Trump the Antihero?
The cruelty isn't the point.
The Atlantic‘s Adam Serwer, who coined the “cruelty is the point” meme, asserts that “Trump’s Fans Are Suffering From Tony Soprano Syndrome.”
In every Judge Joe Dredd story I’ve ever read, there is at least one almost comically obvious moment when the author makes clear that the protagonist is a jackbooted fascist and not someone to admire. This may come across to the average reader as heavy-handed, but when the richest man in the world misreads the character as heroic, you can see why such heavy-handedness is sometimes necessary.
Shortly before former Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida withdrew his nomination for attorney general, Elon Musk posted on X that Gaetz was the “Judge Dredd America needs to clean up a corrupt system and put powerful bad actors in prison.” Generally speaking, one’s model for justice should not be a fascist invented in part to illustrate the distinction between elite impunity and the brutality that ordinary people face.
There’s quite a bit more on Dredd as an unthinking tool of a fascist system before shifting to other fictional antiheroes that have spawned legions of admirers:
As Trump reshapes the nation in his image, some of his supporters seem inclined to turn cautionary tales on their head, empathizing with villains or antiheroes to such a degree that they miss the point of these stories entirely, even when the writers make the message as clear as possible. We might call this problem Tony Soprano Syndrome, after the patron saint of flawed antihero protagonists. One undecided voter told a New York Times focus group earlier this year that Trump is “the antihero, the Soprano, the ‘Breaking Bad,’ the guy who does bad things, who is a bad guy but does them on behalf of the people he represents.”
Almost every single thing here is wrong, but it’s wrong in a way that illustrates the illiteracy that I am talking about. The Sopranos is by any measure one of the greatest television series of all time, focusing on the daily travails of a mob boss who tries to balance his mental health with keeping his marriage together and raising his children. But Tony is a murderer whose greed and ambition harm the people he claims to love. He is not a moral exemplar, nor is he intended to be; his selfishness helps no one else and is destructive to all around him. The same is true of Walter White, the protagonist of Breaking Bad, who at one point in the show literally looks at the camera and says of his crimes, “I did it for me.”
Again, the creators could not be more clear that these characters are horrible people whom others should not seek to emulate. There is a difference between thinking Darth Vader is an awesome character in the fictional context of Star Wars and, you know, wanting to be like Darth Vader, a psychotic child-killer. Quite similarly, Trump could not be more clear that he is out for himself, seeking the power of the presidency to enrich himself and his allies, protect himself from legal jeopardy, and bask in the cultlike adulation of his followers. But fans of Tony or Walter, living vicariously through the power and cruelty of the object of their admiration, invert the moral implications of those characters’ stories such that selfishness and malice are justified or laudable. In the same way, Trump supporters treat the real-life Trump, who seeks power for his own gain, as a fictionalized Trump whose vices are in service to a selfless cause.
So, I don’t think this is a function of illiteracy but rather of admiration for a certain archetype of masculine strength. The fourth post I wrote here, way back on January 31, 2003, dealt with a similar phenomenon:
Jonah Goldberg’s column today is an excellent example of how you can agree with someone’s conclusions but strongly object to their argument. Yes, the Tom Cruise character in “A Few Good Men” was a smart-aleck pretty boy (as he is in all of his watchable movies; he’s dreadful when he tries to go against type). Yes, the Jack Nicholson character (Colonel Jessup) had some great lines and it was easy to cheer for some of them. But Jessup was a villain in the flick. However well-intentioned, he believed himself above the rules of his society and ordered his subordinates to break the law, with the tragic result of killing one of the men under his command. And then covering it up rather than taking responsibility. Not exactly heroic. I’d hate for Jessup to be the role model for American foreign policy. And, getting to Goldberg’s direct point, while it’s true that the US provides the lion’s share of the NATO defense burden, that doesn’t mean the Europeans have lost all right to dissent. They’re sometimes (okay, usually) annoying, but they aren’t our subordinates; they’re sovereign states with a rather different set of interests. Indeed, that’s the reason we need to preserve the option to act “unilaterally” rather than having all our actions subject to a NATO or UN veto.
In the linked column (originally to its Townhall variant; the Jewish World Review version survives), Goldberg readily acknowledges, “Now, I know Nicholson’s supposed to be the villain,” before going on to express his admiration for the “I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom I provide, then questions the manner in which I provide it” speech.
Jessup is a charismatic war hero and, until the very end of the movie, Cruise’s protagonist was a take-the-easy-way-out pretty boy who didn’t seem to grasp the nature of military service. It’s easy for men—and it’s mainly men that we’re talking about here—to fantasize about being men of action who take no shit and get things done, rules be damned.
Tony and Walter are also aspirational figures for a certain type of man experiencing a certain type of midlife crisis because, despite their body aging and their looks fading, they can still shape the world around them with a seemingly infinite capacity to endure or inflict violence. They want to tell themselves they’re protecting something—home and hearth perhaps—but actually want to validate themselves with a justification for hurting someone else, even if they have to invent one.
Here, I think Serwer misses the mark. Just as I don’t think the cruelty is actually the point (it is, rather, a comeuppance for an Other that is responsible for some imagined humiliation), I don’t think the average Trump supporter (or admirer of Dredd, Soprano, White, or Jessup) really wants to go out and kill people. Rather, they want power and respect.
This is one reason the actor Anna Gunn, who portrayed Walter’s wife, Skylar, drew an intense backlash—she was the embodiment of the nitpicky wife whose jealousy held her husband back from greatness (as a murdering meth kingpin).
Skylar is intentionally portrayed as a shrewish foil for Walter to elicit precisely that reaction from the male fanbase. But, yes, there’s a lot of macho fantasizing at work.
Walter represents the emotional state of a particular type of viewer—someone who wants to enjoy his ability to make himself feel good through violence and suffering, and doesn’t want his good time spoiled by a mouthy woman reminding him that the things he is doing are actually bad. This type of reactionary masculinity is itself emblematic of the Trump era, as if conservatives listened to feminist critiques of “toxic masculinity” and decided to shear all virtue from their conception of traditional manhood and retain only those parts that involve dominance and exploitation of others.
Again, I think Serwer identifies something real but misses the mark. I don’t think there’s a huge contingent of men who secretly want to be murderers and drug kingpins. But there’s certainly a longing for the days when “a man’s home was his castle.”
The shape of Western society has changed radically over the course of the last half century or so. The days when a man with a high school education or less could easily get a job to support his family in a middle-class lifestyle are essentially over. At the same time, our social mores have evolved to take away their presumptive role as head of the household and to constrain behaviors that were once “just boys being boys.”
Most of us have adjusted to these changing conditions and acquired skills that enable us to make a good living and enjoy a certain amount of respect in our day-to-day lives. But there are tens of millions who haven’t. And they naturally resent the hell out of being looked down upon. It’s not shocking that they get some vicarious enjoyment rooting for a Walter White or Tony Soprano.
Trump, who despite a lifetime of wealth and fame, has been a master of playing to these resentments. Partly, I think, because he shares them. Even though he’s by any reasonable measure part of the elite, he feels that he’s never been accepted by them and he resents the hell out of it.
Examples abound. Last year, another heavy-handed comic-book adaptation, the television series The Boys—about a covert-ops group that targets the irresponsible corporate-produced “supers” who kill more people than they actually save—made its criticism of fascism so overt that many of its fascist-sympathetic fans began to get upset. These fans complained that the show had gotten “woke” once the plot began to more plainly illustrate the political points it had been making all along, to the dismay of those fans who were living vicariously through the antagonists’ acts of cruelty.
Similarly, the creators of the murderous Marvel Comics’ vigilante the Punisher have repeatedly clarified, to no avail, that, despite possessing some virtues, the character of Frank Castle is not a good guy. In addition to being a murderer, he is occasionally portrayed as a fascist. During the Civil War storyline, Castle is told off by his idol, Captain America, who describes Castle as “psychotic,” fulfilling a “twisted notion of justice.” The Punisher creator Gerry Conway has called the embrace of Punisher iconography by real-life armed agents of the state “disturbing,” because “the Punisher represents a failure of the Justice system. He’s supposed to indict the collapse of social moral authority and the reality [that] some people can’t depend on institutions like the police or the military to act in a just and capable way.”
The collapse of trust in institutions is one of the stories of the past decade or so. But so is this moral degeneracy, motivated by the need to ideologically justify the place of a corrupt authoritarian strongman in the most powerful government in the world. What looks like declining media literacy may be something much worse—an affirmation of the underlying values in dystopian literature that inevitably lead to the dystopia itself.
So, I agree that some of this is quite disturbing. But it’s not like this is something that just happened overnight. Hell, Batman, one of the most popular comic book characters since 1939, is a masked vigilante who metes out justice outside the law. The Dirty Harry character, which debuted in 1971, was popular precisely because he wasn’t constrained by the rules handed down by namby-pamby judges. For decades, John Rambo (introduced to moviegoers in 1982) fought gunned down corrupt cops and crooked politicians with machine guns.
And that’s to say nothing of the persistence of the Western and its modern counterparts. That Yellowstone‘s John Dutton and Rip Wheeler are mass murderers doesn’t keep millions from admiring their grit and tenacity. Similarly, fantasies about hanging people selling dope (after some panty-waist judge lets them go) and gunning down evil-doers have been a longstanding trope in country music.
There’s a longstanding frustration that our culture has gotten corrupted and that our institutions are letting us down. And it’s manifesting in increasingly violent imagery, rhetoric, and, occasionally, action. And, again, it seems especially among men.
Trump has both exploited and advanced this trend.
Good post James, thank you.
Also, the United Healthcare murder this week – feeds the same narrative.
@Tony W: Yeah. I hope to get to that this afternoon or tomorrow. It’s really distressing.
In my day it was the Dirty Harry/ Death Wish vigilante that expressed that comic book version of the anti-hero who rises above a corrupt system to deliver justice.
And while it may be true that “the average Trump supporter (or admirer of Dredd, Soprano, White, or Jessup) really wants to go out and kill people. Rather, they want power and respect.”
However it is critical to note that in all these cases, power and respect is a zero sum game.
In order for them to feel respected, someone else has to suffer.
Dirty Harry/Judge Dredd/Tony Soprano can’t exist in a world of cooperation and equality and win-win outcomes; Like Arendt noted, they can only exist in a world of unending struggle against an implacable enemy which can never be defeated.
Jessup particularly illustrates the absurdity of his own outlook. His speech: “I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom I provide, then questions the manner in which I provide it” could just as easily describe himself.
It is Jessup who rises and sleeps under the blanket of protection of the civilians who fund and care for him and more importantly, the vast apparatus of the military which enables him to do his job.
Without the civilians, without the supply chain and military bureaucracy and yes, the assistance of the JAG attorneys like Cruise, Jessup is just a frail and powerless person unable to “provide freedom” to himself much less anyone else.
This is why comic books tend to be fascistic despite the authors best intentions.
Because they focus on the lone hero, the sole autocrat rather than the cooperative teams of ordinary people working together.
The irony of Elon Musk’s Dredd praise is hilarious when you realize there was a recent comic where Judge Dredd tries to arrest a blatant parody of Musk who barely tries to hide his list of crimes. Oh and comic Dredd teams up with his Sylvester Stallone and Karl Urban counterparts to apprehend the evil tech bro.
Very interesting post. You could cite The Joker sequel Joker: Folie a Deux, in which the director realized to his horror that he was feeding the beast so he cut the legs out from under his own creation. It’s hard for reasonable, grown-up men like Todd Philipps to imagine that a sad sack loser could become a rallying symbol for incels. So in the sequel he gave Joker a hot girlfriend (Lady Gaga), made it into a musical and then said, ‘just kidding, he was never the Joker.’
I admire his virtue, not so much his devotion to his job of making money for WBD.
The renegade hero willing to do what has to be done is long-established, but it’s different from the modern anti-hero. The rule-breaker was a good guy, a virtuous man driven against his will to break the law in service to a greater good. Walter White and Tony Soprano were not trying to do anyone any good, they were parasites causing and feeding off, human misery.
Part of the problem has to do with balance. When you have a hero you can have an anti-hero and it’s almost symbiotic. Absent a hero you’re left with anti-hero and the only balance comes with parasites and predators. Name a cinematic hero who’s not wearing spandex. There is no modern comp to John Wayne or Gregory Peck. So the paradigm shifts to the right, toward heightened anti-hero, ex-villain. It’s no longer good vs. evil, it’s evil-but-with-excuses vs. straight up evil.
Some of this is just lazy writing, monkey see, monkey write. You always want to top what came before, so you migrate from hero to virtuous anti-hero, to morally questionable anti-hero, to evil-but-he-has-cause non-hero, to villain-as-hero. It’s the dismissal of virtue as a goal, as a worthy thing in itself. Nothing matters but getting what you want.
A somewhat recent example, the reboot of Hawaii Five-O. The original Steve McGarrett did not torture suspects, the new McGarrett does. He’s a semi-virtuous anti-hero, but he’s the drastic devolution of an actual hero. Partly the public may not want to see heroes, and partly it’s self-indulgent writing. It is infinitely more fun to write villains than heroes. Heroes are by definition reader-ID or viewer-ID characters, they’re meant to represent the audience. If the audience/readership won’t buy heroes, where do you find story? How do you make a virtuous man into a good character, a good story?
This indifference to, even hostility to virtue both in the audience and in the creative community is how you end up with appalling morality in, for example, recent superhero (Marvel especially) stories like WandaVision. Wanda tortures an entire town for days, weeks, but she’s sad, so it’s OK. We are actually meant to feel sorry for Wanda. WTF?
Darth Vader is the best character in Star Wars (one of the best ever) but he’s not the hero. You need Luke in order to have Vader. If you remove Luke where’s the story? Vader vs. Palpatine? Evil vs. more evil?
In my work I make an effort to cope with gray morality. My heroes may be flawed in all kinds of ways, they may cross the line, but they still know the line is there, and they are trying to stay on the right side of it. Even the villains see the line, they don’t care, but they know it’s there. When Jake in Animorphs commits a war crime by flushing 32,000 helpless Yeerks into space, he knows what he’s doing is morally indefensible. You can’t get so caught up in the action that you forget you’re in a battle between good, however tarnished, and evil, however sexy.
A great example is Jimmy (Saul) from Better Call Saul. The writers and Bob Odenkirk never forgot right and wrong, and Jimmy, while a POS, always had a path to some moral redemption. He’s a character I identified with* because of that possibility of redemption. In the end he pays a heavy price because he does the right thing.
*I tend to have redemption arcs for a lot of my characters. Having had to walk myself back from the edge and find a path back to some level of virtue, I’ve lived the trope.
“Yes, the Tom Cruise character in “A Few Good Men” was a smart-aleck pretty boy (as he is in all of his watchable movies; he’s dreadful when he tries to go against type).”
I suggest you watch Tropic Thunder and especially the Tom Cruise character. Most definitely not a pretty boy!
It’s telling that when antiheroes are mentioned, there are no Philip Marlowes or Sam Spades, and there aren’ t any artists. The antihero who tortures a suspect is way different than the antihero who uses his wit and existential affinity with what’s sordid in the world. There’s nothing countercultural about Batman, Jessup, or Tony Soprano. Tony desires Gary Cooper rather than the beleagured Philip Marlowe, even as he’s busting out his ‘friend’s’ sporting good store. And he doesn’t want his daughter to be with a black guy, even though he’s furious about the image of Italian-Americans.
This is all to say there are different types of antiheroes. Trump is just appealing to fascist/authoritarian ones, all of whom have views which are safe in American political culture.
@Chip Daniels: OK, a tangent, but I wish we’d be more realistic about war. The Revolution was about freedom. The Civil War was about freedom. WWI was kinda about freedom in Europe. WWII was about freedom. Had Germany and Japan been successful in Europe and Asia, they’d have been a threat to us. Subsequent wars may or may not have been necessary, but our freedom was not at stake. As proven by our loss in Vietnam. Jessup was guarding the perimeter of Guantanamo, not Key West. Wars are most often about foreign policy and domestic politics, not defense of our freedom.
That said, remember Pearl Harbor on this day and the millions who died in that war. It was a massive military and foreign policy mistake by the Japanese. They did indeed awaken a tiger.
A couple of quick thoughts because there is much to unpack on this topic:
* It is telling that Elon Musk (and some of his Republican notables) consistently draw on American pop culture to justify or explain themselves. And not just recent pop culture but often icons from their formative years.
These “bright ones in the room” seem to have a very narrow band of reference that defines their worldviews.
And this may be why our corporate memory of “how we got here” and lessons provided by our parents/grandparents in their struggle for pluralism is fading. The meaning and consequences of fighting actual Nazis, Jim Crow, Pinkertons is no longer compelling.
Forgotten is not just the lessons learned by the last couple of generations, but an appreciation for the classical body of knowledge and values provided by our much longer timeline, that had been kicked down the generational road forever.
We have indeed made a real break from the past, and now rush headlong into a naively brave new world.
* There may be an innate Jungian archetype aspect underlying the appropriation of these symbolic personalities. But a stronger case can be made for placing blame on the massive 24/7 onslaught of a popular culture spewing emotionally tillating themes that jar sensibilities. Monetized click bait cultural distractions as our collective nanny.
Some men may driven by a
but only because they have been told by a stream of cheezy, low brow, transactional culture, that that is what they should want. Advertising works.
@Not the IT Dept.: The post is almost 22 years old. Cruise’s acting chops are considerably evolved since then.
@gVOR10: I am going to go so far as to say that the Revolution was as much about political and economic power as it was pure freedom. Likewise, the Civil War started as being about political control of territory and maintaining the federal government than it was about freeing slaves (but the south certainly was fighting for anti-freedom). But the war was, ultimately about freedom (although more incompletely than the mythology notes).
WWII was certainly the most morally justified international war that we engaged in, but I think that if we had stayed out of it that US freedom would not have been threatened. Invading the US would have been a monumental task.
I actually hate the notion that “freedom isn’t free” and that the military provides our freedoms. They don’t.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Its striking to compare the public view of the military today versus during the WWII era and its aftermath.
For example, consider the cartoon Willie & Joe, where cartoonist Bill Mauldin portrayed soldiers as just very average ordinary guys; Not tall strapping heroes of comic book but just weary, ordinary schlubs who were doing their job.
My father and uncles all served in WWII, and this is how they thought of themselves- They never talked about their service other than to repeat funny anecdotes about their comrades. No one of that generation would have put up with Col. Jessup’s crap for a moment.
The whole “heroic warriors forming a wall between us and barbarism” is a sentiment that contradicts the entire concept of a liberal democracy.
I think most MAGAs view Trump as a Superhero.
@Steven L. Taylor: Indeed. John Hancock was protecting his very profitable smuggling operation. I’d add Peter Turchin’s (IIRC) observation that the Civil War was not so much against slavery as against the slaveocracy, the rising Northern industrial and finance elites against the Southern, largely Virginia, elites that had dominated the government up to then. I’ve wondered if VA secession wasn’t driven partly by a realization they were losing dominance, so they were just going to take their ball and go home.
@CSK: Lord knows I view Trump as cartoonish.
@James
Somewhat off topic, but something I’m really interested was your post that included:
Do you still subscribe to that notion that the US provides the “lion’s share” and what leads you to that conclusion. Perhaps you can point me to other posts you may have written more recently that confirms the assertion. Hopefully you will have computed the “NATO defense burden”.
@Chip Daniels:
Yep. The cartoonish Rambo icon has added to the template for the modern male s̶o̶l̶d̶i̶e̶r̶ warfighter.
Also curious, the number of ex-Seals and Special Forces that have run for Republican candidacies, particularly while embracing gender chaunvism memes.
I do believe we have a cult in ascendancy, egged on by pop culture. Art mimics life mimics art.
The point you are making here, James…
…Serwer addresses here (to my reading at least).
“Imagined humiliation” is the key here. If the Other isn’t sufficiently or obviously evil enough to justify the Us electing a corrupt strongman, then the Us has to grossly exaggerate or even fabricate the villainy to create the permission structure.
So trans people aren’t a tiny percentage of the population trying to live their true lives, but they’re a big percentage of the population forcing unfair competition on all women athletes or exposing penises to little girls in public restrooms. It’s not enough that Democrats want to tax billionaires at a progressive rate – they have to be pedophiles who drink the blood of children to get their daily adrenochrome fix. Or at least Democrats are evil, sick, and out to destroy America – all rhetoric that Trump and other Republicans deployed regularly during the last campaign.
And once the caricature of evil becomes truth in the imagination of the Trump voter, then isn’t it only righteous to want to destroy the threat to all that is good and decent in America?
The average Trump supporter wants respect, sure. They’re on the side of good, so they deserve respect. The average Trump wants power, too. But will they be satisfied if their strongman doesn’t wield that anti-hero power to save them from their imagined humiliation? I don’t think we have any reason to believe that Trump supporters* will be placated with Trump merely pardoning himself and golfing (the only things Trump is guaranteed to do during his coming term). They want the retribution he has promised.
So, the cruelty IS the point.
*Certainly there are Trump ‘voters’ who checked his box in the general election over the price of eggs and gas. I’m talking about the Republican rank & file who made him the GOP nominee and the Trump supporters (in the GOP base and on The Hill) who have enabled Trumpism to take over the Republican Party.
One must be blinded by cultural rage and resentment to miss the obviousness of Tony Soprano and Donald Trump both gluttonous, insecure narcissistic losers, lashing out at those they perceive as weak because they never had the balls to stand up to mommy and daddy. Fans of Tony and Trump must share the same sad sack issues, because how else could they misread the plot and mistake these guys for role models?
I can’t believe that who had a real parent could think Donald Trump meets some masculine ideal. The same conservatives who preach masculinity in the next breath whine and cry about how offended they are by dismissive liberal condescension. A woke Instagram comment wounded your ego-strength, but you’re sooooo macho? Please with this fakery.
Sorry to sound outdated and insensitive, but straight American men need to grow a pair and get their shit together. This is fuckin pathetic.
This is why Democrats need to get tough, and start breaking norms and defying rules on to uplift decent people and Americans who are suffering economically, like archetypical heroes do. Per a comment from yesterday’s in yesterday:
@Jim Brown 32:
And then Dems need to keep flexing, and stop apologizing. The cost of housing, healthcare, and education in this country is outrageous — and it’s Ronald Reagan’s fault. Democrats should be shouting this daily and breaking rules to fix it.
The oldest president in history backed by the world’s richest incel and a cabinet of oligarchs, unqualified druggies, and affirmative action pick paedos is not going to stick it to the man. They’ll be trying to enrich billionaires by plundering the middle and working classes. Sorry, MAGA, you’ve been played.
Trump and His Team Are ‘Laughing’ at Biden’s Commitment to Decorum (Rolling Stone via Yahoo! News)
But let’s clutch pearls and take to our fainting couches about calling Epstein-bestie rapist Trump nicknames, about a guy convicted of a low-level gun paperwork offense getting a pardon, and about Biden considering pardons for those the fascist and his scumbag cabinet promise to persecute.
Then let’s act perplexed about why half of the electorate thinks we’re too staid, effete, prim, weak, and wedded to obsolete norms to say and do what’s necessary to reverse this country’s Reagan Revolution decline into feudalism and worse-than-Gilded-Age oligarchy.
Make it make sense.
@Bobert:
Whenever I hear Americans complain about what we spend on NATO, I ask them who they think will supply the battlefields and the bombed-out cities in the event of war.
We are brilliant at letting Europeans (including Russians) fight while we profit and come in toward the end to claim the credit.
@DK:
Preach!
Speaking as an official White Man these people embarrass me. Their ancestors back in the days these clowns are nostalgic for, crossed the Great Plains in wagons as their kids died of cholera, and they crossed the beaches in Normandy as all around them their friends died. But now eggs are expensive, they can’t get laid and someone on Twitter lists their pronouns, so we need a parody of masculinity to be a dictator. And they call themselves ‘Alphas.’ Jesus Christ, they’re fuckin pussies*.
*No shade intended for actual vaginas, many of which extrude entire 10 pound 13 ounce humans**.
** I was a large baby.
@Michael Reynolds:
I’ll repeat a comment I made a few weeks ago. It took Germany loss of a World War, ruinous reparation’s, and the Great Depression to get to this point.
@Scott F.: A small point of interest, supporting your comment. Jews were a bit less than 1% of the German population in 1930, similar to trans now in the U. S. Small numbers make a more attractive target for those who want a target for political reasons.
The Guardian had a column yesterday, in response to the TN case, that’s one of the few MSM pieces I’ve seen recognizing trans rights are an issue because Republicans chose to make it so.
@gVOR10:
Yup. The size of the illegal immigration problem is overstated as well, since 13.7 million illegal immigrants is about 4% of the population. And it’s well documented that the vast majority of those 14M are criminals, but contributing to society.
But, a Venezuelan gang has taken over an apartment complex in Colorado and JKB feels bad when he doesn’t know enough Spanish to shop retail in Miami, so the US is now third world being overrun by criminals.
@Scott F.:
Can you cite the “well documented” source?
It would be helpful if the “criminality” stats excluded immigration offenses.
@Bobert:
D’oh! I meant to type “aren’t criminals.” I hope that was taken from the context, since I didn’t proofread after posting.
@CSK: The irony is Trump was a literal template for 80s-present day Lex Luthor.
@Chip Daniels:
It’s the price of an all-volunteer force. The WWII era didn’t valorize military service because it was simply citizens doing their patriotic duty. They understood the realities, both in terms of the costs of war and the humanity of those who served. For the last half century, it’s been something only a tiny handful do and most can’t comprehend putting oneself into harm’s way. (See also: police.)