The Silver Lining #1: Trump continues the work of the #MeToo Movement
Every predator's history will be parsed through the moment he taps them for his cabinet and I, personally, think that's beautiful.
It’s finally December, and I’ll speak for me: I can’t wait for this year to end. It’s a weird place to be, ready for a new year, but that new year already promising to be…challenging at best? As we await the next fresh hell, it’ll be important to find silver linings in the cloud of ass and so this is a new series I’ll do when called for to help us find anything positive to latch onto. Trust me, it won’t be easy, but I will do my best.
For the past month, Donald Trump has done a slow rollout of his cabinet picks. I’m calling them the junk drawer or the injustice league, personally, but suffice it to say it’s the ghouls who will be doing his bidding in dismantling our democracy and selling it for parts to Russia, China, and basically all the people your grandparents fought against in wars for decades to protect something or other here in the US.
And while the bleakbleakbleak reality that people whose negligence, incompetence, malice, and shortcomings have caused outsized harm to countless scores of people is tough to take, maybe there’s something good in there to soothe us.
Today’s revelation is that in picking the absolute worst scumbags to run our government, Donald Trump has inadvertently continued the work of the #MeToo movement.
If you’re a predator and a Trump loyalist, this is probably the worst-case scenario. Pete Hegseth with his uneven sideburns and bad breathalyzer results could’ve skated by making at least hundreds of thousands of dollars a year hosting shows old people have muted in the general room at their group homes while kids read to them. And when called to serve as SECRETARY OF DEFENSE, THE LITERAL HEAD OF THE US MILITARY (!!!!!!!) was outed by everyone AND HIS MOTHER (!!!!) as being abusive to women, a bad husband, and an alcoholic.
This, after Donald Trump BENEVOLENTLY (👀) nominated Matt Gaetz who has disgraced everyone around him by venmoing children to have sex with them and traffic them AlLeGeDlY, and purposely (wink implied) brought those chickens home to roost so intensely that he resigned from Congress with no plans to come back and a (hopefully not booming) Cameo account.
So many pundits in the wake of November 5th’s disappointing election results have claimed “woke” is to blame for these shifts nationally. If only women knew their place, if only Black people weren’t so uppity. If only trans people who have always existed suddenly stopped, then maybe dems could win an election!
But who besides Trump is putting trash predators on the curb so their criminal histories can be kicked directly into the street for naming and shaming purposes? Who has been more dedicated to this cause recently than him? And clearly it takes one to know one, he knows all of them!
I knew Linda McMahon was married to Vince because as a child of the 90s I watched a lot of wrestling. At some point I memory-holed her involvement in a scheme that saw loads of young men abused. And while she is still going to be the head of the Department of Education —while it lasts I guess? Because if they get rid of your department, what’s even your job?—at least we now know that her intentions have always been to harm kids.
TL;DR: When Trump sends his people, he’s not sending his best. But he is making sure people we were otherwise ambivalent about can be scrutinized publicly for being absolute pieces of trash. He fully is the reason Matt Gaetz got canceled. Pete is next. And maybe the republicans will get too spooked to defy their dear leader further than this, but that doesn’t mean we can’t talk about who these monsters actually are.
A silver lining. 🌥️
Thanks for reading,
A
Used to watch a lot of wrestling here, too, back in the day. The absurd, over-the-top-rope ridiculousness of those storylines—The Undertaker taking Stephanie McMahon as his “Dark Bride,” Stone Cold rampaging through that supermarket and calling for a “cleanup on Aisle 316” (was that after or before he beat Vince with a bedpan during a bedside visit)…so, so stupid, and so operatic in its bombast. Wish the McMahon dynasty didn’t turn out to be such shameless, unscrupulous, IRL heels. (I’d call it a face turn but I reckon they’ve always been shitheels at heart).