The president’s scatological No Kings publish expresses the ugly emotion fueling his authoritarian rule.
Donald Trump speaks to the press on the White Home on September 11, 2025.
(Yasin Ozturk / Anadolu by way of Getty Pictures)
On Saturday, practically 7 million Individuals took to the streets within the largest one-day protest within the nation’s historical past to oppose Donald Trump’s authoritarianism beneath the slogan “No Kings!” Regardless of the absurd Republican smear of protesters as violent extremists, the marches have been peaceable, patriotic, and even perhaps too high-minded for their very own good. Definitely, the phrase “No Kings” evokes a venerable civic-minded small-r republican heritage that transcends ideological and social gathering strains. At finest, anti-Trump ardour is merely the opening for a bigger technique of liberals radicalizing. The clear mainstream enchantment of No Kings led right-wing pundits to shift their party line from earlier complaints that the protests have been filled with antifa anarchists who “hate America” to mockery that the occasion was dominated by old, white people and thus missing in vitality.
Trump himself has had two opposite responses to the No Kings marches. In an interview with Fox recorded on Friday, Trump contested the critique that he’s a would-be monarch, saying, “They’re referring to me as a king. I’m not a king.”
However on Saturday, Trump posted on Reality Social a disturbing video, virtually actually created by AI, that indicated he was much less inclined to refute the accusation of royal aspirations than to revel within the fantasy of being a sovereign who might degrade his topics with impunity. The New York Instances offered a typically euphemistic description of this “pretend video,” writing delicately that it “confirmed him carrying a crown and flying a jet labeled ‘King Trump’ that dumps brown liquid on protesters.” The newspaper went on, with solely barely extra candor, to clarify that the video depicted the president “dropping a brown liquid resembling feces onto the heads of protesters, who seemed to be gathered in a metropolis.”
Present Concern
As distasteful as Trump’s video is, it deserves to be talked about with out evasion: It’s a fantasy of Trump as a king who drops shit on peacefully protesting residents exercising their First Modification rights. In different phrases, Trump was shit-posting in each sense of the phrase.
The traditional response to such posts is to tut-tut them as breaches of presidential norms and civility. However such prim rejoinders are irrelevant. Trump was twice elected president. Whether or not we prefer it or not, he is the norm, and mourning for a misplaced period of politeness has completed nothing to cease him.
The traditional protection by Trump’s supporters to such vulgarity is to dismiss it as a joke and ask why the president’s critics don’t have a humorousness. However this MAGA apologia is not any extra convincing than liberal opprobrium.
Trump’s jokes are hardly ever humorous—and so they all the time inform us one thing about him. As we’ve been taught by Sigmund Freud and Gershon Legman (the good exegetist of soiled limericks), jokes are hardly ever harmless. Comedy has a latent in addition to a blatant which means, and clowning is a manner of giving public vent to—in addition to legitimizing—feelings (typically nervousness and anger) which can be socially unacceptable. Following this line of thought, the thinker Jean-Paul Sartre cogently noted in his Anti-Semite and Jew (1944) that Nazis typically used absurdly over-the-top expressions of anti-Jewish hatred—concepts that appeared so fantastical they elicited nervous laughter—to make antisemitism palatable.
It’s placing to distinction Trump’s sickening publish with a genuinely satirical deployment of scatological humor mocking kingly energy. In 1831, Honoré Daumier, one of many biggest of all caricaturists, drew a lithograph titled Gargantua that depicted King Louis-Philippe I as a grotesque Rabelaisian large who consumes gold and pours out stool within the type of pretend titles of the Aristocracy for individuals who paid him. Daumier was jailed for this good depiction of royal corruption. Daumier’s drawing has the tonic and cleaning pressure of all nice satire as a result of it upholds immutable ethical ideas. Trump’s publish is anti-satire: not a denunciation of bullying and authoritarianism however a reveling within the pleasures of inflicting struggling. It makes one really feel queasy and unclean.
Trump’s unhinged scatological nightmare will not be a lot a satirical transgression as a revelation, a key to the impulses of his authoritarian politics. He has all the time been moved by anger and resentment in opposition to these he thinks are insufficiently respectful of him. As his political profession has progressed, these vengeful motives have solely grown extra sadistic. It’s not sufficient to politically defeat his foes or to enact insurance policies they dislike. Trump clearly desires to humiliate and debase his enemies.
Trump’s disgusting publish is just one piece of proof pointing to the truth that the No Kings accusation is totally on the mark. If Trump is energized by private vengefulness, he’s surrounded by cronies greater than prepared to harness that anger towards their political purpose. They too need Trump to be a king, not simply to degrade the opposition however to enact an irreversible political transformation pushing America to the precise.
Writing in Semafor, David Weigel noted that Trump has large approval amongst Republicans in a challenge of reviving the “imperial presidency” (which was solely modestly rolled again after the Watergate scandal and Richard Nixon’s 1974 resignation):
[W]ith a number of libertarian exceptions, [Republicans] see so much to love about Trump stripping energy from the legislative department of the US authorities.
Trump is undoing post-Watergate norms that took away the president’s proper to impound congressionally appropriated cash, strike enemies with out congressional approval, and govern with out the distraction of politicized investigations—and most Republicans would reply: What’s wrong with that? Who, they surprise, has truly benefited from reining in the “imperial presidency”?
Stephen Miller, the agenda-setting White Home deputy chief of workers for coverage, has claimed that Trump enjoys “plenary authority” as president, which means his energy is almost with out restrict. Steve Bannon, an unofficial adviser who has lengthy formed MAGA ideology, has been much more express in celebrating the unchained presidency, delighting in the truth that Congress is as servile and irrelevant in Trump’s America because the Duma is in Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
In a latest episode of his Web present Warfare Room, Bannon outlined an expansive view of the Article 2 powers of the president:
[Trump is] Chief Govt Officer of the nation. Meaning he can fireplace who he desires and the appropriations invoice is a ceiling not a flooring. He can maintain a reimbursement in impoundment. As Commander in Chief…he can repel invasions, he can go after our enemies, and most significantly, I believe…he’s the Chief Justice of the Peace and Chief Legislation Enforcement Officer of america authorities. So the Justice Division and FBI will not be hermetically sealed away from the chief department.
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Bannon has also suggested that Trump has the precise to droop the writ of habeas corpus to implement his immigration crackdown.
All of those insurance policies, mixed with Trump’s doubtless unlawful unilateral bombing marketing campaign within the Caribbean seas, are assertions of the facility of an absolute sovereign. Trump is making an attempt to rule as a king, and never a benign one. He thrills at being a monarch who craps everywhere in the folks of the world and his nation’s constitutional traditions. In that sense, his AI publish is actually an sincere expression of his objectives.
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