The ‘Slimeball’ Effect

The president’s ratings are the highest this year. I guess “might makes right” is still the byword for his supporters and even for some Americans who should know better.

Trump gets backed into a corner with all his loud-mouthing about how “the missiles are coming” and has to actually attack Syria and blow up some supposed chemical weapons sites and then crow “Mission Accomplished.”

It didn’t seem to bother him that Bush crowed the same refrain and – guess what? – mission was far from accomplished. Trump said he used that phrase even with its negative historic connotation because he just liked the sound of it.

This guy has a great ear and a way with words, huh? I mean, what other president has such an innate sense of poetry that he could call the ex-head of the FBI a “slimeball”? Echoes of Lincoln at his Gettysburg Address and FDR telling us we had “nothing to fear except fear itself,” no? If Donald Trump is remembered for anything, it will doubtless be for his unmatched oratorical genius – and his unrivaled hair, a monument to the cement-sprayed comb-over intricacy of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

But let’s go back to the Syrian missile strikes that so boosted his ratings from “dismal” to “pretty dismal.” Many Americans like their beer cold and endless, their cars big and shiny and fast, and their responses to any problems fast and violent. I remember the only time I was at the Alamo. It was like a shrine to violent death and the weapons that produced it even way back then were all in cases and handily labeled for our edification.

Take Robert DeNiro. He hates Donald Trump with the deep scorn of a Manhattan player for a jerkoff from Queens. And what did he say would be his response to Trump? “I’d like to punch him in the face.” Not debate him or try to reason with him, but just punch him in the mouth.

Americans are weaned to believe that if you got a problem, go right to fists. Or it used to be fists. Now it’s big-bore handguns. Those TV shots of missiles hurtling into Syria and the flames and carnage they begot were right in too many of Americans’ wheelhouses. How many people have you heard say that the response to any country giving us problems is “to bomb them back to the Stone Age”?

That’s what passes for the politics of too many Americans and a vast, vast majority of Trump supporters. They – and “we” in many senses – have become so inured to the ceaseless violence we are spoon-fed from the cradle to the grave by television and the movies and the print media that firing off missiles at Syria with no concern for so-called “collateral damage” or pre-emptively nuking North Korea even if it means horrendous loss to both North and South Korea seem like logical and rational responses to so many Americans that this flurry of airborne violence far across the world is enough to shore up Trump’s ratings.

That and calling James Comey a “slimeball.”