Trump’s Presidency Was Always Going to End This Way

From Cosmopolitan

Amid all the chaos of Wednesday’s MAGA insurrection in Washington, D.C., there’s one particular scene that stands out: An aggrieved white man who believed his country was stolen from him strolled right into the U.S. Capitol Building without much resistance and put his feet up on the desk of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, arguably the most powerful woman in American history. He left a note calling her a bitch.

This man was part of a mob that stormed the Capitol to disrupt the tally of electoral votes for Joe Biden after Trump had encouraged them to “take our country back.” The riot followed 24 hours of marauding gangs of mostly white dudes with rage veins popping out of their foreheads punching street signs, picking fights, and spewing homophobic slurs. “Pull the cock out of your mouth!” one zombified man-baby screamed Tuesday night, his voice hoarse from all the shouting.

The Capitol riot was such a fitting and obvious end to a presidency that began with a reality TV star defending the size of his penis on the debate stage. Of course, this was just one final, grand display of toxic masculinity.

And what a quintessentially Trumpian thing it is to feel angry and victimized by a culture in which you actually still have so much power and privilege that the U.S. Capitol Police will practically escort you into the building and take selfies with you as you snatch statues and wave a Confederate flag around. D.C. law enforcement made only around 60 arrests on Wednesday, compared to 289 on the first day of the Black Lives Matter protests in the city over the summer. If Wednesday’s events showed us anything, it’s that white men still have it really f*cking good in this country.

“Let’s go get a beer and then come back,” one man could be heard saying as he strolled out of the Capitol Building he just invaded through a door on which a fellow rioter had scribbled the words “Murder the Media.”

This riot will be Trump’s legacy. He gave a megaphone to a particular kind of insecure white dude who doesn’t even understand what he’s angry about, who equates masculinity with brute displays of dominance and force. The embarrassing, former-beauty-pageant-owning president who wanted to wear a Superman shirt out of Walter Reed hospital while recovering from COVID-19 was never going to inspire anything more out of his supporters than a “bitch” note on Pelosi’s desk and a can of Axe body spray rolling around the U.S. Capitol Building.

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