In Defense of Human Scum

Here is the latest fireside chat from the President of the United States:

Allow me to interpret that statement, for those who may lack the linguistic sophistication of the most famous graduate of the Wharton School (of Making Money): People who had previously voted for the party Donald Trump has reduced to progressive populist rubble, but who refused to accept as their party’s leader a New York liberal demagogue with the political awareness of a second grade elementary school student and the moral awareness of a sewer rat, are human scum. 

“Human scum,” says the eloquent President of the United States in describing fellow Americans who chose not to vote for him in an election. This is the same eloquent President of the United States, of course, who has frequently described Kim Jong-Un as his talented and trustworthy friend.

The twelve-year-old girl doth protest too much, methinks. This outburst, extreme even by Trump standards, sounds like hot air seeping through a crack in the façade. That is, it sounds like the desperate lunge of a man who is increasingly feeling caught, trapped. It also sounds a great deal like inadvertent projection, almost a Freudian slip. If there is a whiff of scum wafting through this room, it isn’t coming from those who gave up on the Republican Party when the GOP embraced the poster boy for irrational fear and infantile hatred as its figurehead.

What interests me about this childish effusion from Donny the Wonder RINO, however, is not what Trump himself thinks about anything, since I already know he doesn’t think about anything, nor what his true believers think, since I know they think only what their master thinks (see above). No, the group whose reaction to this deplorable behavior from the man playing POTUS on television is most interesting to me is that clever (read “cynical”) faction within the “conservative media” who continue to play the “good Trump, bad Trump” game, trying to have their cake and eat it too by catering to the Trump mob as much as they can while simultaneously keeping one foot outside the door, in case it suddenly becomes professionally necessary to make a run for it. 

I have a hunch about what that group will do too, actually. They will follow their career-climbing instincts, which in this case will tell them that Trump has lowered the tone and expectations of leadership so far by now that most people will simply ignore this kind of brazen incivility. Hence, the wise stance, from a careerist point of view, would be for them to ignore it too, beyond perhaps a momentary tut-tut to provide them with an alibi later, when the wheel turns.

This, in sum, is exactly the difference between the majority of legitimate, principled “NeverTrumpers” and most other people in American political circles right now. The NT “human scum” are the only ones who, when the dust clears and St. Peter is staring us all in the face, will unequivocally be able to say, without excuses or evasion, that they did not put their personal comfort and social advancement ahead of their country and their principles.

I’m all in with the human scum on this one, though I am not an American. I am scum in spirit, if you will.


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