Trump and the Art of Insult

Wow you are the biggest snowflake give your vagina a wipe you're bleeding all over the interweb lol

 A fellow named Mike Kirchner, of Vancouver, BC, recently inscribed this witticism on the Facebook page of a good friend. She had posted that meme (you may have seen it) which gives side-by-side pictures of Clinton and Trump, with the caption “The saddest part of 2016 was seeing how many people believed the worst rumors about a woman while ignoring the worst facts about a man.” This led to a flurry of largely like-minded comments and some polite caveats. Then a couple of trolls showed up, my friend grew ever so slightly heated in her rejoinders, and little Mikey delivered his show-stopper.

The volatility of online discussions is an old story by now — but to this extreme? Vulgarity so absolute and uncalled for, delivered with such nasty feigned jocularity (that “lol” at the end really is the cherry on the sundae, rendering the rest somehow twice as creepy) calls for a slightly new explanation. And the new element in the equation these days, pretty obviously, is Trumpism.

Mikey, it seems, has been learning at the feet of the Master, via TV no doubt and perhaps Twitter. He may still lack a bit of his hero’s finesse, but he has clearly absorbed the essential lesson driven home by Trump in this disaster of an election: that insult beats civilized argument, every time. Confronted with inconvenient facts, insult your opponent. Confronted with more facts and an idea or two, repeat the insult, perhaps with a cute twist. It’s a simple technique that anyone can learn — that in fact nearly everyone does learn, by age five or so — and after its startling success in the primaries, then the general, seems to have inspired a frenzy of imitation.

Trump’s “thank you rallies” (with the menacing undertone that leads some of us to hear another word in place of “thank”), like all the rallies before, have promoted a joyous mass reversion to nearly infantile modes of imagination and feeling. Trump never quite said, “Stop thinking; follow me, and I will make you masters.” That was Mussolini, and (with variations) Hitler and Hirohito, in slightly different times. But the president-elect’s big idea is much the same, and his followers get it.

Trump may not really get you your old job back, probably won’t in fact. But he gives you an excuse to vent in the crudest terms possible, while all around you a horde of allies shrieks its approval, and damn, that can feel good. What comes next will take care of itself.

As part of this larger liberation from the hated curbs of rationality, the Movement (English teachers take note) has featured a joyous return to preadolescent modes of self-expression and argument. Hair-trigger irritability, reflexive combativeness, and a potty mouth are no longer childish vices to be overcome, but essential aptitudes for all who dream of going viral.

Of course, just switching from argument to insult doesn’t necessarily make your job all that easy. There is an art in all things, and to be a really accomplished insulter takes talent and hard work. You need a hunter’s eye for human vulnerability, a sexual predator’s keenly non-empathic awareness of other people’s sensitivities. You need to be as versed as a lawyer or court eunuch in the ways of hierarchy, knowing all the nasty codes people use to rate, rank, and demean one another. Add a safe-cracker’s cool and a bridge player’s strategic smarts, and you are maybe halfway to where Donald is. Face it, though: no one else will ever do it the way he does.

But even a lowly first-degree brown belt like Mikey knows what you do in an argument with a woman. You put her in her place, of course. Early or late (your choice entirely), you remind her who has a penis and who has a vagina, and that is the whole game in one move. Shut up, bitch, a man’s talking. See how easy that is?

Will such gamesmanship, such resort to codes and hierarchies one had thought moribund, result in real changes in behavior? The Republic waits breathlessly to find out. My money is on yes. Mikey and his pals are not yet roaming the streets throwing acid in the faces of women who displease them; but they are patrolling the internet in a way that suggests real potential in this line. Give them time. 

Ever since the 11/9 disaster, portions of the commentariat have been prattling about the Democratic party’s failure to “understand” Trump voters. They were not really racists, sexists, or xenophobes, we are told, just economically anxious people who wanted a change and felt that they were not being listened to. When we talked about things like racism and sexism and xenophobia, when we appealed to the facts all the time, we offended them and made them feel that we still weren’t listening. Instead of convincing them with our charts and figures and logical appeals, we made them feel dumb. This got them so angry that they went and elected a certifiable sociopath to the most important job in the world. That should teach us a lesson, all right, about being so smug.

To all this I cry BS, citing Mikey’s post as my Exhibit A. In my reckoning, Trump voters generally are not quite as stupid as they pretend. They voted for Agent Orange because he is a racist, a sexist, a thug, and all the rest, not in spite of those things. Beneath his idiotic promises to take everyone back to the 1950s they discerned the outlines of a dream that might actually be achievable: to take us back to the 1150s, so far as our basic values are concerned. They wanted someone who would license all their own worst instincts.

If we have elections in 2018 and 2020 (we still might), Democrats will face the question of how to talk to the Mikeys of the world. Should we listen more politely and at length, before trying to nudge them a step or two in the direction of civilized discourse? Should we try really, really hard to see things their way, sampling the euphoria that comes from blaming problems of every size and kind on the Other? Hug the flag and hate on a few Mexicans, just to be good sports?

For my money, hell no. You don’t bring a knife to a gun fight. If the other side has chosen ridicule, scapegoating, and the big lie as their weapons of choice, there is little choice for now but to reply in kind. When both sides are thoroughly sick of the destruction wrought by the infantilist approach to political conversation, then will be the time to start bringing back all those values that Trumpism has swept aside: values like courtesy, fairness, objectivity, circumspection, and on down the quaint and dreary list.

Meanwhile, Mikey’s post offers invaluable insight into Hillary’s key mistake in the campaign, the same mistake from beginning to end. She had a vagina. That meant she was wrong by definition, no matter what she did. Now we all get to see just what it means to prefer even the worst of men to even the best of women.