Friday, November 24, 2017

Trump: Just Another Tinkerbell Republican

If there's a literary genre more embarrassing than Trump fan fic, I hope to god I never live to read any of it. It's embarrassing to me as an English speaker, as an American, and as a member of the same species as the people who write that drivel. Seriously: read some Trump fan fic and then watch Independence Day, and tell me you aren't rooting for the aliens.

Yesterday brought us a particularly ripe example in the form of a Washington Times piece called Trump proves his warrior spirit by defending Moore. The piece itself is every bit as embarrassing as the title:
At some point, every warrior eventually runs out of arrows. His armor wears thin yet grows heavier still. He must lay down his weary helmeted head for rest.

Even Coriolanus was forced to retreat — at the behest of his mother.

Not so Donald Trump.

Not a weary drop of blood pumps through the man’s veins. He wears his thick armor light as skin. His bottomless quiver is never empty.
The most striking thing about this, besides the sheer awfulness of the writing, is the Onion-esque mismatch between rhetoric and subject. I mean, this slobbering paean to imaginary epic heroism is about a guy notable for his cowardice, whose epic battle is defending a guy who sexually assaulted a minor.

Except, part of his epic heroism is equivocating about it:
Note how Mr. Trump did not endorse Judge Moore. He simply refused to endorse Democrat Doug Jones.
Yeah, Trump's weasely attempt at plausible deniability is totally Sparta, man.

But that's how Republicans roll. We saw this kind of thing before, with Bush. This is a rule: when a Republican president is at his most hapless and incompetent and indefensible, that's when the wingnut prose about him is most ludicrously adulatory.

The Republican solution is always to clap louder.

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