Ask A Genius 883: Voting and Loathsome Characters
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/02/03
[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: We’re talking about what you’re signing on for. If you support Trump or vote for Trump or vote for anybody but Biden, really, because a vote for anybody but Biden works in Trump’s favour. Back to the Future came out in about ’83, maybe, plus two sequels throughout the rest of the ’80s. The main villain in the movie, a character named Biff Tannen, looks and acts a lot like Trump, and the writer says he is based on Trump. So, Conservatives, Trump supporters like to say that people didn’t go after Trump until he became a political threat, that they didn’t like to try to dig up bad stuff on him and frame him because his supporters think that everything he’s accused of is bullshit. Still, it was only when he threatened to clean out the swamp that people went after him. This is a not-truefalse case in point because it is Back to the Future. Biff Tannen is one of the most loathsome characters in all the movies. He doesn’t kill a lot of people like Hannibal Lecter, but he’s just a huge asshole, and people knew Trump was an asshole enough to have one of the most successful movie franchises resting upon a Trump-like, Trump-based character being the villain 40 years ago.
So, people knew Trump was a huge butthole. Spy magazine in New York in the late ’70s mid into the ’80s made fun of him monthly; what a jerk and a buffoon he was, but nobody much cared. He placed a racist ad about the Central Park Five, which was a group of black teens who were falsely accused of beating up and maybe raping, I think. Anyway, they went to prison unjustly, and he went after them in a kind of race. Anyway, he was a big dickhead, but it didn’t matter because he was just a guy in the background of people’s lives who gave a fuck. The so-called persecution of Trump started when he started running for office. The first investigation into Trump by the FBI and a subsequent lawsuit by the Department of Justice began in 1972 with a settlement in 1973 for racist renting practices at Trump properties; the investigation to him and his dad.
So, he’s always been an asshole. Still, it came out recently in the two defamation trials of him being found liable for defaming E. Jean Carroll, a writer and a former beauty queen, a very attractive woman who’s now 80 and is still attractive for 80, but she’s freaking 80. So, Trump was able to or tried to claim that she wasn’t his type, and she was ugly, a monster and a lunatic. Still, he raped her 25 years ago or more, um, when she was a very pretty woman in her early 50s, and it wasn’t a rape trial but the integrity of the rape charges was on trial because the defamation included him denying that he raped her. She wrote a book, and she claimed that he raped her. Figuring out the truth of that, the defamation rested upon that, and a jury found that he had sexually assaulted her. The judge said that in common parliaments, what he did was rape her even though, in the language of the New York statute, its sexual assault because when he assaulted her, he pushed her face first into the wall of a dressing room of a New York Department Store. She couldn’t see what was going on, but she could feel that she was being penetrated, and she couldn’t tell whether it was his penis or his fingers. Under the New York statute, if it’s not your penis, it’s sexual assault and not rape, even though the judge said.
Well, it’s equivalent to rape, it’s freaking rape, but given the situation and given that Trump back then was a portly man not in the best shape, would have been 50 something himself, I find it much more likely that he penetrated her with his fingers instead of his penis that Trump has never done a fucking pushup, out of shape-ness, I doubt that he could get erect enough to achieve penetration and that in the case of Trump who’s been accused by 26 other women of sexual harassment, assault, and rape it is the feminist idea of rape which is it’s a crime of domination and power, not of sex. So, I think he penetrated her with his fingers.
It’s not a coincidence that the guy who installed the judges on the Supreme Court, who got rid of women’s bodily autonomy by getting rid of the right to abortion, is a serial sexual assaulter of women and in a misogynist way, not to get off sexually but to get off on the domination and cruelty. So, when you’re voting for Trump, you’re voting for a guy who just shoved his fingers into a woman to exert power and to humiliate her and who’s one of dozens of women who’s accused him of that, and he raped his first wife. She admitted so in a deposition. So, this is a deeply misogynist guy who gets off on cruelty, and you’re handing this guy control of nuclear weapons if you vote for him. When you look back on all the presidents, we’ve had racist presidents. The further back in history you go, the more likely they are to be racist. I mean, Woodrow Wilson, 110 years ago, was a racist president, but really, when you get back into the evolutionary War era, that was just part of the thinking of the time, so you’d probably have a lot of presidents who held racist beliefs. You’ve had presidents who’ve killed people in war, but that was part of the war.
I think Andrew Jackson probably killed quite a few. I haven’t read up on him; Native Americans, I think he was an Indian fighter, and he’s probably had racist opinions about who he was killing when he was fighting Indians, but for somebody to be as racist today as Trump is and to encourage racism as much as he does today and for him to be his misogynist. Clinton has settled rape charges with people. He was rape-y, but he liked to jizz, the guy is known for wanting to fuck people for sexual pleasure, but when Trump assaults people, it’s out of cruelty and just to dominate people. I guess what I’m saying is that if you still support this guy after everything we know about him, you’re maybe 25% of the way to being a Nazi. You’re maybe 25% as much of a piece of shit, more than 25% as somebody who is a run-of-the-mill Nazi party member in Germany in the 1930s where you know about the cruelty and you know about the unfairness, and you’re okay with it because Hitler’s your guy. If Trump’s your guy, you’re quite a bit on the way to being as bad as a freaking regular Nazi.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I always dislike the comparison to Nazis.
Rosner: I think there’s a term for it that if you compare somebody to a Nazi, you’ve lost the argument. Still, I don’t buy it in the case of Trump because he’s given every indication of being a psychopath and enjoying cruelty for the sake of cruelty wanting to be a dictator, ginning up racism in his base and having cruel policies, like family separation. When families came to the border under Trump of undocumented immigrants, kids were separated from their parents, and they were sent elsewhere to live with families, I guess, in the US, and records were not kept of where they were sent, of who they were. They were just shipped off, and at least 600 families had their kids taken away from them with no way of finding out where they went. I believe that there are still 200 of those missing kids, kids ripped away from their families because their parents tried to come to the US, and they were kidnapped. Suppose you want to tell me that that’s not Nazi-esque. In that case, I’m going to say no, it fucking is and that he’s given every indication that he’ll be worse if he’s made president again. He contributed to the deaths of more Americans than any previous president. A million more Americans died under Trump in four years than under any previous president. I might be exaggerating a little bit; it might only be 900,000, and change as 12 million died under Trump compared to the most ever before, which was about 11 million in four years, and only a third of that increase was due to any increases in the US population.
So, he’s been our deadliest president and the dying because of Trump didn’t stop when he quit being president. You’ve got hundreds of thousands of more people who died of COVID-19 because he politicized COVID-19. Then you can add in people who died in other countries because his politicization of COVID-19 spread beyond America’s borders. So, he’s been our deadliest president and that in itself is Hitler-esque. Hitler was responsible for the deaths of about 30 million people. Trump’s been responsible for the deaths of more than a million, maybe a million five, maybe more than that. So, yeah, it’s not in the Hitler numbers. Still, the US has been a very lucky nation in that the deadliest events in our history haven’t been as deadly as the deadliest events in European history, where Russia lost tens of millions of people in World War II and tens of millions before World War II under Stalin’s murder sprees. Until COVID-19, the deadliest event in the US was the Civil War, which killed about three-quarters of a million people, followed by World War II, which killed about 410,000 people. Now Covid has killed about a million five Americans, which is more than us deaths in all our Wars combined.
So, that’s just in terms of compared to other events in US history; I would argue that Trump is pretty fucking Hitler-y, or at least his, and you can maybe make a more effective argument against Trump as Hitler. I think it’s a more persuasive argument that his supporters at this point are like Nazis, Nazi lite, still pretty fucking Nazi-esque in their support of this guy who has given every indication that he will do cruel and dictatorial shit and try to exact vengeance against the people who don’t like him if he’s made president again.
[Recording End]
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