Kathy Griffin did a stupid thing by way of her Trump beheading stunt.
An effigy of then-President Barack Obama was burned by a hateful priest a number of years ago, though the denunciation by the right was anemic. This was back when Donald Trump was a birther, trading on innuendo designed to evoke suspicion about the then-president’s origin. By asking the question, he was able to ride suspicion about where this supposed secret Muslim communist came from without ever having to own it, and without some supporters ever having had to feel as though these hunches were based in anything that looked or felt like overt racism.
I bring up the effigy not to exonerate Griffin — it was dumb and, even by the standards of someone who enjoys a good punk rock spectacle, as lame and pointless as it was in bad taste — but to illustrate the phenomenon of selective outrage on the part of the president’s dwindling base of support.
You may have also, in the aftermath of this most recent nonsense, heard folks bring up the time Ted Nugent, an ardent and outspoken supporter of Trump, dropped an innuendo-laden rant that made it sound a lot like he was in support of violent removal of Obama to a crowd of folks who are really into guns and talk loosely about revolution if access to those guns is ever restricted by the government.
What is left of support for Trump is, and always has been, a masterful construction of outrage and backlash based on false equivalence. Threats were made and effigies burned and Trump supporters, and those who would go on to support him, largely looked the other way. Now, they believe Griffin, who made a stupid, attention-grabbing art project, should be taken down.
The significance, though, goes beyond anything Nugent and Griffin have done.
The core of the president’s dog-and-pony show is built upon maintaining and managing a spectacular level of disproportionate response. Hillary Clinton’s email “scandal” was enough to justify chants of “lock her up,” but every step of this Russia investigation has revealed something literally shocking at nearly every level of Trump’s administration and the downplaying by his backers has been spectacular.
It’s not like I expect a rational response, because I don’t believe this outrage was built upon rational grounds, but where are the “Benghazi!” folks in the wake of the levels of insecurity and exposure this administration appears to be committed to?
With the introduction of Obamacare, a conservative, market-based compromise on health care reform, then President Obama provided proof to folks of the birther ilk that, yes, he was indeed a secret Marxist, hell-bent on taking the country down from the inside. Today Trump returns Russian diplomatic housing, which was purportedly being used for intelligence purposes, back to Russia.
The administration’s straight-faced commitment to selling what is not theirs has provided for them at least a temporary opportunity to loot the spoils made possible by access to the Oval Office. It has granted itself, staff-wide, ethics waivers so that the mixing of government business and personal gain is no longer interrupted by pesky ethical standards.
This is what we get, after all, for buying the line that the government can and should be run like a corporation.
Support for this administration, and objection to it, is becoming much less about ideological affiliation and difference, and more about commitment or aversion to the truth and proportionate response. It’s about concern for security, integrity and ethics, or aversion to these things. It’s about intentionally reading performance art, albeit in bad taste, as a credible threat while looking the other way on actual threats, rhetorical and otherwise. Increasingly, “both sides” looks less like right versus left, and more and more like those who trade in selective outrage to support Trump’s sinking ship and everybody else.
Alex Steed has written about and engaged in politics since he was a teenager. He’s an owner-partner of a Portland-based content production company and lives with his family, dogs and garden in Cornish.