This cartoon by Jesse Duquette is a masterpiece. It expresses something words can't. (And yet, as I'm sure you guessed, I cannot stop myself from trying.)
Trump's superpower was always to follow outrage with outrage, but I have a strange hunch that those two words, "quiet, piggy", might be one of the worst missteps he's ever made.
It's just petty enough, just childish enough... and also he said it right to a woman, rather than during a debate looking into a camera. And he said it precisely at the moment he's old and cornered, and the moment his regime, brittle like all cults of personality, is showing cracks everywhere.
Also, there's something about his pettiness and smallness juxtaposed with the seismic nature of the Epstein files. At a moment that is (hopefully) demolishing a dizzyingly wide swath of powerful people, (Harvard President Larry Summers, Prince Andrew AND Prince bin-Salman, Noam Chomsky, Ehud Barak, Deepak Chopra, Steve Bannon) ... even at a moment like this, he just can't help himself. He doesn't even have the sense to shut up.
Obviously he bothers everyone with a shred of conscience, but it seems like "quiet, piggy" bothers a wider swath of people, for longer. Hank Green doubled back to it online, for example. Me too, for that matter! I will loathe Trump forever for allowing another squalid mediocrity (Musk) to effectively murder millions of children by gutting USAID... but as awful as that is, "quiet piggy" is easier to get one's head around.
As Stalin might have put it, a million insults is a statistic, but one insult is a tragedy.
At least, I dearly hope so. I hope that this turns out to be the moment his center of socio-political gravity tipped irrecoverably too far forward over his ankles.
May he fall, once and for all. He revealed plenty about us that we'll be reckoning with for the rest of our lives, but I for one was already doing plenty of reckoning, as was everyone I know, and we really could use some damn quiet in which to reckon.
Well. I'll see you out there. Stay human.
[Peter Mulvey]
