If anyone ever asks me, on some future date, why I refuse to call Tr-mp “president,” why I refuse to acknowledge his legitimacy and fitness for the office, why I consider him to have, perhaps permanently, cratered the dignity of the presidency, and why I consider him to represent the worst of America, I will simply point to this picture of him and Ted Nugent:
Or perhaps I’ll point to this one:
These are pictures of classless people. And they spent four hours in the White’s House with an even more classless Tr-mp, talking about, according to Ted Nugent, “pretty girls.”
Three years ago, Larry Womack of The Huffington Post wrote this about Nugent:
In fact, in the case of Nugent, we have even come to see alleged child sexual abuse as some sort of eccentricity or harmless vice. Can you imagine anyone else who had been accused of having sex with a 12-year-old, written a song about raping a 13-year-old and adopted a 17-year-old so that he could have sex with her going on to campaign alongside all the most conservative “family values” candidates? […]
Would governors and congressmen hit the campaign trail with that guy? Would they send their children to his “Kamp for Kids” — and professional snipers? What would they say about almost any other man? They wouldn’t call him a creep or a redneck. They’d call him a pedophile.
Instead, Nugent is embraced as some sort of down-home firebrand. He’s a redneck rock star; sex with kids is just part of the package! Sarah Palin says that if a candidate “is good enough for Ted Nugent, he is good enough for me!” Congressmen invite him to the State of the Union.
Besides all that, we have the gun-worshipping, warmongering Nugent’s admission in 1977 that he had an elaborate plan to dodge the Vietnam War draft:
Then two weeks before, I stopped eating any food with nutritional value. I just had chips, Pepsi, beer — stuff I never touched– buttered poop, little jars of Polish sausages, and I’d drink the syrup. I was this side of death. Then a week before, I stopped going to the bathroom. I did it in my pants. Poop, piss, the whole shot. My pants got crusted up.
I don’t have to rehearse all the stupid, nasty, racist, bigoted things that crusty pants Ted Nugent has said, but here are a few of them:
♦ “If Barack Obama becomes the next president in November, again, I will either be dead or in jail by this time next year. Why are you laughing? Do you think that’s funny? That’s not funny at all. I’m serious as a heart attack.”
♦ “I have obviously failed to galvanize and prod, if not shame enough Americans to be ever vigilant not to let a Chicago communist-raised, communist-educated, communist-nurtured subhuman mongrel like the ACORN community organizer gangster Barack Hussein Obama to weasel his way into the top office of authority in the United States of America.”
♦ “I was in Chicago last week. I was in Chicago and said, “Hey, Obama you might want to suck on one of these you punk.” Obama, he’s a piece of shit, and I told him to suck on my machine gun. Let’s hear it for him. And then I was in New York. I said, “Hey, Hillary, you might want to ride one of these into the sunset, you worthless bitch. Since I’m in California, how about Barbara Boxer, she might want to suck on my machine gun. And Dianne Feinstein, ride one of these you worthless whore. Any questions?”
Those are the words of a man whom Sarah Palin—a classless quitter cynically brought into American politics by a tainted John McCain, thereby helping pave the way for Tr-mpism—embraces and celebrates. Those are the words of a man with whom she proudly stood in the White’s House, in front of a portrait of the former First Lady—the same one Nugent called a “worthless bitch” and suggested she “ride” on his “machine gun”—and mocked Hillary Clinton. And Palin stood there and posed with Ted Nugent in front of that portrait with the permission of Donald Tr-mp, who might have been the one Nugent was referring to when he told the New York Times that someone asked the three of them to “extend their middle fingers beneath the portrait.”
The term “white trash” goes back a long way in American history. It has had a lot of meanings over time. Certainly, somewhere in the extended pedigree of that word Donald Tr-mp and his vulgar, boorish, clownish friends can be found. Alongside the misogyny, the racism, the xenophobia, and general bigotry of these people, there is the simple fact that they are unrefined, unpolished, unsophisticated, ill-bred schmucks who, by their very presence, disgrace what is fast becoming the trashiest house in America’s neighborhood.