Look, I don’t actually watch South Park much any more. I thoroughly enjoyed it back in the day, and I always respected the fact that they weren’t afraid to be shocking. But there’s a difference between not being afraid to be shocking, and just being shocking for the sake of being shocking. And the latter can grow thin over time, in my opinion. So it was that I gradually watched it less and less, even though I continued to appreciate their chutzpah. But they’re having a bit of a resurgence these days, and I may have to starting watching again.
But, for now, I’m just watching the clips of South Park that they show on Pod Save America. And, while I’m not the biggest fan of Favreau, Lovett, and Vietor (as witnessed by how rarely I reference them in these Reports), I do enjoy some of their stuff, and I confess I really get a kick out of them really getting a kick out of South Park lately. The saga of Donald Trump’s “teeny tiny penis” is one of those over-the-top, shock-for-shock’s-value bits that dampened my enthusiasm for South Park in the first place, so that’s not the part that interested me. But what I really loved was the saga of Towelie visiting DC to kiss Trump’s ass (as so many world leaders have been doing this year), accompanied by this shot of the perpetually stoned, anthropomorphic towel arriving in Union Station:
And what strikes me about this is, it’s the type of image you’d expect to see in a show about Franco’s Spain, or Pol Pot’s Cambodia, or Pinochet’s Chile, or Idi Amin’s Uganda, or, in more modern times, Orbán’s Hungary or Erdoğan’s Turkey. Soldiers everywhere, citizens mostly in hiding, air of menace hanging thick in the air. And, yes: South Park is exaggerating the situation in DC, and yes: it’a a friggin’ cartoon. But against those counterpoints, I’ll tell you two things Donald Trump said this week. After patting himself on the back about how well his military depolyment in DC is going, he continued:
And after we do this, we’ll go to another location, and we’ll make it safe also. We’re going to make our country very safe. We’re going to make our cities very, very safe. Chicago is a mess: you have an incompetent mayor, grossly incompetent. And, uh, we’ll straighten that one out, probably next.
And, while hosting Zelenskyy in the White House, when Zelenskyy notes that they can’t hold elections while they’re being invaded by Russia, Trump interrupts:
So you’re saying, during the war you can’t have elections. So let me just say three and a half years from now— so you mean, if we happen to be in a war with somebody, no more elections.
And, if you don’t find that chilling, then I fear you just haven’t been paying enough attention.
Other things you need to know this week:
- This week’s Strict Scrutiny covers just how much Trump can and cannot do as regards deploying the military in DC (and other cities). Although I think we need to institute a new rule: any statement that contains “the president is not allowed to” must also include the word “allegedly.” You know: just to cover all your bases.
- Robert Reich gives you 5 things you can do to stand up to the current fascism.
- Adam Kinzinger talks briefly about the raid on John Bolton’s house by Trump’s DOJ.
Is there hope this week? I’d like to find hope in the fact that Sherrod Brown, who represented Ohio in Congress for over 30 years before being defeated by a Trumpist last year, will not be retiring, but rather running again next year to fill the Senate vacancy left by JD Vance. The Republican who beat him, by the way, is an immigrant from Colombia who can be summed up trivially by this exact sequence of paragraphs in his Wikipedia page:
In 2016, Moreno called Trump a “lunatic invading [the Republican Party]” and said he could not support a party led by “that maniac”. In a now-deleted 2016 tweet, Moreno wrote, “He attacked immigrants, tries to silence the press, & appeals to the darkest part of human nature”, then asked his followers whether he was describing Trump or Adolf Hitler. He wrote in a tweet that he had written in a vote for Marco Rubio in the 2016 presidential election. During a 2019 radio interview, Moreno said, “there’s no scenario in which I would support Trump.”Beyond the triumph of crass opportunism, though, Brown is looking at an entirely different race next year than last year. And he’s a left-wing populist, not a corporate Democrat, and therefore hopefully not as ineffectual. Mirroring that divide, over in Maine, oysterman and bartender Graham Platner is going to challenge Susan Collins, she of the Trump-has-learned-a-“pretty big lesson” after his first impeachment. Remember how she predicted he would “be much more cautious in the future”? Yeah, that didn’t work out so well. And, while Platner is still a big unknown, we can at least take comfort that Fox “News” is calling him “Maine’s Mamdani.” So the call to action is being heeded. Will it be sufficient? Well, I guess it all depends on how many soldiers Trump can deploy between now and then ...
By 2024, Moreno was a Trump supporter, received his endorsement for Senate, and said, “I wear with honor my endorsement from President Trump.”