To Effectively Fight Against Trump, You Have To Fight Against More Than Trump

Why many of the protests we're seeing don't matter

(For the video version of this column, go here)

If you listen to the right wing right now, Donald Trump is the best president to ever live—Including Van Buren’s glory days when he put a stop to the Aroostook War with Canada that consisted of throwing dirty beavers at each other from the banks of a frozen lake.

Meanwhile if you listen to the liberals across this country, Trump (with Elon Musk riding sidesaddle inside his codpiece) is the most horrific president since Hitler mated with Winston Churchill, producing a bastard child that was racist in seven different ways. (Whoa, that line pissed off everyone.)

So should you hate most of what Trump is doing (even though there are exceptions like ending the proxy-war in Ukraine)? Yes. But here’s the part that’s going to blow liberals’ minds—To effectively fight against Trump, you have to fight against more than Trump. If you fight back against just Trump, you achieve nothing.

Receipts? Let’s do it.

Let’s go through some of Trump’s worst actions so far. To begin with - his assault on immigrants. We’ve seen ICE raids increase across the nation. People who don’t look the right color are being rounded up—Including Native Americans. Ummmm, question. …To what home country are they planning to deport them? That’s going to be a short flight. Probably just a bunch of neckless ICE agents staring at a piece of paper going, “Where da hell is Turtle Island? Is that near Dallas?”

Trump has put absolutely insane lunatics in to manage his persecution of immigrants, like naming Tom Homan, his former acting ICE director, as the administration’s ‘border czar’. (“Border Czar” is a conflicting message. “Let’s name the guy in charge of hating other countries after a Russian ruler. It’s like if your veterinarian’s name were Dr. Foie Gras.)

Anyway, this Tom Homan “...[argued] that separating children from their caregivers would be an effective means of discouraging illegal border crossings.” Wow. It’s tough to come up with a sentence more putrid than that unless you’re a genius like Kanye West.

So, if you’re furious about this and you fight your hardest to get rid of Donald Trump. And you win. What will happen? Maybe we’ll go back to the Biden years. Yes! When he deported more people than Trump did.

Wait, no, that’s bad. Don’t do that. But maybe we’ll go all the way back to the Obama years—Those good days when he was known as deporter and chief. And he appointed a man named (checks notes) Tom Homan as ICE’s executive associate director. And you might think, “Well, much like the movie Mulholland Drive, Obama must not have known what Homan was really about.” Yet “By 2014 under the Obama administration, Homan had begun to argue that separating children from their caregivers would be an effective means of discouraging illegal border crossings.”

Oooooh. That was under Obama? Well, I bet Obama booted him to the curb. They couldn’t allow that kind of racist shit-headery in their liberal wonder-world! …Well actually, “In 2015, President Obama gave [Homan] a Presidential Rank Award as a Distinguished Executive.” You see, this horror show did not start with Donald Trump.

To effectively fight against Trump, you have to fight against more than Trump.

Let’s move on to Trump’s racist rhetoric. He called some nations “shit-hole countries,” after the Charlottesville terror attack by a white supremacist that killed Heather Heyer, Trump said, “there were very fine people on both sides.” And in his second term, he seems to be replacing most anyone who’s not white. And that’s just the beginning.

So we need to fight back against Trump for being racist! Okay, great. Get your banners and your bumper stickers and let’s do it. Anyone who has the misfortune of getting stopped behind my car at a red light is gonna get an education! If only more Gazans had those “COEXIST” bumper stickers, I doubt Israel would’ve dared mess with them.

But again, if you just defeat Trumpism, then you’ll put us back into a long list of racist presidents. Joe Biden pushed through the laughably racist crime bill in 1994. Even true-love of the liberal world Franklin Roosevelt signed off on Japanese internment camps for anyone of Japanese descent. President Woodrow Wilson was a proud racist and even “…wrote a history textbook praising the Confederacy and, in particular, the Ku Klux Klan.” (In his defense though, he was mainly praising how white they kept their hoods—Even when eating barbecue!)

But if you think what Trump’s doing to the federal government is bad, Woodrow Wilson re-segregated it. “…he allowed his cabinet to segregate the Treasury, the Post Office, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing (used to be more important when there was / engraving and printing), the Navy, the Interior, the Marine Hospital, the War Department (DOD) and the Government Printing Office.” So of course Wilson was racist, he segregated his interior.

But it’s really the actions, not the words, of the US government that are the most racist. The genocide of the Native Americans, slavery, dropping the two atom bombs that needed to be dropped less than Drake’s 21st album. The atom bombs were incredibly racist seeing as they were only acceptable to most Americans because it was non-white innocent people murdered in the hundreds of thousands.

Arguably the most racist thing Donald Trump has done in his short time so far in office is publicly announce his plan for ethnic cleansing in Gaza. He announced that because he views Palestinians as disposable. Yet Biden oversaw and facilitated that genocide for over a year! Let’s not argue who’s racist and who’s race-ish. They’re all fucking awful.

So if you want to fight against Trump’s racism, you have to fight against more than Trump.

Here’s another thing Trump has done that caused a stir - He fired the Chairman of The Joint Chiefs and other military brass. If you’re only fighting back against Trump, then your response is “He’s trying to get more control of the military. How dare he!” But of course the President, whether you like it or not, is supposed to have control of the military. If it were up to me, I would prefer Donny Boy have control over nothing including his bladder. But alas that’s not how our so-called democracy works. …Oh, that’s right, he doesn’t have control of his bladder. Totally forgot about that.

If you’re only protesting Trump, then your next response is “We need to take to the streets and demand Air Force General CQ Brown Jr. return as head of the Joint Chiefs!” But what does that really achieve? Every higher up at the Pentagon has been a bloodthirsty maniac since they were a toddler. All the Pentagon ruling class are sociopaths. Do you think anyone else could get a top job overseeing our military? Do you think a dreadlocked yoga instructor was on the short list?

Do you think an entrepreneur who sells intention water out of the back of their Mazda Miata almost got the gig as Chairman of The Joint Chiefs?!

No! It’s trained and eager killers and nothing less. It’s enthusiastic killers. You couldn’t even get that job if you were a reluctant killer. Just like, “Yeah, I guesssss I’ll bomb children in Afghanistan. I mean, if I have time after I rip this bong.” …He’s not gettin’ the job.

Getting angry about the head of the Joint Chiefs changes nothing. You have to replace the system—the military industrial complex—which is a trillion-dollar-a-year death machine.

To effectively fight against Trump, you have to fight against more than Trump.

Let’s do one more. Trump just recently ended accountability for federal law enforcement. It’s unprecedented! The Justice Department shut down the federal law enforcement misconduct tracker.

Federal law enforcement includes everything from ICE to the Coast Guard to Homeland Security to the FBI to the CIA to the little-known Federal Glory Hole Investigators who make sure gas station glory holes maintain a certain level of glory.

Anyway, getting rid of the Federal Misconduct Tracker does sound really bad. It sounds worse than that time Jewel tried her hand at death metal.

Trump’s move is unprecedented since the misconduct tracker was first instituted (checks notes) over a year ago. A year ago?! That’s when dinosaurs roamed the planet.

And in that year, has a lot changed in the misconduct of federal law enforcement? Have the Capitol Police stopped stomping on activists? Have ICE agents been helping migrants carry their groceries? Has the CIA switched from training Nazis in the woods of Ukraine to potty-training war orphans in Syria? (I’m gonna wager not.)

It doesn’t matter much if you track misconduct unless you do anything …about it. I track my calories but seeing as I do nothing with the information, I’m still on the cusp of having my first breast. (For some reason it’s just the left one at the moment, but I’m thinking if I increase my Chunky Monkey intake, I might be symmetrical again by Easter.)

Point is - Have the feds been on their best behavior because of this tracker? Was the FBI acting like gentlemen over the past year because of this tracker? Of course not. Most of the dystopian clown-show that is these federal agencies’ day-to-day does not include much accountability for misconduct to begin with. The tracker could only track things the agencies actually reported. And most of the time, they just ignore misconduct. Plus, the worst parts of their behavior is usually not considered misconduct. It’s just considered - wait for it - conduct! Ninety percent of the worst things the CIA does are their job! (Kinda like John Cena.)

When the capitol police beat up an old woman for carrying a strongly worded sign, they view that as a job well done. Do I wish Trump had not shredded the misconduct tracker? Sure. Do I think it makes any more difference than Aaron Rodgers coming to the Jets? Nope. You see, you have to fight the system of Federal Law Enforcement, which has largely been unaccountable forever.

Trump and his goons are repugnant but…

To effectively fight against Trump, you have to fight against more than Trump.

For the video version of this column, go here.