President Trump’s greatest power is his ability to reduce his critics into bubbly, spittle-flecked puddles of screaming fury. He doesn’t even have to say a word.
The president’s mere presence drives his critics insane with rage. So insane, in fact, they’ll attack the issues they hold dear just so they can “resist” him better.
Consider, for example, an op-ed published this week in the LGBT magazine Out, which attacks the Trump administration’s new campaign to decriminalize homosexuality worldwide.
“Trump’s Plan to Decriminalize Homosexuality Is an Old Racist Tactic,” reads the article’s headline.
U.S. ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell, who is gay, is going to help lead the campaign, starting first with a “strategy meeting” with European activists, the State Department told reporters this week. The campaign aims to target Iran specifically over its human rights abuses, including its zero-tolerance anti-gay laws.
When I say zero-tolerance, I mean zero-tolerance. Iran hanged a 31-year-old recently who was found to be in violation of the country’s anti-gay laws, something Grenell himself characterized as a “barbaric public execution.”
You would think an LGBT magazine would be on board with any initiative to decriminalize homosexuality. But you’d be wrong. Trump is president, and he must be “resisted”!
“Rather than actually being about helping queer people around the world, the campaign looks more like another instance of the right using queer people as a pawn to amass power and enact its own agenda,” writes Out’s Matthew Rodriguez.
He adds:
Spivak was referencing the British colonial agenda in India. But Grennell’s attack might be a case of white men trying to save brown gay men from brown straight men, to the same end.
Yeah, shame on the U.S. ambassador to Germany for trying to save people from being murdered by the state.
Rodriguez continues, comparing Grenell’s “sudden interest” in Iran’s anti-gay laws, it’s not sudden, to how the president reacted in 2016 to the Pulse Nightclub massacre. Back then, Rodriguez alleges, the GOP nominee exploited the deaths of 49 gay men “as a way to galvanize support for an anti-Muslim agenda rather than find a way to support LGBTQ+ people.”
“Though plans may or may not exist to invite local LGBTQ+ advocacy groups to the table, that they are not there at the plan’s inception is dangerous,” Rodriguez writes. “Inviting European activists to solve problems in the Middle East, African or the Caribbean — which, once again, are not monolithic in the slightest — is a toothless effort, more PR than progressive.”
The article goes on like that for some time, alleging that Trump and Grenell are interested only in being anti-Muslim. Rodriguez also claims the Trump initiative “is denoted in a colonial sense of paternalism.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, the author never gets around to explaining why that is. Absurdly enough, Rodriguez also suggests that Iran is not so bad on its treatment of gay people (what?) and that the Iranian people are responsible anyway, not their government (what?).
I don’t know what it is about Trump, but he manages to inspire the absolute worst in those who oppose him. Whether they’re behaving like petty imbeciles or arguing on the behalf of a brutal theocratic dictatorship, the president’s superpower is his ability to reveal his enemies to be just as bad, if not considerably worse, than they say he is.
