We in the rest of the world have had to hear a lot – such a lot – about what this US government and its hardcore fanbase thinks about us. So you know they’ll be super-relaxed and free-speechy about hearing some thoughts about how they look from the outside. Let’s use last Saturday as a single snapshot. In Minneapolis, they had the shooting by ICE agents of a protesting nurse who posed no threat – an event promptly, provably and blatantly lied about at the highest level by Donald Trump’s politburo. Then that evening in Washington, a lot of those same politburocrats turned out for the White House premiere of a ridiculous propaganda film about the president’s wife, also attended fawningly by bloodless Apple oligarch Tim Cook. And he’s not even the oligarch who paid an insane amount for the film. Top line, guys: all this makes you look like what your president likes to call a “shithole country”. Sorry! I assume it’s fine to use officially licensed vocabulary?
Obviously, it’s not a proper shithole country until the soft-skinned puppetmasters in the presidential palace cut some grizzled local warlord off at the knees for following orders, so it’s good to learn overnight that border patrol “commander at large” Gregory Bovino has been pulled out of Minneapolis, possibly locked out of his social media accounts, and may soon “retire”, presumably a fall guy for the likes of stage 4 homeland security tumour Stephen Miller. Bovino’s the guy who’s literally got the same haircut and outfit as the Sean Penn character in One Battle After Another. But hey, at least he wears a uniform. Again, what are international outsiders to make of the spectacle of ICE’s federal officers coming masked and frequently dressed in civilian clothes, while images from protests across the States show resisting civilians increasingly drawn to military-style clothing? Can Trump’s storm detachment not at least be issued with matching shirts? They don’t have to be brown, but Maga chic desperately needs to make even a first step to getting itself together. In the entire history of the movement, only one follower – the QAnon shaman – has ever had true style.
With death threats being the sign of a deeply articulate and sophisticated political culture, I have cleared my inbox to make space for them. But I should say I have always truly loved America. I’ve visited 38 of its great states in my time, and always dreamed of completing the set, but … not currently, let’s be honest. I note US tourism is currently experiencing a downturn in visitors from previously enthusiastic markets. Who among us can imagine why? Still, no doubt numbers from Nato countries in Europe will rally if Trump (a five-time draft dodger) continues to piss on their military graves. Reminder: Nato has activated its collective defence clause precisely once since its inception – at the request of the United States, in the wake of 9/11. Our troops fought and died in all their stoopid wars – but now, apparently, we have to listen to Trump’s whiny little rants about how nobody really put themselves on the line.
Anyway, back to the events of Saturday and their fallout. Hard to pick the most mindboggling reaction to the shooting of Alex Pretti, who never produced the gun he was carrying, for which he had a licence, before it was taken off him. But there’s a strong argument for going for the statement from the National Rifle Association, which reacted to all the Maga zealots saying Pretti was always likely to have been shot for legally carrying a gun he had a licence for by thundering back that carrying a licensed gun is famously constitutionally allowed, and calling for a full investigation into the killing. Maybe Trump’s base are now more rightwing than the NRA? Or more leftwing, I can’t tell. Are Maga now too woke on gun control for the NRA? Such are the sentences one can end up typing when we’re this far through the looking-glass.
Speaking of the political upside-down, Saturday’s other notable event was the Melania premiere at the White House, which, though flowing with champagne, was in some ways as grotesquely down and dirty as the scenes in Minneapolis. Consider the guests, which included the usual regime stalwarts but also, intriguingly, Tim Cook. Days before, Cook had been posting on one of the other oligarchs’ platforms about Martin Luther King’s “commitment to justice”, only to watch videos of Pretti’s execution proliferate across that same platform, but still pop on his bow tie and toddle off to clink glasses at the premiere. Melania is the forthcoming “documentary” about the president’s wife, for which she serves as executive producer and has been paid an unspecified sum, while the entire thing has been bought by Jeff Bezos’s Amazon for $40m (£30m) – a sum so staggeringly beyond what such a film should cost, by so many orders of magnitude, that it can only be read as a naked gift to the regime. A further $35m has been spent on marketing for its preposterous theatrical release.
But I guess that as the OGs in Russia have shown us, oligarchs have to take their turn to do expensive things, just so they can stay in the gang. At least they’re getting something out of it. Much more tragic are the ordinary-folks footsoldiers dutifully coming out to defend the ICE shooting. I can barely think of anything more beaten than spending the day typing variations on the theme of “it is good that law enforcement officers in my country shoot civilians who are no threat”. What a bunch of bootlickers. They might be too far gone to see it, but much of the rest of the world can.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
