Trump shits on America. Why doesn’t the media care?
For many news orgs, Trump’s fascist coalition is uniquely legitimate.
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Last Saturday, millions of people took to the streets to defy President Donald Trump in the largest single-day political demonstration in the country’s history.
How did Trump respond? By taking a big (virtual) shit on America.
Saturday evening, Trump released an AI video of himself in a crown piloting a fighter jet named King Trump. The jet flies over cities, dumping feces on protesters below.
At this point, it’s not exactly a surprise that Trump sees himself as a king. Nor is it a surprise that he thinks it’s funny to shit on America. Still, the leader of the free world fantasizing about seizing supreme power to cover his constituents in turds seems newsworthy.
Six million people exercised their democratic right to protest, and Trump’s response was to giggle and express a wish to bury them in feces. At best that’s juvenile; at worst it’s an ugly attack on the democratic spirit. Either way, it’s bizarre, jarring, and extremely divisive. You’d think journalists would want to talk about it.
And yet, for the most part, the mainstream media has shied away from the story.
The Sunday shows hardly mentioned it. As Parker Malloy points out, when House Speaker Mike Johnson went on ABC’s This Week, no one asked him about the video. Print media mostly tried to avoid informing its readers of the scatological nature of the video. People and The Hill euphemistically said in their headlines that Trump was dumping a “brown liquid” on protestors. The New York Times and Axios wrote headlines which mentioned the “King Trump” jet, but avoided saying anything at all about the shit he dropped.
Perhaps the media is avoiding details in part because editors feel that talking about poop is distasteful. Even so, it’s clear that there’s a double standard at work.
When Democrats or liberals question the morals or perspicacity of Trump voters, the press treats it as a major scandal. When Trump expresses a desire to cover protestors with feces — essentially saying that anyone who disagrees with him is shit — the media is barely willing to talk about it. Why?
Part of the answer is both depressing and straightforward. Trump’s coalition is white, male, and rural — and for much of the media, white rural men are seen as quintessential Americans. But the opposition to Trump by contrast is multiracial and majority women — and the press does not see non-white men as true Americans worthy of respect.
In short, the media is not horrified when Trump dumps on his opponents not just because mainstream outlets are cowed, because also because they, too, see anti-MAGA protesters as dump-worthy.
Who are politicians allowed to deplore?
Trump’s sneering and shitty attack on the opposition inevitably recalls Hillary Clinton’s denigration of some Trump supporters in 2016. At a fundraiser that September, Clinton infamously said:
You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people, now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets offensive, hateful, mean-spirited rhetoric. Now some of those folks, they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.
Clinton went on to argue that some of Trump’s supporters were not irredeemable, but were instead “people who feel that government has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they are just desperate for change.” Those people, she argued, were reachable, and Democrats should “understand and empathize with” them.
You can of course disagree with Clinton’s argument and how she aired it. But in full context — or even out of context! — it’s impossible to argue that her words are as callous and dismissive as Trump’s grotesque AI slop video.
Yet the press has spent literally a decade rending their garments and gnashing their molars over Clinton’s comments. Influential New York Times columnist Ezra Klein made it central to his recent agonized discussion of why Democrats lose to Trump and why they need to center the needs and sensibilities of Trump voters rather than (for example) openly acknowledging the ugly racism of Charlie Kirk.
In contrast, Republicans have not disavowed or apologized for Trump’s video — not even for a minute, much less for 10 whole years. When a reporter finally got up the gumption to ask Mike Johnson about it during a press conference on Monday, the speaker actually praised the video and Trump’s social media acumen.
Trump is “probably the most effective person who’s ever used social media,” Johnson insisting, adding that the poop video is “using satire to make a point” — that point being, apparently, that Trump is a king dumping sewage on America.
This is a variation on a longstanding difference between Democrats and Republicans.
As political scientist Seth Masket observes, Democrats tend to view every loss as an existential crisis — which is why they whine and thrash about “deplorables” forever, world without end. But when Republicans lose they simply shrug and move on.
Trump lost in 2020 after engaging in violently divisive rhetoric, up to and including staging a coup attempt. But that didn’t lead Republicans to think they should stop attacking immigrants, or Black people, or Democrats, or democracy itself. If anything, as Trump’s second term shows, they’ve doubled down.
Everyone wants to be the white working class
Part of the issue here is that the electoral system is tilted toward Republicans. The Electoral College, House, and (especially) the Senate all give disproportionate power to majority white rural districts. That means that to win Democrats generally need to persuade voters who lean conservative to vote for them.
In addition to this pragmatic consideration, though, there’s also a strong element of ideology at work. Journalists, Republicans, and even Democrats themselves all tend to see whiteness as legitimizing, authentic, American. Following the 2016 election, Bernie Sanders lamented the party’s loss of “white working class” voters — neatly eliding the question of why white voters, in particular, seem so open to Trump’s racist message.
Echoing Sanders’s sentiment, though, the media for years has run Trump whisperer essays from diners in which reporters spoke to (supposedly) authentic voices of the white working class. On the other hand, after 2020, there was not a genre of interview in which reporters went to Black barber shops to ask why people voted against Trump.
What would it look like if the media routinely presented a multiracial America as an authentic America? As it happens, New York Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani has spent much of the last year answering that question. In a series of excellent, joyful, light-hearted ads, Mamdani has filmed himself bicycling across the city, chatting with halal vendors, celebrating trans activist Sylvia Rivera’s legacy, and generally interacting with and enjoying the company of New York’s diverse and wide-ranging electorate.
Mamdani offers a vision in which America’s authenticity and greatness derives from its diversity and multiplicity. He obviously loves the fact you can walk down the street in New York and find food and people and ideas and energy from literally the entire world right there in front of you.
Trump, however, believes in an America in which only those who kiss his ass are worthy, and everyone else deserves a pile of dung on their head. The media, and the country, has a choice. Which America do we want to be the real America? So far, too many journalists seem to believe the only authentic Americanness is the ugly, foul effluvia that comes out of Trump’s rear.
That’s it for today
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This is symbolic desecration…a leader fantasizing about defiling dissent, turning protest into a punchline. People exercised their democratic rights, and the response was not policy, not dialogue, but a grotesque wish to bury them in filth. Pure authoritarian theater.
I just wrote about Voice of My People, where a disabled citizen in Zürich enters Parliament through joy, inclusion, and democratic trust.
That is also the America worth amplifying.
The media’s euphemisms are part of the problem. When spectacle becomes normalized, clarity becomes resistance.
I stand with those who name the grotesque and ritualize the plural.
—Johan
Well done. The media has carefully ignored black men and women, white women, people of every shade and ethnicity in favor of less than a third of the population. Older people are automatically considered Trumpers despite the fact that many of us fought hard for Civil Rights, Women's Rights, Voting rights etc in our youth. In spite of what people think of us, many of us became more liberal, not less, as we aged. I am on substack because nothing I see on the so called nightly news feels true anymore. Thanks for putting it so well.