The Trump presidency has truly redefined “breaking news” in the most literal way.
Every day there is a new harm, a new insult, a new degradation heaped onto the American people. If you feel exhausted, disgusted and helpless, well then, know that they’re getting to you. All is working as planned.
Trump is the “chaos” president, after all. It is hard to focus, hard to organize, hard to cope during times of chaos. It is easy to sew fear, spread resentment and abandon truth all together when everyone is running around distracted and confused. Tuning out the chaos is often the only coping mechanism that seems possible. Unfortunately, that means letting the chaos win.
If you’re a straight white male, then this chaos may be working to your advantage, assuming you don’t give a rip for the rights of minorities and women (and, considering that white males voted overwhelmingly for Trump, the answer is pretty clear). But for everyone else, these are pretty terrifying times.
Trump, who actually claimed that he’d be great for the gays, has decidedly not been great for the gays. From his cabinet members to the extremist judges he’s been nominating, Trump has managed to assemble an anti-LGBT dream team.
And the MVP of this team is clearly Mike Pence. From the moment Trump announced his VP pick, anyone who’d been deluding themselves into thinking that Trump would be or could be a friend to LGBT people should have woken up. Pence has a long history of working against equality for LGBT people. He opposes marriage equality and discrimination protections for LGBT people. He believes in harmful reparative therapy and, in fact, while he was Indiana governor, sought to use HIV/AIDS prevention money for gay “cure” therapy instead. This attitude, coupled with an anti-science rejection of needle exchanges and a slash-and-burn approach to health funding, led to an HIV outbreak in Indiana.
Anyway, Pence’s horrible awfulness is well documented. You can Google it.
The new layer of this shit sandwich is that Trump apparently thinks Pence’s hatred of LGBT people is totally hilarious.
In Jane Mayer’s New Yorker piece titled “The Danger of President Pence,” there’s a description of a meeting, attended by both Trump and Pence, in which LGBT rights comes up. According to the article, Trump took the opportunity to try his hand at stand-up comedy material. “Don’t ask that guy,” Trump joked, pointing at Pence: “He wants to hang them all!”
Ha. Ha. Ha. Get it? Because Pence hates gays so much, he would like to literally murder them like they do in countries with the Sharia law Pence pretends to have nightmares about, except he basically wants the same kind of rule in the U.S. only with white Christian dominion. So funny. What a laugh riot. I cannot wait to tell this joke at the dinner table and explain to my son why the vice president thinks his moms should be killed and how the president thinks that’s funny.
Now, you might say, it’s not like Pence literally wants to lynch LGBT people, so no harm, no foul, right? Wrong. The fact that the president of the United States cares so little for the LGBT people of this country that the premise of our summary execution is fodder for a joke is beyond alarming. What this signals is that the anti-LGBT policies that Pence wants to see enacted will face no resistance from Trump. Granted, they never did. Trump will rubber stamp any and all moves to demean and dehumanize LGBT people.
As George Takei put it, “Not sure what’s more disturbing, that Donald would joke about such a thing or that he would pick a man with these views as his number two.”
More disturbing still is that millions of Americans voted for this hateful shit show. And nobody is going to get out of this mess squeaky clean.