By David Futrelle
You may have been a bit startled, as I was, to learn of Melania Trump’s strange choice of outerwear for her trip to Texas today to comfort, I guess, the immigrant children her husband has kidnapped for their parents’ misdemeanor crime of crossing the border, some of whom may never be returned to their parents because, oops, the Trump administration doesn’t seem to have even bothered to keep track of whose kids are whose.
Anyway, that sentence got away from me but, hey, it’s been a weird day, not least because Melania’s choice of outerwear for the trip was a jacket with the words “I REALLY DON’T CARE DO U?” written across the back in giant letters. WTF. After pondering for a few moments the possibility that we have all been living in a weird simulation since November 8 2016, and concluding sadly that we probably haven’t been, the best reaction I could muster was this:
Apparently the "Let them eat cake" jackets were sold out https://t.co/YPRU7kW7gc
— David Futrelle (@DavidFutrelle) June 21, 2018
Melania’s spokesperson quickly assured the media that it was just “a jacket” with “no hidden meaning” intended by the words on the back. Then The Donald himself weighed in with a completely contradictory explanation:
“I REALLY DON’T CARE, DO U?” written on the back of Melania’s jacket, refers to the Fake News Media. Melania has learned how dishonest they are, and she truly no longer cares!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 21, 2018
To Trump’s biggest fans, it really didn’t matter what the explanation was. Because they had already decided that Melania’s jacket was totally kickass and also very classy because it was OWNING THE LIBS so hard, and maybe the #FAKEMEDIA too. Because evidently, that’s all any of this is about to them — almost as if we live in some sort of Troll Nation.
Naturally some of these terrible people took to Twitter to express their joy, and I’ve collected together some of their tweets for you all and for the benefit of any future historians (assuming we have a future) who are stuck with the unenviable task of making sense of this shithole of an era.
I’m not quite sure I understand this one, though:
“THANK YOU cry now?”
On Gab, the Twitter alternative for Nazis and people who don’t mind hanging out with, like, a huge number of Nazis, the responses were a little more blunt.
Yes, that’s our old pal Heartiste in the replies there, because of course.
We are through the looking glass, people. And it’s one of those carnival mirrors that makes everything weird and wiggly. If Joe McCarthy were alive today, and he were confronted, as the real McCarthy was, with the question “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?” he would have simply replied “LOL, are you triggered yet, snowflake, I identify as an attack helicopter #TrumpTrain #MAGA #ListOf57Communists” and his idiot fans on Twitter would have cheered.
CONTENT WARNING: MAGA-CHUDs and government-sanctioned child abuse.
Did everybody see that CNN clip where they interviewed some of the MAGA hats at a diner in Arizona?
https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/19/us/trump-voters-family-separation/index.html
If there’s any service these interviews do, it’s to document for the rest of us how far gone the base Republican voter really is. Because these people are exactly the same ones who went to Tea Party rallies in 2009 and voted Bush in 2004. This is really how they think. They can’t muster empathy for children that don’t look like their kids. They’re perfectly willing to equate crossing the border without documentation (which is not what these families are doing, but regardless) to armed robbery and thus they deserve every hideous ill that comes to them, treatment so terrible that it reminds me of Abu Ghraib:
https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/21/us/undocumented-migrant-children-detention-facilities-abuse-invs/index.html
But I bring it up to highlight the response of that one woman who said this:
This right here is the sentiment that links the supporters of fascism to the “alt-lite” or the erstwhile “centrists” that play patty-cake with the alt-right. I heard it from the lips of YouTuber ArmouredSkeptic when the topic of Black Lives Matter arose. You might have heard it before as “Stop trying to push ‘white guilt’ on me!” It all comes back to the same idea that there’s an emotion that they know they’re supposed to feel, but their biases won’t allow them to and having that pointed out is leading them to an inconvenient conclusion about themselves.
And make no mistake, the conclusion that they’re terrified of is “I’m the villain of the story.” Sure, in their own personal stories, Carl Bier might be a fine grandfather and Madeline Carroll a loving wife. But in the story of history, the one that gets written about in textbooks and taught in schools, that story doesn’t get told. It didn’t get told of the German citizenry of the 1930s and 40s. And I’ve watched interviews with them. The documentary series The World At War has a lot of amazing interviews completed in the 70s with Holocaust survivors, ordinary German citizens, soldiers, politicians, even Albert Speer and Karl Donitz. And the ones with the German housewives who have had to live with their inaction over the past 30 or so years is powerful stuff. They’re under no illusions that they have become the villains of history as a result and been struggling to make peace with that fact.
But those “good Germans” didn’t have the internet. These people do. They can listen to the heartbreaking audio any time they want, but they choose deliberately not to. They’ve crafted their own reality where every asylum seeker is an MS-13 gang member and any report to the contrary is “fake news” or “staged” or somesuch crap.
These people need to be made uncomfortable. They’ve been comfortable in their fabricated little reality for far too long. It needs to be shattered and the pieces stomped on. And I think this story has cracked that dome a little for some of these people. Clearly it’s making Madeline Carroll squirm a bit. Now imagine she was confronted with postmortem photos of Sandy Hook victims. We’ll see how long that smugness of hers lasts. Sure, she’d cover her eyes and say “Fake news, it’s all fake!” But that excuse becomes less effective with every piece of evidence that comes. And if she gradually comes around, great. I’ll settle for her just staying away from a ballot for the rest of her life.
Okay, rant over.
Never mind concentration camps for babies. The real oppression is that no one wants to date members of the Trump administration.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/06/22/trump-millennial-supporters-washington-dc-218833
I think we’re misplacing our anger here, guys.
The horror! Horror!
50 bucks says this fool thinks women make up stories about street harassment and besides, they were asking for it by having boobs that aren’t wrapped in an invisibility cloak.
Yeah, how could someone not want to date a person enabling concentration camps for babies? That’s just mean!
Sob.
Such heroes!
Is anyone familiar with this “3.5% Rule”?
It’s the idea that once three and a half percent of the population engage in non violent resistance, oppresive regimes inevitably topple.
I’ve seen it popping up a bit recently. I’ve tried googling, but it’s all TED talks and the like.. I’d love it to be true, but it sounds a bit like the political equivalent of “This miracle superfruit cures all diseases!”
But if anyone here knows more about it I’d be interested to hear.
OT, but our Aussie commenters were talking about this in another thread and, unsurprisingly, MRAs have the worst take:
https://twitter.com/TakedownMRAs/status/1010073905543897088?s=19
Damn, I was hoping this had been another ‘shop job. 🙁
This quote from the article that wwth linked:
Has me going “wat?” I think maybe the former aide here got the quote slightly wrong; I suspect the grandmother’s joke was actually that the key to dating is to be interestED, not interestING.
My aunt, who passed two years ago (and boy do I miss her) was a person who was genuinely interested in other people. Little kids, perfect strangers, shop clerks, wait staff, few were immune to her good-humored and genuine interest. She kept in touch with anyone who was willing. When she retired, I think she must have spent hundreds just in postage every month. My dad accumulated boxes full of short letters stuffed in with clippings she thought would interest him. I have more than a few of my own. So do lots of other people I’ve never even met. That’s just what she was like.
I’m not nearly so gregarious as my beloved aunt, but I did take onboard that being interesting is not nearly as important as being interested because more people like someone taking an interest in them than feigning interest in what others think should interest them (about themselves, yet!)
It doesn’t surprise me that this tRump staffer thinks this way, though.
It doesn’t flatter her.
(Beeholde yee fielde inn whyche I keepe my schytte and knoowe that I have loste noone of ytt.)
On the bright side that means we can hate all Trumps aside from the young kids with equal fervor.
Remember a week or two ago when people were half-joking, half-seriously speculating that Donald Trump had put Melania in the hospital and it was being covered up? I remember a sudden outpouring of support and kind words for her. Now that good will seems to have evanesced. So I wonder, if it does ultimately come out that yes, he did physically abuse her, would people still be sympathetic and supportive, or has she burned enough good will that people will look at it as “shitty people being shitty to other shitty people?”
But remember, if we say anything not so nice about these people, the New York Times will give us a scolding.
The media has long sold Melania and Ivanka as the kinder gentler Trumps who might at some point rein Cheeto in. Whether they actually are kinder and gentler or if it’s fake, I don’t know. I suspect the latter, but really it doesn’t matter. It’s dangerous to sit back and count on them to keep him from doing something even more terrible than he’s already done. They either can’t or they won’t. It’s good to see public opinion finally starting to turn against them. If they were really good people, they would’ve been objecting publicly. They haven’t been. People are taking note of their this shit I think. I hope.
Am I weird for wondering what the hell she is doing wearing a jacket in the Southwest in the later part of June?
@wwth
Seriously that narrative that the wife is supposed to be the maiden that soothes the savage man beast is garbage. And yes it is good that the public is turning on them. Her actions were using her station in life to harm children who literally have no say in the matter. Children who were being separated from their parents, drugged and forced to live in conditions that is bound to kill them considering how much ICE wants to keep people away from their camps.
Back to the article it’s such a perfect picture of the people we’re facing. It’s cathartic in a way. We don’t have to negotiate and see the humanity in them. This is how they treat brown children. They don’t deserve anything but derision and scorn.
Otrame,
No. Others have mentioned that. Not only was in in the mid-90s in TX, it was mid-80s in Washington where she boarded the plane. At no point was there any reason for her to need to wear a heavyish looking fall jacket.
Karalora said:
It seems like they see any kind of criticism or disagreement as losing one’s shit.
@wwth:
They can legitimately be kinder gentler Trumps and still be horrible people; think about what they’re being compared with here.
They can be scraping the bottom of the barrel while Donny himself is busy digging his way through the Earth to visit North Korea.
Did the staffer say when they get out of work? If I ever find myself in Washington DC and have a free evening, I’d like to go and yell at them. It’s more fun than the Lincoln Memorial.
Could we possibly have an exception to comments policy regarding the particular topic of children concentration camps and the people responsible for it? Because I find myself lacking any appropriate way to truly express how I feel about what should be done to these fuckers.
No seriously, how isn’t ANYONE in the Democratic party screaming for impeachment??? This is straight up a human rights violation, a violation of the 8th Amendment, due process and just about anything else that would get ANYBODY ELSE immediately impeached within days.
This is why I don’t trust liberals and Democrats in general, they’re nothing more than the soft version of White supremacy. Even if it doesn’t have a chance to pass in this Congress, I feel like there should be a nonstop chorus of “IMPEACHMENT!”, if anything to pressure this abusive administration into backing out of this shit. But no, they’re not doing anything, so the Trumpanzees feel entirely empowered to treat Latinos like animals and down the spiral we go and go, straight into fascism.
[img
[/img]
A clothing company saw this bit of awfulness and made a response….
[/img]
https://www.themarysue.com/really-do-care-shirts/
….You can buy these shirts and support Immigrants and Refugees and help them.
[img
….Here’s the response shirt.
And remember….
[/img]
[img
Womp womp
Since it look like a staged thing to me, I would say it’s possible Trump asked her to wear that. And I could also see her accepting litteraly anything out of fear.
That don’t exonerate Melania, of course. If only because nothing in thoses theory is proven. But also because it’s so grotesquely evil that nothing can really pardon that. It’s more that I would hear her out if she suddenly disowned Trump.
Not gonna be too compassionate with her until it’s more than a plausible hypothesis anyhow. Good things the alt right clown do their childlish antic to make me remember that they are as incompetent as they are evil.
ChimericMind:
I can’t speak for “people”. But, just for myself:
1. Nobody deserves to be in an abusive relationship, even shitty garbage people.
2. I have no difficulty having sympathy for an abuser’s victim while simultaneously being critical of their own bad behaviour. People are not one-dimensional.
3. If we learn that the relationship is really that bad, it’ll call into question how much choice Melania has when she does shitty things. Perhaps she was ordered to wear that jacket?
It’s a million degrees down here in Texas; Why have a jacket on in the first place?
Does anyone feel a sort of Pygmalion (or Golem) effect kicking in? In an effort to troll “Snowflakes”, these guys seem to actually be turning into the Legion of Doom.
Space Force and all.
I think Melania’s fashion choice is the oddest thing I’ve ever seen by a first lady. Ever.