"They Hate Our Country"

Yes, They Really Do

I’ve drawn the short straw assignment at The New Republic — my editor asked me to pre-write the “Trump Wins” election cover article. (Someone else is pre-writing the article we hope is published — I get paid either way.) I spent the last two weeks calling wise people who know politics and Washington about what the next four years would look like, and … well let’s just say the accumulated bleakness of the predictions was enough to depress me so that I had to flee. 

I grabbed a discount flight to Europe for a few days and landed in Berlin, a city I’d never visited before. The first day, jet-lagged, I found my way to the Reichstag, and as the sun set, gazed across the Spree River at the neo-renaissance edifice the Nazis set afire as their horrible reign began. It’s all cleaned up now, a landmark visible from many points on the flat, central European terrain on which the vast city lies. If you didn’t know its history, you’d think Germany had always been just this solid and prosperous. 

A few miles away, there’s a wide street called Karl Marx Allee, lined with pale, cold-looking apartment buildings erected by the Soviets who ran East Berlin for a generation after Berlin was bombed to rubble and Hitler’s Germany crushed. It’s picturesque, and the setting for one of the great movies about totalitarianism, The Lives of Others.

Today, Checkpoint Charlie — another movie backdrop to us today, but the site of horror and death for thousands — is a tourist attraction. People line up in front of a facsimile of the old guardhouse and take selfies behind the sandbags. A glowing KFC sign shares Instagram frame space above the “You are entering the American sector” sign, in Russian, French, and German. 

Karl Marx said history repeats itself, first as tragedy then as farce. There’s something of that in modern Berlin: today’s tourist attraction was yesterday’s fascist nightmare and divided ruin. 

But back in America, by some quantum glitch, our tragedy is simultaneously farce.

I got back to the city in time for the Trump rally at Madison Square Garden. MAGAs — judging from their accents, mainly from South Jersey, Staten Island, and Long Island, Rangers hockey fans who know how to find the trains into the city — lined up on the avenues in their red hats, spewing the usual idiocy and resentment for the fake news media. My favorite clips from the crowd are of two separate women explaining to the Good Liars video team how the hurricane that ravaged North Carolina was man-made, a “cloud-seeding or something” manufactured by the government to “take the land” so that Kamala Harris’ husband could mine it for lithium. 

The thousands of oafs and neckbeards that accompanied the motley collection of Trump women were easily satirized, as one Xitter wag summed them up: “the largest concentration in history of domestic abusers with an Uncle Michael on the force.” 

Watching this sad spectacle reminded me of standing on Pennsylvania Avenue in January 2017 at Trump’s inauguration. It was gray and drizzly and surprisingly sparse — certainly compared to Obama’s inauguration in 2008, an open-air sardine can of hundreds of thousands in which none of us could move our arms. Part of the reason for the vacant feeling on the street was that the police had herded crowds of protesters — who easily outnumbered celebrants — into groups fenced in by riot guards at regular intervals along the route. These pens were spots of color and creativity — people of all ages, races, and genders, musicians and artists, designers, singers, packed in tight, waving clever and hilarious signs and chanting funny things, music blasting. 

The free ranging Trump celebrants, his people who’d come in from the sticks, passed these vibrant little prisons looking confused and wandered off lost and lonely. Something was wrong with this celebration, but what?

So much creativity on our side, that’s one thing they hate. 

On Sunday in Manhattan, the MAGAs streamed into the venue and enjoyed five hours of cheap, vulgar insults. Men stood in front of an audience of 16,000 — plus however many millions were watching the live stream — and actually said these things: Harris is the devil, the antichrist, she’s a prostitute with pimps, and, from Tucker Carlson, a little wink-wink racism, she is “Samoan-Malaysian.” The show’s featured comedian was reportedly going to call her a cunt, but someone nixed that line. 

Censorship! How unfair. 

The next day, Trumpers were forced to backpedal from the comedian’s “joke” about Puerto Rico being an island of garbage (there are after all a quarter of a million people of Puerto Rican descent in Pennsylvania, whoops). 

Dear Leader took the podium a few hours late, on brand, crooning, syrupy, next-gen Frank Sinatra at the Sands, and for an hour and a half unleashed the “weave,” slurring non-MAGAs as un-American or “enemies within,” and returning repeatedly to his core argument for the election: “These are people that hate our country. They hate our country. … The radical left wants to destroy our country.”

He ginned up the conspiracy du jour about Democrats inviting in criminal illegal migrants “from the dungeons” of shithole countries to vote blue. Apparently, his MAGAs are too blinkered to realize that besides that lie itself being a lie, the last thing any illegal, undocumented person in America would want to do is enter a room associated with the apparatus of the state and guarded by cops from whom they are trying to hide.

These people are clowns, yes. But the biggest mistake anyone can make is not taking Don and his 70 million-strong MAGA movement seriously. Billionaires and CEOs are already acting out anticipatory obedience to the dictator.

Beyond that revolting rally spectacle, these last days are chaotic with other ugly, embarrassing, and frightening news. It’s hard to cover all of it, but a few bits deserve attention. 

First, a scary investigation from Wired revealed how hundreds of paramilitary groups itching to fight against the election outcome are using Facebook to find each other, organize, and plan meetings and musters. Meta apparently is not only letting them do it — it is autogenerating pages for them. 

Does Zuckerberg know or care? Boy Wonder is probably hunkered down in his Hawaiian bunker this weekend with a Meta Quest headset tuned to virtual surfing. 

Oh, and people are burning ballot boxes. 

On the jolly side (Sing It: Always Look On the Bright Side of Life) my favorite bit of news this week — cheering, really — is Pro Publica’s release last night of a pair of videos of a strange little man named Russell Vought, a sanctimonious Christian nationalist, architect of Project 2025, and Trump’s former director of Office of Management and Budget. 

Vought is in the running for White House chief of staff in Trump 2.0. I recommend glancing at these videos, recorded secretly at venues Vought assumed were friendly. There he is, a small, tremulous man, balding and bearded, a man who would literally disappear in a crowd, go unnoticed in a corner at a party … a wisp, a vapor, a nothing …. animated with fire and rage against secular, heterogeneous American society. He promises Trump will sic the military to quell “riots” and he explains with sadistic relish the Project 2025 scheme to fire tens of thousands of career federal civil servants whose crime was not breaking the law when Dear Leader asked them to the first time around. 

“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he says. “When they wake up in the morning we want them to not want to go to work.” Women giggle in the background. 

Vought also calls Trump — thrice-married, conman, convict, abuser of women, facing prison if he’s not elected president — a “gift of God.” Vought is such a sanctimonious freak he prays for God’s blessings before even small meetings, per another undercover video a pair of British journalists snagged for the Centre for Climate Reporting last year. 

Vought belongs to a breed of Christians that Christ would not recognize including Trump’s “spiritual advisor,” prosperity gospeller Paula White (enjoy a video of her speaking in tongues and calling on “angels from Africa” to correct the 2020 election here). He loathes America’s “multicultural” society and schemes to destroy it. Images of these hypocrites laying on hands and praying over Trump are making the rounds again in time for the mega-church jumbotrons on the last Sunday before election day. Germophobe Trump has learned to keep himself from cringing in the years since they first started subjecting him to their godly paws. He’s also learned how to mimic the frozen gaze of beatific idiocy that this gang admires. 

I grew up around real Christians in rural Michigan, and I’m sorry Russ and Paula, but no real Christians I knew could support the incivility trickling down, the vulgarity celebrated, the cruelty adored, the absence of mercy and charity. Vought reminds me of the lead character in The Conformist, the great film about an insecure man sexually abused as a child, a man tormented by closeted kinks, a man who has poured all his self-loathing into the grand project of authoritarian abuse of society at large. 

The scapegoat is so necessary for these people. They almost can’t breathe for wanting to crucify someone. Lacking that, they’re going to settle for a man who will get the military to kidnap and frogmarch some poor people to concentration camps.

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NOTE TO READERS: Last week I passed a milestone I almost didn’t notice, publishing my 100th Freakshow. Thank you so much for reading my rants and raves, for commenting, sharing, and being part of this small but growing community. I have faith that we’ll get through the next weeks and months. If you need a diversion from the anxiety of these final pre-election days, you can always curl up on a couch with a blanket and some tea or Scotch and read my novel, Zero Visibility Possible, which Rick Wilson has pronounced dark and witty, and Greg Olear called “a stick of dynamite of a first novel." As usual, if you buy one, send me a receipt and I will gift a free subscription to you or a friend.