For a great many years, the silliest people in perhaps the whole country were the snowflakes on campus. They so loved peace and justice that they were driven to riot against those who opposed them. And they were so fragile and delicate that they had to be saved from the stress of democratic contention. How? Using actual censorship and “safe spaces.”
But their pride of place lasted only until last week, when the college snowflakes were unseated by perhaps their least likely successors: the intense and most fervid of President Trump’s supporters. They revel no end in his rants against others, but collapse in mass faints and cold sweats and intense fits of anguish at any signs of a critique against Trump.
How strange has this been? In July, the New York Times ran a piece on “The 487 People, Places, and Things Donald Trump Has Insulted on Twitter,” detailing each last attack and description and to whom it applied.
The longest list going was given to Hillary Clinton (who to be fair had been running against him), with shade being cast also upon Bill, her husband; on Jeb and George Bush; on the congressional leadership of both of the parties; on Ted Cruz and his wife and his father (who after all had helped to kill JFK); on his GOP rivals in the primary season; on almost all of the networks, magazines, and newspapers; on Miss Universe; on football players who knelt during the national anthem; on war heroes living and dead and their family members; and of course on John McCain.
“He’s not a war hero,” as Trump put it. “He’s a war hero because he got captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”
None of this seemed to bother Trump’s backers, who took it as proof that their man was a “fighter,” even if all of his “fighting” was done with his mouth. On the news of McCain’s death last week, Trump took his time about an announcement and then stuck his thumbs in the eyes of McCain’s friends and backers by raising the flag at the White House after a very few minutes, letting it stand as a giant “Up Yours” proclamation on the part of the White House, against the large sea of flags that had been properly lowered on all of the buildings around.
To most fans of Trump, this passed as normal and even as feisty behavior, with the genuine sin being Meghan McCain’s address in defense of her father. Trump’s flunkies compared it to the Wellstone memorial, at which Democrats booed the Republicans who had come to pay their respects to a beloved colleague and urged a vote for Democrats.
No one at the McCain ceremonies told anyone else how to vote, but urged both sides to dial down on the partisan rhetoric and think of the country. Mysteriously, it was this that was taken by the Trump snowflakes as a blast at their hero, as if the charge of caring for oneself more than country could apply to no one but he.
“It’s pretty wild how people can hear speaker after speaker talk about decency, transcendence of party and finding common ground and take *that* as an attack on Trump,” Erick Erickson wrote recently. Having begun on the Left, the Snowflake legacy is safe in the hands of Trump Nation, where it may stay for a very long time.
