding his enemies to standards he refuses to abide by. The Trump camp has insisted that the fault for last year’s attempts on Trump’s life lies with anybody who has attacked him as dangerous or authoritarian. Yet Trump himself attacks his enemies in such terms routinely, and Miller seems to be attempting to exceed his boss’s Manichaean style by depicting their opponents as the literal embodiment of malevolence.
Watch Miller’s speech and Trump’s refutation of Christ’s admonition to “love your enemies” if you want to see malevolence in action. If Americans don’t wake up to it soon, the concentration camps coming online will begin to fill, and not just with foreign migrants.
George Herbert Walker Bush once delicately described such situations as being in “deep doo- doo.” And that’s putting it mildly. Tom Lehrer once put in song.
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