Stop Crying "Several Wolves!"

Exaggeration doesn't help wolf-neutralization efforts

Above: A screenshot of a segment that aired Sunday on MSNBC.

I would describe the current state of the presidential race this way: There is a wolf. Many people — Democrats, centrist Republicans, and even former members of the Trump administration — are crying “wolf!” And others — namely Resistance Democrats and the more incontinence-challenged members of the media — are crying “several wolves!” Sometimes, these people even cry “several wolves with switchblades and uzis and they’re biting people and giving them AIDS!” Trump’s backers respond by crying “They’re lying about the wolves!” And at that point, the first group is forced to chime back in and say “They are indeed exaggerating the threat posed by wolves but it is factually true that there is one wolf, who presents a serious threat that is, to be fair, probably not existential.” Which is not the type of pithy message that wins elections.

This dynamic was on display in response to Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday night. Here’s the beginning of a piece that MSNBC ran after the event.

Jesus woodworking Christ, MSNBC — get a grip. The main linkage seems to be simply “Madison Square Garden”; I guess if the rally had been at the Barclays Center, there would be no story. I once saw Radiohead at Madison Square Garden — I suppose that justifies a story saying “In 2019, scores of mopey 40-somethings packed Madison Square Garden to hear five pale English guys sing about robots. Now, against that backdrop of history, Donald Trump held a rally.”

Much of the fallout from the rally focused on comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who did a Don-Rickles-if-Rickles-completely-sucked-style routine. Here’s the joke that’s getting the most attention:

Holy fuck that is a terrible joke. Terrible as in “dickish” and terrible as in “not funny” — in fact, it’s dickish because it’s not funny. The key to getting Rickles-style insult comedy to land is that it has to be funny enough that everyone understands that you’re just goofing around; here’s a clip of Zeus of the Edgelords Anthony Jeselnik explaining how that works. Hinchcliffe doesn’t wink at the crowd,¹ he doesn’t layer in irony to suggest that the joke is on him — he just comes across as a guy calling Puerto Rico an “island of garbage”. And he’s not helped by the fact that he’s at a political rally, not a comedy club, where the “I’m just fucking around” forcefield is severely weakened.

Nonetheless: It was a joke. Maybe Hinchcliffe meant what he said, maybe he didn’t, and we could debate what it means that Trump booked this particular comedian in the first place, but the fact remains that Hinchcliffe is a standup comedian who told a joke. That’s crucial context. But that context is omitted from the Washington Post’s headline about the event:

The Post article says that Hinchcliffe is one of “several opening speakers who lobbed sexist, racist and otherwise demeaning insults at a variety of targets.” Notice the weasliness of that construction: Lumping “sexist” (bad!), “racist” (bad!), and “otherwise demeaning” (meh) together allows the Post to tie relatively mundane statements to the really bad stuff. It’s like a high school principal saying “We searched lockers and 100 contained either meth, heroin, or Triscuits.” Okay…did you find 99 boxes of Triscuits and one locker full of hard drugs? The Post’s construction conflates clearly-dickish-but-not-racist stuff said by other speakers (e.g. David Rem calling Harris “the devil”) to the stereotypes used in Hinchcliffe’s act. And Hinchcliffe was attempting jokes. The effect of these distortions is to make the rally seem like Nazi Rally Part Two: Goose-Step at the Garden when it was actually AM radio-style invective that is shitty but common.

Exaggeration makes it easy to write off all criticism of Trump as liberal overreaction. Sanewashing Trump’s glaring unfitness for office is a thriving industry, and that sanewashing mostly focuses on overstatements from the left. For example, here’s Fox News pointing out that the “fascist” or “Hitler” label has been lobbed at Republicans including Gerald Ford and Mitt Romney, despite the fact that calling those guys “fascist” makes about as much sense as calling them “hot Asian MILFs”. The big difference, of course, is that Trump didn’t just get called “fascist” by some blogger at PenOfTheWorker.truth — he was called that by both his Chief of Staff and his Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Fox is making the “boy who cried wolf” argument while defining “boy” as “anyone in the world, including some bandana-wearing ANTIFA twit who also calls Kamala ‘Holocaust Harris’.”

I don’t think that Trump will usher in a fascist dystopia. I don’t think that there will be concentration camps or an American Kristallnacht or intensely homoerotic youth indoctrination camps. Consider that implementing a fascist vision takes work, and Trump’s work ethic makes Homer Simpson look like Thomas Edison. Trump spent his first term watching Fox News until noon while farting into the presidential mattress, not laying the groundwork for the Thousand Year Reich. Hitler had a warped ideology, while Trump has five lonely neurons trying to communicate with each other across the vast emptiness of his frontal lobe. Trump isn’t Hitler partly because to achieve Hitler’s level of evil, you need to be much smarter and harder working than Trump is on his best day.

But that doesn’t mean Trump won’t do bad stuff. Here are some thuggish things that I could imagine Trump doing, all of which are based on things he’s already done:

• The election comes down to one or two states, and Trump successfully pressures officials in those states to certify him as the winner even though mail-in ballots — which disproportionately break Democratic — are still being counted;

• Trump fires Jack Smith, the special prosecutor who has charged Trump with two felonies, and then has the Justice Department dismiss the cases;

• The FTC and Justice Department take a series of actions that greatly benefit Twitter and Fox News and punish outlets like CNN and The Washington Post;

• An important vote comes down to a few members of Congress, those members receive death threats, and the Justice Department does nothing while Trump hints at pardons for people who make threats;

• Trump convinces some authority — a police department or possibly even the military — to forcibly break up a protest that isn’t breaking the law.

Some people will read this and think “So what? How does my life change if Jack Smith gets fired?” It changes because America’s rules-based political system has served us well. Problems that get solved with violence in other countries get solved with boring C-SPAN shit in the U.S. I’m not saying that we’re one step away from having warlord armies comprised of coked-up 12 year-olds riding through the capital on tanks, but a breakdown in rules weakens the people’s control of government. Our laws were made through a democratic process, so flaunting the rules is flaunting the people’s will. And that’s just the effect of Trump’s lawlessness; I haven’t even mentioned his Smörgåsbord of Idiotic Policy, which includes selling out Ukraine and reverting to the tax system that we used when we were a tobacco-and-beaver-pelt-based economy.

I think the tendency towards exaggeration comes partly from the desire to believe that we’re living in interesting times. It’s human to want to feel like we matter, and part of that is feeling like we’re witnessing major historic events. Movies don’t get made about the Gadsden Purchase or the Grover Cleveland administration; if you want future generations to sing your praises, then you need to be part of something big. And that’s partly why the fact that Trump is racist, ignores the law, and knows less about policy than a bathtub full of dildos gets exaggerated to “he’s Hitler!” Which happens to be just about the only comparison that makes Trump look good. And I think that probably the main effect of that comparison is to make people discount a threat that is actually real.

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1. “Wink at the crowd” doesn’t literally mean wink — it means to do something subtle to indicate that you’re joking around. Jimmy Carr does sort of a big-bulging-eyes move that is a wink.