Trump’s Re-election Is Like Being Back at Grade School

except this time the bullies are running the show

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OK, I admit it. I was triggered. What a reckoning for my self-esteem! I thought I was the big, strong, manly type, stiff upper lip, a very major model of a modern homosexual, but ever since the election blew up in your faces, I’m feeling bullied.

I’ve been wearing my gonads as earrings and avoiding making my usual intense, unblinking eye contact with strangers on the subway.

You know, the kind of eye contact that says, “I want to spend the rest of my life with you, but let’s have dinner first so I can be sure,” or “I just escaped from a high-security prison for the criminally insane, and I think you’d make a great dinner! With a nice can of Laker!”

This residual old-guy flirtiness is an atavistic response, a holdover from the accepted practice of the sixties and seventies, when gay men perfected the art of sussing each other out on the street. This was not magic. We dressed so similarly and had so much the same type of moustache we referred to each other as “clones”.

It doesn’t work so well since I lost a few teeth due to old age and poverty. It’s a little “Mad Max”, without the cool animal skins, unless you count my own sagging pelt.

I’m like a shar-pei humping your leg: what I lose in subtlety, I gain in sheer importunate insistence. I’m the boiled undressed hot-dog of your worst nightmares, minus the bun. I want to say, don’t pity me, but if that’s all you have, I’m on board.

Really, about the election, I’m ashamed that I had hope. How freakin’ embarassing, after my Dionysian dance of Kamala joy. Oh, brother.

I feel like the drunken guest who wakes up after the party to find he threw a childless cat-lady, including her under-employed uterus, and her cat, through the picture window. Excuse me while I pour some brandy, with a chaser of pseudo-epinephrine, in my morning coffee.

I’m ashamed that I had hope.

Hope! Ugh! The last refuge of the self-defeated. Hope is not the message we needed or have ever needed. Hope disgusts me.

Hope is for the lazy, the exhausted and those who get their bliss from ignorance. Hope is for those who’ve accepted their lack of agency and look up at their oppressors with pleading eyes. “I don’t want to offend you, but could I possibly have my rights, please?”

It turns out that right-wing types really don’t like LGBTQIA+ people. Who knew! To think I spent four years manscaping with a straight razor, washing my bell-bottoms on hot so they’d be “European fit” (in other words, looking like liquid viscose has been sprayed onto my lower torso) and practising shallow breathing so I don’t pop all the buttons on my vintage stretch polyester top.

All in my favorite color—maroon!

No, they really don’t want people like me around, grooming their kids, and fuck ’em if the little terrors are running riot with dirty fingernails, unparted hair and socks with sandals. Let their parents do the grooming for a change! That’ll teach ’em!

It’s only I was hoping for a shot at Attorney General, but I lack the essential qualifications: I’m not into underage girls and I don’t have a Venmo account. My concept of grooming involves Brylcreem, and you gotta admit, Matt Gaetz definitely has that “timeless, slicked-back look”.

As the underage girls at his sex parties explained, in between hits on the crack pipe, “A little dab and Matt will do ya!”

I wonder if “trans people spoiled it for Kamala“? I mean, did you take it too far with the human rights thing? Granted, there’s some tighty-whiteys who’ve never strayed out of suburbia long enough to see an unhoused person or shift out of missionary position, so I guess it was a bit of a stretch for them to understand gender dysphoria.

(Quick question: Does the woman get to stand up between impregnations? You know, have a smoke, stretch her legs? Or does she just get permanently tied to the four-poster? I mean, there’s a mega-church to fill and she ain’t gettin’ any younger by the looks of her!)

Even imagining sex that’s not white, straight and binary, that’s not a grabbed pussy or a little golden shower in a Moscow hotel room, is more than normal, decent Republicans should have to contend with.

And that’s not even considering how trans kids have turned politics into a cesspool of corruption because of their super PACs and gerrymandering and voter suppression;

how trans kids have tanked the environment by pouring pollutants all over the place from their giant, like, oil tankers and gas-guzzling cars and billions and billions of plastic bottles;

and how trans kids have spread disinformation about vaccines, and stuffed all their money in giant safes under Swiss Alps and Caribbean Islands;

how trans kids engineered vast corporate empires of for-profit jails and hospitals, decimating communities of color and denying sick people their medications and treatments unless they assume life-long debt; trans kids even unleashed a holocaust of gun violence against the children of the US, where…

Almost incredible, isn’t it, how a mere 0.48% of the U.S. population, a demographic that is mischaracterized and almost completely misunderstood, that sees its very membership in the human race denied, that suffers disproportionately from gender- and phobic violence, that is suddenly hyper-visible and enduring an open season of hatred and discrimination with the threat always looming that they and their rights will be entirely erased from public view:

Funny how powerful they seem to be. Funny how they would have such a negative influence on the past hundred years of US history.

Yeah. What with kids using litter boxes in school, and drag queens with beards, and liberal teachers performing sex changes with safety scissors and Elmer’s glue—be sure to press the new penis or vagina firmly in place, so it sticks properly, there ya go!—well, I can understand why vicious, ignorant homophobes would put their jack-booted feet down.

If I’m your enemy, then you’re mine, too. You started this, not me. Even the enemy of my enemy is—my enemy. I’m not taking anything for granted.

The tone on Twitter (I refuse to X) is that of the lawless playground, with Republican incels gleefully “admitting” that Project 2025 will be the literal blueprint from Day One. (We know, sweetie, we know… Subtlety ain’t your strong point.) Following the template created by Donald Trump, they provoke, gauge the response, then double-down.

They throw out the most extreme ideas they can come up with, watch progressives run around helplessly in circles with exploding heads, and realize there’s nothing they can’t try to get away with. They delight in people’s concern that their rights are being rolled back, that their security is threatened. They revel in any discomfort we display; they can’t believe their luck, that we’re still gobsmacked by how low they can go.

Thus, we have Trump casually floating the idea of ending term limits—Trump for life, anyone?— and ending birthright citizenship for the children of immigrants (which would take the US back to Dred Scott, that is, pre-Civil War and the Supreme Court ruling that no African American could ever be a full citizen).

Perhaps the Trump team will court-martial soldiers who were in Afghanistan at the time of withdrawal, accusing them of treason, a capital offense. Perhaps, prompted by the radical Christian demographic musing about repealing the 19th amendment, they’ll take voting rights away from women.

I didn’t make any of this up. I’m not speculating. They’re looking into it.

It’s bully politics without guard rails. Do you notice that these ideas consolidate executive power while stripping American citizens of their rights? They don’t want to make your life better. They don’t want to lift you up. That’s not what bully politics is for.

They don’t want to give you a seat at the table, quite the opposite: they want to banish from the body politic anyone who’s not white, male, Christian and heterosexual.

MAGA Republicans have always scoffed at “identity politics”, all the while discriminating against Americans—based on their identity. Of course it’s contradictory and illogical. That’s how they keep you off-balance, create the cognitive dissonance that keeps us questioning your sanity and their intentions.

The MAGA Republicans are sore losers, and, because they are bullies, they are also sore winners. Win or lose, there is always grievance and outrage, not on behalf of the discounted and the poor and the marginalized, but on their own behalf. This is not a time when you can say to each other, “congratulations, we look forward to working together for the American People!” Are you kidding?

There is so little to choose between Democrats and traditional Republicans, that Trump had to take the party rightward into autocracy to give voters a “new direction”; and that autocratic playbook requires that you demonize the other party, make them the enemy, so beyond the pale that cooperation is unthinkable. Cooperate with a Marxist? (The idea that anyone could think Kamala Harris is a Marxist makes me choke into my corn flakes, but whatever myth works for you. In our new alternative reality, saying makes it so.)

The final push by team Trump was aimed at younger white males, the type who typically don’t even bother voting, the demographic who “didn’t like the direction the country was headed.”

Not, please don’t misunderstand, in terms of how it’s headed for gay people, or women, or “immigrants” (POC). This was not an election where people worried about each other.

Men voted for Trump who have women in their lives, women who might need an abortion one day, and die because they can’t get one. Everyone voted for Trump without caring what happened to their gay or trans friends and relatives. I guess that’s not what we do anymore: worry about our fellow citizens, how things might be going for them.

And I don’t care if you’re Black and female, even, if you voted for Trump you’re officially a racist, misogynist, homophobic white man. There. Enjoy all the privileges that come from that. Now all on your lonesome you can get pregnant, have a self-induced miscarriage, then lynch yourself. Does it get any better?

It does: because scared transgender kids, teens and adults, who you wish didn’t exist, but do; who want nothing more than to be left alone and work out what treatment, if any, would help them live meaningful lives; the young people whose parents you’ve criminalized because they don’t conform to your misguided “beliefs”; the transgender, gender non-conforming and intersex people you want to kill—will more than likely save you the trouble and do it themselves.

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“Trump was good for the economy.”

Was he? I dunno. He couldn’t have been. Could he? I dunno! Was he? I don’t think he was!

Wow, getting a big hit of serotonin, and not a moment too soon! Must be the coffee!

Economies take time to percolate, and sometimes the incumbent is benefiting from or getting tanked by the previous guy’s policies. Economic policies also have to make sense. Trump’s were, and are, non-sense.

What were Trump’s economic policies in his first term? His first kick at the can was in December, 2017, and it was a doozy—a huge tax cut for billionaires and corporations.

The western world had just been through a twenty- to thirty-year period during which there was a massive redistribution of wealth from the working and middle classes to what’s now known as the one percent, the richest of the rich, the self-styled cream of the crop at the top of the heap, and thanks to Liza Minnelli for giving us the vocabulary, the dance moves, and the emotional trajectory from thinly-veiled hysteria to aneurysm that sums up the historical moment.

So it was a no-brainer for Trump to send the billionaire classes a love letter in the form of a massive tax cut (because taxes are bad), the absolute last thing that billionaires, or the US economy, needed. This was announced with the usual drivel about trickling down to the workers because corporations would of course pass on the tax cut to their workers in the form of higher wages, right?

Corporations did not award anyone higher wages. To a man, they used the funds to buy up more of their own stock, and stuffed the rest away in their bank accounts. They didn’t need the money. But they appreciated the thank you for their donations to Trump’s election campaign.

Having bought housing that should have gone to the people so they could extract rent, and four extra yachts in case the main one broke, they now created hedge funds where they could stuff their stolen goods and make money from money. Usury, historically an antisemitic trope, was now cool. Nothing produced, just money writhing and roiling in a greasy, slippery cluster-whatsit.

That’s if you think that Trump’s policies are in any way, well, policies, part of an overall strategy for the economy that will support full employment, social benefits, health care, and so on.

They are not. They’re just catch phrases, devoid of meaning. He merely works in transactions, with no thought of the cascade of effects that will follow. “Taxes bad!” So, cut taxes!

Handy tip: Most of the one percent pay little to no tax anyway. But you sound like a feisty renegade, so, well worth it! Tax cuts for the rich! Zero benefit to the economy.

What is the gist of Trump’s “economic policy” this time around? Two concepts, both of which rely on Americans’ utter economic illiteracy: Tariffs on all imports, but especially on imports from China (because, guess what? now taxes are good), and, although he calls it immigration policy it’s really economic: the mass deportation of millions of immigrants (“immigrants” is how conservatives say “people of color” without puking into their own mouths).

Tariffs

I’ll bet a container-load of MAGA hats that, if you voted for Trump because those tariffs are gonna sock it to ’em (the Chinese, primarily) that the last time you thought of economics was when you cashed your stimulus check that meant you didn’t get evicted from your home.

You don’t know what a tariff is. TRUMP doesn’t know what a tariff is!

Tariffs, little MAGA-hatter, are not a burden to the exporting nation. They’re a burden to the business that’s importing the goods, who then pass the extra costs onto—now, no fair peeking!—that’s right! You! Trump’s tariffs are a little boy’s fantasy of “revenge” on the Chinese, that’s actually revenge on the economic illiterates—you again— who voted for him.

Mass Deportations

Who will do the deporting? The army. How much will it cost? Trillions of dollars. And how will it happen? Will the army march into your workplace, your factory, your agribusiness, your child care, grab them by the scruff of the neck, leaving the business without, in some sectors, forty percent of its labor force?

“Deportations” are just another make believe policy, just a bit of raw red meat tossed to the Trump base of racists.

Can we put the nails in this coffin? Here you go:

Immigrants are not taking jobs from white people.

Immigrants do the jobs that Americans won’t do. You know, “Black jobs”. Menial or laborious or badly paid. Fruit picking. Construction workers. Many immigrants staff your day care centres.

More immigrants than US-born workers are employed; less immigrants than US-born commit crimes.

And who is smuggling the drugs? White people. Americans. The immigrants are escaping from drug cartels!

And immigrants are not taking your housing.

The housing crisis is caused, oddly enough, by a lack of housing. You’re not building the housing.

Immigrants spoiling everything for you is just—not a thing. OK?

You’ll just have to own up: these are justifications that Trump voters use to disguise their racism, their misogyny and their homophobia/transphobia. There’s no other reason to hate immigrants, documented or otherwise, or to vote for going low, to abandon your neighbor, to wash your hands of it all.

The cult of individualism has won: “there is no such thing as society”.

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Dealing with bullies demands presence of mind and some easily-mastered skills.

Never run away. That just awakens more blood-lust. And never “give back as good as you get.” That’s another way you send the signal that they’ve hooked you, that they’ve found that tender, vulnerable spot. And both of these responses concede your space to the bully: they strip you of your authority.

Here’s what to do, according to experts:

Maintain eye contact. This is like stand your ground, but without the gun. You are master of your space.

Respond dispassionately. “Whatever.” “If you say so.” Be blithely neutral.

Use your wit. If they demand your candies, say, “Ok, but I’ve licked them all.”

Then grab one of your Jewish space lasers, whip up another Demoncrat hurricane, and blast those bastards to kingdom come.

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