“Stand up, Bradley,” my mother used to say to me. I slouched, my head hung forward. I was a “lazy breather,” inhaling through my mouth. …
Scum
“Scum.” That’s what Trump called President Biden in his “Happy Memorial Day to all” message,
“Happy Memorial Day to all, including the scum that spent the last four years trying to destroy our country through warped radical left minds,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Hopefully, the United States Supreme Court … will save us from the decisions of the monsters who want our country to go to hell,” he wrote.
“Again, happy Memorial Day,” Trump concluded.
“Scum,” “trying to destroy,” warped radical left minds,” he posted on “Truth Social,” going on about “monsters who want our country to go to hell.” Note the nuanced use of thought and language.
“Scum” is what he’d call you or anyone daring to question his king-like stature and authority. Do you qualify as scum? To him, yes. Don’t like it? Too bad. His rabble supporters mock your concern. They gleefully joke about “liberal tears.”
He hates half the country he pretends to lead. Judges, congresspeople, law firms, universities, foreigners, states, cities, news outlets, comedians, and anyone else he disagrees with or dislikes are insulted and undermined as enemies. It’s a typical fascist tactic. Totalistic braggadocio and insults, none detailed or substantiated, distort our language and thought.
“Fake,” “corrupt,” “crazy,” “stupid,” “witch hunt, and “radical-left lunatics” are his frequent slurs. Such language has increased three hundred percent more than what clogged soundbites during his initial term! (See my “Words and The Word” to see that former tactic, now doubled down on. No, wait, tripled down on!)
In a mere thirteen months, Trump referred to Venezuelan migrants as “criminals” seventy times. Lumping them in with Mexicans and Central Americans, he alarms us with accusations that they are “rapists” and “murderers.” He justifies jailing such “violent delinquents” in a distant prison because they constitute a “foreign invasion.” However, three-fourths have committed no crimes, and the remaining one-fourth were mostly for non-violent petty offenses. Only about a dozen of the 238 had been convicted of serious crimes like rape and murder. Yet all have been shackled and stuffed in an overcrowded prison for such “crimes” as having tattoos.
None have been granted their due process of “Habeas Corpus” (meaning “you have the body,” intended to protect individuals from unlawful imprisonment or detention). But when Kristi Noem, Trump’s Secretary of Homeland Security, was asked what it meant, she replied, “a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country.” In other words, incorrectly, backwardly, and stupidly. She built on John Yoo and William Barr’s earlier controversial attempts to establish “unitary executive” power in the presidency, which fits in with six Supreme Court justices preemptively granting him such power. You have a body? Maybe not so secure.
It isn’t just brown-skinned migrants from South and Central America who are now at risk. Kash Patel and his podcaster sidekick Dan Bongino have seriously weakened the FBI. They reduced the staff of the Domestic Terrorism Operations Section and discontinued the tracking tool for such terrorism investigations. Instead, they target the Black Lives Matter (an effort to protect blacks from police harassment and murder) and the mythical but missing Antifa. Just who has the guns and likes to brandish them?
Who would protect us if the bad got worse? Some 100 JTTFs (Joint Terrorism Task Forces) involving 600 partner agencies with over 4000 members are under Kash Patel’s FBI. Over 80 local and state Fusion Centers are under Kristi Noem’s DHS. Resources previously dedicated to critical operations such as child sex crimes, drug trafficking, money laundering, and terrorism investigations have been reallocated. Traditional crime investigations, including those involving the Russian Mafia in New York City, go unstaffed. Those involved in the violent insurrection at our Capitol on January 6th have been pardoned and released. What could go wrong?
We’d like to think our government is resilient and would protect us from zealots. Don’t count on that as zealots take charge. Review the history of Western Civilization with its crusades and inquisitions. When President Reagan ended the Fairness Doctrine, moderating our radios and TVs, we soon heard lots from Rush Limbaugh to Fox News as news sources and opinion makers. Fox was regularly mocked for being anything but its “Fair and Balanced” slogan, but it prevailed. Now, Trump has incorporated twenty-three former Fox personalities into his administration. As thousands of loyal workers and experts are shooed out of their functions, utterly inept loyalists are brazenly placed into top control. [1]
The Fox News slogans and lies got amped up via social media’s algorithmic tools to magnify any emotional tweets or posts. These are not reasoned or respectful. Rather, posters hide their identity behind phony names. Our worst, most riled ideas were magnified back into our faces and minds. Wild lies and cruel insults became the stuff of our sociability. Zuckerberg and Musk didn’t mind. They got even richer and more powerful as our country lurched and tripped into anger and tribes.
Our founders once worried that political parties could descend into factions caught in cycles of mutual hate. A few better angels worry now as millions of riled devils contend. Our discourse is cheapened, inflamed, twisted. We’re the renewed peasants, and the Lord of the Land is propped up and protected by religions, social media magnates, and an endless supply of lawyers. There’s no us in the U.S. with Trump.
In Freudian terms, Nazism has a revered leader giving loyalists Superego sanction, even instruction, to bypass the Ego to allow and tell the Id to do whatever horrid thing it wanted as if a patriotic act. Posing as loyal, obedient, or even pious, amorality runs rampant. The Libertarian amorality of Elon Musk and other techno billionaires hates any governmental intrusion or regulation of their activity and mocks any sympathy or justice for all the pathetic nobodies not crafty and cruel enough to amass similar fortunes. They scoff at empathy and morality. They foresee an utter collapse of the empire and are positioning themselves to ride it out, even profit from the chaos, pain, and environmental ruin. (See Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine – The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.)
The wealthy tech bros are the political counterpart of the “Left Behind” Christians, a popular book and movie series that expects good Christians to be raptured up to heaven, safely above the apocalyptic tribulation for all suckers and sinners left behind.
In all these DOGE cuts of multitudes of former loyal workers and scientists, where is there any vision of what sort of society we should have other than anti-governmental? And how much “waste, fraud, and abuse” was saved compared to the expected $2T (two thousand billion dollars)? DOGE claimed they saved $115 billion, but their “wall of receipts” shows only $35 billion, less than two percent of the announced expected super savings. [2]
That’s a lot of money and a shiny bangle to brag about to distract from the enormous debt our country would assume by sheltering the richest of the rich from any fair share of taxes, currently expected to save them over $4 trillion over the next decade. Given the U.S. now pays $1 trillion a year on its debt and that such additional debt would exceed our entire gross domestic product in mere decades, and that such debt would exceed the debt we incurred coming out of the Second World War, we have to wonder why President Trump would sacrifice our society to pamper, pander to, and pay off the ROI of his already wealthy doners. [3]
He and his scurry off to the Middle East to sell weapons, secure hotels, and receive a “Palace in the Sky” free luxury airplane. (As detailed in Russ Baker’s “Family of Secrets,” the Bush/bin Laden connections go back to the 1940s.) It was almost entirely Saudis who flew airplanes into our buildings on 9-11. It was the Saudis who murdered and hacked up Khashoggi. He had dared criticize Crown Prince bin Salman, an official terrorist offence in Saudi Arabia. Rich owner of the Washington Post, Jeff Bezos, offered condolences to the widow, but went on to sit prominently on the dais at Trump’s inauguration.
Trump and Musk mock our convoluted, weakened government. Transnational corporations trump national governments. The wealthy buy media empires and fund the rapid shift to right-wing populism here, in South America, and Europe. Financial wizards play the on-again, off-again tariff game to their benefit, not ours.
Would Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” abandon the poor to fend for themselves? Would the wealthy be that much happier with larger yachts? Would social unrest and angry demonstrations be met with martial law? Given his narcissistic tendency to attract attention via bragging and insulting, standing proudly amid chaos, red tie glaring, and his aspirations in the larger world beyond U.S. borders, how divisive, dangerous, and destructive could he and his get?
America was founded to toss off demented kings, yet here we are. Scum?
_________________
Footnotes
1. Appointees from Fox News
- Jeanine Pirro – Appointed as interim U.S. Attorney for Washington, D.C. Pirro, a former Fox News host and judge, is leading high-profile investigations, including the recent embassy staff murders. YouTube+6Fox News+6WSJ+6PBS+6Politico+6WSJ+6
- Pete Hegseth – Serving as Secretary of Defense. Hegseth was previously a co-host on Fox & Friends Weekend. Reddit+2NPR+2Newsweek+2Wikipedia+5Reddit+5Newsweek+5
- Dan Bongino – Appointed as Deputy Director of the FBI. Bongino, a former Secret Service agent and Fox News contributor, has expressed dissatisfaction with his role. Wikipedia+6The Daily Beast+6TheWrap+6
- Sean Duffy – Serving as Secretary of Transportation. Duffy is a former congressman and Fox Business co-host. TheWrap+3NPR+3Wikipedia+3Wikipedia+1TheWrap+1
- Tammy Bruce – Appointed as State Department Spokesperson. TheWrap
- Monica Crowley – Serving as Chief of Protocol at the State Department. Politico+13TheWrap+13Wikipedia+13
- Richard Grenell – Appointed as Presidential Envoy for Special Missions. Grenell previously served as acting Director of National Intelligence and was a Fox News contributor. TheWrapWikipedia
- Dr. Janette Nesheiwat – Nominated for Surgeon General. Nesheiwat is a former Fox News medical contributor. Wikipedia
- Michael Waltz – Appointed as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. Reddit
- Mike Huckabee – Serving as U.S. Ambassador to Israel. Reddit
- Sebastian Gorka – Appointed as Deputy Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Counterterrorism. TheWrap
- Sergio Gor – Serving as Director of the Presidential Personnel Office. TheWrap
- Tulsi Gabbard – Appointed as Director of National Intelligence.
- Kimberly Guilfoyle – Nominated as U.S. Ambassador to Greece. Guilfoyle is a former co-host of The Five on Fox News. Wikipedia+3NPR+3Fox News+3
- Heather Nauert – Previously served as State Department Spokesperson and Acting Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. Nauert was a Fox News anchor before joining the Trump administration. Wikipedia
- Kayleigh McEnany – Served as White House Press Secretary. McEnany was a producer for Huckabee on Fox News and later a commentator. Wikipedia
- Larry Kudlow – Served as Director of the National Economic Council. Kudlow was a financial news commentator for Fox Business. Wikipedia
- Alina Habba – Appointed as interim U.S. Attorney for New Jersey. Habba is a frequent Fox News guest and Trump’s personal attorney. Politico+5Fox News+5ABC News+5AP News
- Sigal Chattah – Appointed as interim U.S. Attorney for Nevada. Chattah is a conservative commentator with appearances on Fox News. AP News
- Ed Martin – Initially appointed as interim U.S. Attorney for Washington, D.C., but later reassigned within the Department of Justice after bipartisan opposition. Fox News
- Pam Bondi – Serving as U.S. Attorney General. Bondi is a former Florida Attorney General and Fox News contributor. Fox News
- Kash Patel – Appointed as FBI Director. Patel has been a guest on Fox News and is known for his loyalty to Trump. The Daily Beast
- Sebastian Gorka – Serving as Deputy Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Counterterrorism. Gorka was a Fox News contributor. TheWrap
2. Expected and actual DOGE savings
3. Increased debt due to tax breaks for the rich: https://fortune.com/2025/03/22/us-debt-crisis-200-gdp-cbo-forecast-unsustainable-trump-tax-cuts-permanent/
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Thanks Brad! The USA is tottering upon dysfunction and economic collapse. But I don’t see how the election of Kamala Harris would have altered our current plight. Both the Dems and the GOP seem determined to continue kicking the deficit timebomb further down the road, It appears that much of western Europe is headed in a similar direction. Most of the mainstream news media, both on the left and right, distort news to appease their viewers. As to “scum,” it was only a few years ago when Hillary Clinton used the term “deplorables” to describe half the US population. Please… Read more »
Oh, the horror of Hillary letting slip her descriptive “deplorables” comment. Contrast that with Trump’s gushing litany of insults and slurs (as barely detailed in my recent essays). His language is as totalistic in bragging and cruelty as it is empty of specifics. I wouldn’t put you in the “Left Behind” thinking, religiously or politically. Earthly Purgatory? Ouch! Given your short list of recurring hells (I’d add social and environmental examples), it does seem as though “all are fallen.” “We’re all sinners” is a dismal thing to assume. It surrenders our ideals and aspirations to the amygdala, sending us into… Read more »
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Great post. A well thought out summary of the state of affairs.
Thanks. I could always say more. There’s too much upheaval and bad leadership. Pope Francis died. We’re left with Trump, Putin, Netanyahu, etc. We should be cooperating with the Chinese to fix global warming, not assuming some future war. I’ve more faith in you and your generation than these takers.