The rise of the fragile “tough guy”

From police to our president, and the federal goon squads he has deployed from Los Angeles to DC, we all seem to exist at the whim of supposed “tough guys” whose reputations belie their weakness

Our president is notoriously fragile. But he is not alone, either in his tendency to brag about his masculinity, or the reality of his weakness that his rhetoric aims to obscure.

[E]very U.S. president over the past 75 years—including many from the Democratic Party, such as Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and “Genocide” Joe Biden—would be in international prison if the U.S. allowed international authorities to adjudicate the crimes of our leaders.

A fragile president

Trump’s responses to critics, as well as his responses to praise, reveal the fragility of his ego. As observed by actor & retired wrestler Dave Bautista, the president is a “Whiny Little Bitch” and “a weak, tubby toddler.”

Image credit: MAD magazine

The international arena offers many examples. He is so easily plied by praise that foreign diplomats and heads of state have made it part of their strategy.

Meanwhile, his belligerence towards traditional allies reflects the impetuousness of a teenager eager to offend an established norm in order to prompt a response. It is classic trolling behavior.

Yet Trump bows before figures generally viewed as despots. Jair Bolsonaro, the corrupt and disgraced former president of Brazil, counts Trump among his most committed public champions.

Similarly, Vladimir Putin has reveled in Trump’s public adoration, most recently after a summit on U.S. soil that prompted some amusing critiques. Putin’s autocracy deserves critique. Americans who decry it, however, cast stones from a glass house.

A seemingly forceful—but ultimately weak—response

Democrats tend to think of themselves as better, perhaps more civilized, than right wing actors who rely on disinformation and hate. But, while appearing seemingly less offensive, Democrats ultimately replace the right wing’s belligerence with their own ignorance.

Only because I’ve grown tired of observing what others seem to be unable to recognize, I’ll leave aside for now the strategic racism embraced by Democratic Party actors when acting to insulate their officeholders from accountability for their documented corruption.

The pattern of ignorance among Democrats finds too many other examples to rest there.

For instance, responding to Trump’s recent meeting with Putin in Alaska (during the very same week that the state capital barely avoided a catastrophic flood due to a nearby melting glacier), Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press, where he fairly described the meeting as “a disaster.”

Echoing Trump’s appeal to a strongman aesthetic, Murphy claimed that their meeting “was an embarrassment for the United States. It was a failure. Putin got everything he wanted.” Murphy constructed his argument to appeal to viewers affected by the same kind of masculine fragility that possesses the president.

Worse than mimicking Trump’s discursive style (as California Governor Gavin Newsom has done to greater effect), Murphy then revealed his ignorance of his own party’s corruption, ultimately playing into the president’s hands by inviting viewers to draw false equivalencies.

Murphy claimed that, by giving Putin a “photo-op,” Trump helped him “be absolved of his war crimes in front of the world.” That comment seems to falsely insinuate that the rest of the world might find in Trump’s appearance with him a reason to withdraw criticism of Putin and his offensive human rights record. But the rest of the world is not blinded by the same amnesia that grips the U.S.

It was Murphy’s following comment that revealed him as painfully oblivious. He went on to claim that, “War criminals are not normally invited to the United States of America.”

In a sane country, the “journalists” interviewing him would have intervened at that point.

Muprhy’s comment sounds like a great burn, until one recalls that every U.S. president over the past 75 years—including many from the Democratic Party, such as Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and “Genocide” Joe Biden—would be in international prison if the U.S. allowed international authorities to adjudicate the various crimes of our leaders.

Washington doesn’t just invite war criminals to our country. Voters elect them as heads of state, and entrench the worst of them as advisors for decades.

Our recent presidents are not alone. The ranks of national security officials serving under Democratic and Republican administrations alike are replete with criminals.

I was arrested in 2015 for simply asking one of them—James Clapper, who served as Obama’s Director of National Intelligence—how he managed to evade criminal charges despite having admitted to lying to the Senate under oath.

Similarly, John Brennan, who led the CIA under Obama, helped ensure that the Agency’s torturers would never face justice. That concession effectively compromised the Allied victory in the Second World War, and made him no less a criminal in the eyes of the world than his henchmen (and women, including the next CIA Director, Gina Haspel).

Their widespread complicity in war crimes is precisely why American leaders—from each of the corporate political parties—refuse to recognize the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (which, incidentally, has issued an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the U.S. continues to ignore despite the ICC’s support from the rest of the world).

From top to the bottom

It’s not just presidents and their enablers in Congress who reveal the pattern of timidity that their performative masculinity aims to obscure.

In 2022, police in Uvalde, Texas set a new standard of cowardice when standing by as dozens of school children were murdered by a gunman who they were afraid to confront. New records released earlier this month reveal how anguished parents pleaded with cops to intervene—only to watch them reduce themselves to observers as a macabre spectacle unfolded that they were paid, trained, and equipped to stop.

The federal goon squads that invaded DC this month revealed the same fragility when responding to critics. One, who works for the Justice Department, was subjected to felony charges after injuring the feelings of an ICE agent by striking him with a sandwich. Is there any plausible reason—beyond sheer cowardice—why it took 20 officers to arrest him?

Police (and ICE agents cosplaying as police) are not the only among Trump’s enablers to reflect this pattern of belligerence-covering-for-fragility.

His Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security Advisor, Stephen Miller, could be a poster child for it. After recounting his disturbing history as a protofascist who played a critical role in establishing Trump’s agenda, another insightful writer on this platform described Miller as:

“a coward. He avoids cameras. He hides behind Trump’s bombast. He slithers in the dark because he knows attention is kryptonite. He thrives on secrecy because power without scrutiny is the only kind he can wield. This is why most Americans don’t even know his face. And that’s exactly why we need to drag him into the light.

Stephen Miller is the architect of family separation, the saboteur of Afghan allies, the propagandist of white supremacy, the would-be executioner of habeas corpus, the parasite trying to hijack the judiciary. He is a traitor to his heritage, a disgrace to his family, a coward who hides behind Trump, and a sadist who builds his career on inflicting suffering. He is not just another political adviser. He is the venom in Trumpism’s bloodstream.”

Over their heads

I’ve ranted for decades about the constitutional and legal untenability of allowing the belligerence of state actors to undermine human and civil rights.

The public, the professional journalists who mislead them, and the corrupt lawmakers who they, together, elect seem to be too ignorant to understand reason. So I’m shifting in this post to arguing on the ground established by the institutionalized forces of toxic masculinity that have seized our country, and communities on both sides of it, in their grip.

I won’t appeal to the oath of office, or the precedent set at the Nuremberg trials that exposes every member of Trump’s goon squad to international criminal liability, or even simple human decency.

When we find ourselves pleading with military service members to remember their primary commitment to the Constitution, we have already lost. Members of Congress swear the same oath, but they’ve been betraying it—in the open, on both sides of the partisan aisle—for decades without consequence.

And lest we forget history, the National Guard already proved their willingness to fire on Americans in retaliation for using our constitutional rights. Four university students killed at Kent State University in Ohio proved that point decades ago.

Fighting fire with fire

At the risk of seeming discursively inspired by Gavin Newsom—who I generally detest as a dynasty politician more committed to political theater than substance, but who has at least emerged as among the president’s most committed public antagonists—I’ll instead note that Trump, the thugs in his ICE goon squads, and his enablers in politics and media, are whimps, pansies, fragile little boys with seemingly small penises, hiding behind badges and guns.

I would share similar reflections on the various self-hating women who support and empower the president, but having been falsely accused of misogyny by racist Democrats when I challenged Pelosi’s notorious corruption in the 2020 general election, I’ll step aside and simply observe (as I always have) the voices of strong women speaking for themselves.

We all know the emperor has no clothes. But he is far from alone.

I’m writing this post mostly in the hopes that some of these figures might eventually come to understand how weak and pathetic they—from police officers around the country, to a criminal president, to fascists who hide their faces while claiming to serve the public—appear to the rest of us.

There’s no reason to respect any of these figures. I hope we can go out one step further in giving them the public middle finger that they all deserve.

In a functioning republic, there would be measures of accountability more meaningful than public outrage and shaming.

But given the co-optation of both Congress and the courts, and the disturbing bilateral consensus among both of the corporate political parties that enabled fascism in the United States long before Trump ever came to Washington, that might be the most we can settle for at the moment.

Paid subscribers can access a further section highlighting critical depictions of the president in film, television, and music. Beyond whatever satisfaction these clips might offer readers, I hope that you’ll share them wherever you can.

When Washington Fails Us, Culture Can Help Fill the Gap

On the one hand, reveling in the barbs of comedians responding to an autocrat with no regard for human rights is weak sauce. Yet, when our institutions fail us all as dramatically as Congress and the courts have, culture can remain a province of public accountability.

That was, in part, the genius of the First Amendment. It encompasses five discrete rights, which together comprise the various ways that citizens are (theoretically) invited to engage the political process. And while the “redress of grievances” would ideally include the form of public processes that might lead to actual change, it also includes public shaming.

Finally, critical depictions of corruption in film, music, or television offer each of us opportunities beyond those available to us as community members, citizens, or (increasingly more accurately) subjects. In the age of social media, these examples of critical content represent potential ammunition that any of us can put to use.

Voices Rising to the Moment

Few figures have done a better job of shaming the president than actor and former wrestler Dave Bautista. His remarks about Trump (some which I featured at the top of this post) have been nothing short of scathing, and also generally accurate.

Another figure worth highlighting in the same vein is Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny. His song Neuvayol celebrates Puerto Rican culture in New York City, and the music video features a voice that sounds a lot like the president’s:

Bad Bunny is also noteworthy, beyond his voice, for doing his part to challenge the music industry’s predatory business models and support his fellow Puerto Ricans. As described by Adrian Horton in the Guardian:

His residency in San Juan, the triumphant opening salvo of a world tour that will entirely skip the mainland US, is not just the latest bucked model but, I’d argue, the best use of megastardom in recent memory, an application of generational celebrity that unites potent symbolism with actual material change.

Beyond film and music, comedians and talk show hosts, notably including Stephen Colbert, have also done their part to expose the president and his frailty.

Colbert, to his credit, lost his program seemingly due to his network’s capitulation to the president.

But no one in film, music, or television has taken up the charge of exposing our president as gleefully as Matt Stone and Trey Parker, the co-creators of South Park. Each of their episodes in the current season has been a tour de force, ruthlessly ridiculing Trump and his many enablers from ICE thugs to his cabinet members.

While recent episodes have dialed up the critique, the show has a long history of speaking truth (or at least parody) to power. Whatever you think of the show’s often sophomoric humor generally, it feels perfectly poised to piss the president off.

The show’s recent depiction of (what the creators described as) the president’s “teeny, tiny penis” has a back story almost as funny as the episode itself. According to Esquire:

"It's always like, 'So we love the episode … but we're gonna blur the penis,' " said Trey Parker at San Diego Comic-Con this past July, referencing their contentious relationship with their parent company. "And I'm like, 'No, you're not gonna blur the penis.' "

"We put eyes on the penis," Stone added, with Parker noting that "if we put eyes on the penis, we won't blur it. And then that was a whole conversation for about four fucking days."