“Don’t be in a hurry to condemn because he doesn’t do what you do, or think as you think, or as fast. There was a time when you didn’t know what you know today.”– Malcolm X
This is another Trump rant. But not entirely. Over a week ago former FBI director James Comey posted to social media a pattern of seashells on the beach that he supposedly just found, and the seashells were arranged to read “86 47.” Well, apparently Our Lord and Savior and incidental president thought this was a call to assassinate him (because ’86’ means ‘get rid of’ and Trump’s non-consecutive term makes him the 47th President), as did all of his courtiers on social media, leading to Comey getting called in for questioning by the Secret Service. He actually got on the Stephen Colbert show to talk about this.
And of course lots of people on social media who are not Trump worshipers got on to say, no that’s not what “86” means, the common use of the term is when restaurant crews have to cancel an order so they “86” it.
Yes, but I remember another origin of the term. There was this one Gore Vidal play that was made into a movie starring Jerry Lewis. The movie was called Visitor To A Small Planet. In the movie, Lewis played a space alien with seemingly magic powers, sorta like with Mork & Mindy or My Favorite Martian. And one of these powers was to make a gesture and fire an invisible energy beam. Setting “86” was disintegration.
Maybe that’s why Trump thinks Comey wants to kill him. I mean, if nothing else, Trump’s voice sounds a lot like Jerry Lewis, so he was probably using those movies as speech coaching.
Not that it changes the fact that a year ago, Republicans had no problem with selling “86 46” shirts on Amazon, so apparently they’re all assuming we have the same Oceania-has-always-been-at-war-with-Eastasia mindset that they do.
But that’s not really the subject I want to talk about here. A day or so afterward, Canadian author James Fell, whom I really like, posted on his Facebook page: “Fuck, from the bottom of my heart, James fucking Comey. He posted 8647 on insta(gram). Guess what, fuckface? You don’t get to do that. You’re the reason we’re in this fucking mess. Your stupid email investigation days before the 2016 election almost certainly threw it towards Eric’s dad. Danger Yam is your fault. You can fuck right out of the solar system. Be sure to say hi to Uranus on your way into deep fucking space. Asshole.”
You can see why I like him. But would you rather have somebody like Comey repent of his work for Trump or do you want all the Trumpniks to be like Bill Barr, who said he would still vote for Combover Caligula in 2024 even knowing what he knew about him and even after he’d been repeatedly insulted by Trump? And I said that. I asked Fell, “Would you rather Comey be another Trumpnik who keeps sucking up to the God Emperor no matter how much he abuses him?” He responded, “I’d rather he shut up and got cancer.” Another guy said “James Gillen I’d rather Comey and his ilk not act innocent, like they didn’t create this whole problem to begin with. You know, maybe the members of the ‘personal responsibility’ party should start with a sincere apology and take, you know ‘personal responsibility’. Joe Walsh is another one.”
Make no mistake, I blame, and have blamed, James Comey for the 2016 election (and by extension the continued reign of Our Lord Donald Trump in the present) more than I blame the Russians or even Hillary Clinton’s own incompetence. And I think that anybody who continues to support Trump, knowing what they know, ought to be taken out and walked through the streets with their heads shaved, like the Frenchwomen who “fraternized” with German occupation troops.
And that goes double for courtier journalists who want to sell tell-all books about the Biden White House and how everyone was covering for Joe Biden’s age-related issues, when the same people already hounded him out of his campaign and out of the White House, yet refuse to raise similar alarms about Trump’s much more obvious signs of clinical dementia.
So what is the difference between rejecting everyone who has ever served Trump and rejecting those who did serve Trump and now publicly regret it? The difference is that they’ve changed. They have changed their allegiance and endorsed Democratic candidates and declared so publicly. Guys like Joe Walsh and Adam Kinzinger. They have made apologies and taken responsibility. The key point is that they have to reach out to us. You do not reach out to them. The Trumpnik position is steeped in bad faith, and it requires the rest of us to buy into it. When you reach out to the other side, to “understand” them or “break bread”, you normalize an illegitimate position. You become Bill Maher. But when one of those people actually understands us, and realizes where we are coming from, and weighs the benefits of staying in the cult versus the threats they will face if they reject it, and they reject it anyway, that needs to be acknowledged.
And as much as I want to say “fuck everybody who voted for Trump with a jackhammer”, they already did that to themselves when they voted for him. We’re all living in the same country. James Comey is living in the same country as the rest of us, and we need as many of him as we can get. Because at least up till this point, that’s how elections have worked. The person with the most votes wins. Even in terms of the Electoral College, in 2016 Trump needed to win that many people in just the right states to win enough Electors. Last year, he didn’t even need the Electoral College, because we didn’t get enough people voting for Kamala Harris. Which is the other part of the equation.
On Substack, the heterodox Jesse Singal had an essay about the various unkind things that were said about Joe Biden in the wake of his cancer diagnosis, not from the Trumpniks, but from the Left. Like, because Biden favored Obamacare instead of all-out socialized medicine, Taylor Lorenz said “Hopefully he rots in hell and rests in piss.” Singal said: “But my broader point here is that anyone who has watched lefty online spaces in recent years knows that they have devolved into something really ugly, and likely repellent to the average normal person. If you are curious about leftism, you are very likely to get funneled into spaces that have a lot to say about, well, piss, but very little of substance to chew on.”
This matters because a lot of us have found ourselves in “lefty” spaces these days because nowadays the American definition of “lefty” is not believing that Donald Trump was sent directly by God to reign over us forever and ever and his holy touch can cure cancer and hemorrhoids.
And this matters because the only reason we’re in this mess is that Donald Trump was almost as unpopular with the American public as the Republican Party he leads, but in the actual election, neither were as unpopular as Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party as a whole. And a big part of that was due to the “rest in piss” leftists who didn’t vote for Biden’s party this time cause it wasn’t pure enough for them.
Given that the Trump Party has made itself that much more unpopular by their actions since January, anybody who doesn’t like them really needs to figure out how we’re going to get from Trumpworld to notTrumpworld. And that requires the majority of the country to agree on that goal even though we clearly see that we can’t agree on anything else. And while some of us might have been “radicalized” to where we now believe that paying for national health care is less expensive in the long run than not paying for it, and maybe billionaires don’t need a tax cut more than the other 99 percent of the population, that doesn’t mean we agree with the Left on everything, including the need to enforce purity tests or struggle sessions on the people who don’t agree with you on everything. To paraphrase Adlai Stevenson in a slightly different context, you need a majority to win.