The Video is Part of a Bigger Picture

The timeline behind the account that created the now-infamous violent Trump video paints a familiar picture.

An amateur meme maker makes a viral video.

Reddit's r/the_donald welcomes him in, offers money and community, and asks for more.https://t.co/Zb2apRUYcO

— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) October 14, 2019

Although in a way, the fake-violence Trump video shown at a gathering at Trump Doral last week is just a kind of specific outrage-generating viral thing that we should be used to by now from Team Trump, it's both kind of awkward and serious at the same time. Nobody thinks Trump is going to go hog wild and literally shoot journalists and politicians and whatnot, even if he did boast that he could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and not lose voters. What he was saying is--his supporters hate the things he does. His grievances are their grievances. They would applaud him because whoever he shot, they would understand. The video is really a kind of wish-fulfillment meme representing Trump's Twitter targets. In an online world where headlines of news stories and blogs alike blare things "So-and-so SLAYS Critic with a Comeback", we know the headline does not actually means that a well-known person has left their nemesis in a bloody puddle. They've been shaded at best.

This is the kind of thing that the whole "triggering libs" idea boils down to. It's superficially goofy--here's mass mayhem from a Hollywood movie. Here are the murders of corporate logos and effigies of famous public persons. Do you want an emotional support woobie to deal with it? Trump's not physically going to do those things!

He's just going to incite others to do them, silly! Because the thing is, when he goes after the press or Black Lives Matter or Antifa or suggests a possible "civil war", he's seeding the ground that has already been made fertile by tons of fringe right-wing media bullshit. Much of which he has embraced, including the fringe-y edges of the right-wing social media that this video came from.

This is the unusual part, where Trump differs from other high-level GOP figures--he's mainstreaming the batshit, as opposed to holding it at a distance. Instead of trying to deal in the real world, he has so meshed himself with conspiracy theories and paranoid fantasies that it's kind of hard to tell which ones are his own pathologies and which are being used cynically to muddy the waters of fact and enrage the enrageable. Maybe this is why McCain and Romney feature in this orgy of faux-violence--they failed because they didn't go far enough to appease the permanently aggrieved people who want scalps for, I dunno. Nixon's resignation, Bork's SCOTUS seat, Clarence Thomas's Coke can, Vince Foster, Ruby Ridge, Agenda 21 and the God-fearing folks who disappeared in a Walmart because of Jade Helm, and why isn't anyone discussing that over PIZZA, huh?

I think Trump basically wants violence to happen and he likes it that people are mad, poorly-informed and looking for a hero even if his head is stuffed full of incendiary bullshit. He's very much a GOP mascot this way. His fecklessness is a gift.

I don't fucking get it, but then again, I really never have. It's deplorable, and when people say "The White House renounces this video and knew nothing about it" whatever. The curtains in the Oval Office, the Resolute Desk protests. The Rose Garden repudiates. The ghosts of the Founding Fathers are shocked! Shocked!

Trump gets off on that sort of thing, and we all know it.