Dear Trumpsters: Fuck Your Feelings!

benfell

See update for March 14, 2021, at end of post.


Fig. 1. Photograph by author, August 25, 2020.

So for four long years, we have had a black hole in the White House as Donald Trump has dragged the country lower and lower into a bottomless pit. We have endured endless child separation, white supremacy, xenophobia, violence, hatred, threats, a pandemic, and a love of brutality for the sake of brutality. Because Trump and his followers have an issue with their own masculinity.[1]

Fig. 2. Reproduction of poster, via Relational Implicit, “Understanding social myth: Why it’s so hard to find common ground & how to do it,” September 2020, fair use.

I have heard women snicker about this sort of thing as they know men in a way that men will never know themselves. Do Trumpsters really imagine Trump as muscle-bound Rambo, holding a rocket launcher (figure 2), when the real-life obese Trump probably couldn’t even lift the damn thing? I dimly recall Stormy Daniels describing Trump’s penis:

She describes Trump’s penis as “smaller than average” but “not freakishly small”.

“He knows he has an unusual penis,” [Stormy] Daniels writes. “It has a huge mushroom head. Like a toadstool …

“I lay there, annoyed that I was getting fucked by a guy with Yeti pubes and a dick like the mushroom character in Mario Kart …

“It may have been the least impressive sex I’d ever had, but clearly, he didn’t share that opinion.”[2]

Oh, we’re not supposed to shame Trump for his anatomy? Really, now? After all we’ve endured from Trump himself and his followers? We’re supposed “to give Republicans, including Trump, time and space to work through their feelings about losing?” How sweet.

Did Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin give George Floyd “time and space to work through [his] feelings” in the nearly nine minutes Floyd choked to death?[3]

Did immigration agents give families “time and space to work through their feelings” about being separated on the border or kids “time and space to work through their feelings” as they were being thrown into cages?[4]

Did white supremacists give protesters “time and space to work through their feelings” as “the president’s supporters [were] shooting paintballs and pepper spray from the backs of pickup trucks?”[5]

“I never thought that I’d be in the back of a pickup rolling through downtown Olympia with six guys heavily locked and loaded, armored out,” said [Peter] Diaz, a former Army reservist. “I’m doing something now that’s for a greater cause than myself. And it feels really . . . good.”[6]

I could go on. The Trump administration has been cruel for the sake of being cruel in countless ways. Trumpsters have been cruel for the sake of being cruel in countless ways.

But we’re supposed “to give Republicans, including Trump, time and space to work through their feelings about losing.”

Hey Trumpsters: Fuck your feelings!

Update, March 14, 2021: Although Angie Schmitt barely mentions Donald Trump’s supporters, and indirectly at that, writing for CityLab, she pulls together what I had intuited about Trumpsters and monster pickup trucks, the latter being expressions of heteronormative white masculine rage.[7]

  1. [1]David Benfell, “The Donald Trump supporters’ campaign message: Fuck Your Feelings,” Not Housebroken, August 26, 2020, https://disunitedstates.org/2020/08/26/the-donald-trump-supporters-campaign-message-fuck-your-feelings/; David Benfell, “Natural-born or trained killers,” Not Housebroken, October 25, 2020, https://disunitedstates.org/2020/10/25/natural-born-or-trained-killers/; Priya Elan, “The data is in: men are too fragile to wear Covid-19 masks. Grow up, guys,” Guardian, July 3, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jul/03/covid-19-masks-men-masculinity; Jason Togyer, “Will the sons of steelworkers see Trump’s COVID-19 behavior as strong, or reckless?” Columbia Journalism Review, October 6, 2020, https://www.cjr.org/special_report/year-of-fear-pennsylvania-steel-trump-masculinity-covid.php↩
  2. [2]Tom McCarthy, “Stormy Daniels’ tell-all book on Trump: salacious detail and claims of cheating,” Guardian, September 18, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/sep/18/stormy-daniels-tell-all-book-on-trump-salacious-detail-and-claims-of-cheating↩
  3. [3]Bill Chappell, “Chauvin And 3 Former Officers Face New Charges Over George Floyd’s Death,” National Public Radio, June 3, 2020, https://www.npr.org/2020/06/03/868910542/chauvin-and-3-former-officers-face-new-charges-over-george-floyds-death↩
  4. [4]British Broadcasting Corporation, “Trump migrant separation policy: Children ‘in cages’ in Texas,” June 18, 2018, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-44518942; Caitlin Dickerson, “‘There Is a Stench’: No Soap and Overcrowding in Detention Centers for Migrant Children,” New York Times, June 21, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/21/us/migrant-children-border-soap.html; Alejandro Lazo and Jacob Gershman, “Lawsuit Alleges Government Mistreatment of Migrant Children,” Wall Street Journal, June 27, 2019, https://www.wsj.com/articles/lawsuit-alleges-government-mistreatment-of-migrant-children-11561608969↩
  5. [5]Laura Bliss and Marie Patino, “Tracking the Shifting Shape of Far-Right Political Violence,” CityLab, October 16, 2020, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-16/is-far-right-political-violence-getting-worse↩
  6. [6]Joshua Partlow, “Politics at the point of a gun,” Washington Post, July 28, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/07/28/conservative-armed-militias-protests-coronavirus/↩
  7. [7]Angie Schmitt, “What Happened to Pickup Trucks?” CityLab, March 11, 2021, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-11/the-dangerous-rise-of-the-supersized-pickup-truck↩