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{NYT 19 October} ‘Trump Posts Fake Video of Himself Flying a ‘King Trump’ Jet Over Protesters’
A grotesque spectacle, and the act of a petulant man-child masquerading as a statesman—an overgrown bully and gaslighting autocrat who yet occupies the highest office in the land. If the President of the United States cannot conduct himself with a modicum of dignity and extend respect to all Americans, including those who dissent from him, as each of his predecessors managed to do, then he has no business holding that office.
The current GOP base is defined by a startling deficit of respect for those beyond its own tribal orbit—a moral decay that, if not arrested forthwith, will culminate in widespread atrocity. We already inhabit the danger zone of dehumanisation. Yet it was not always thus. Richard Nixon, for all his paranoia and moral blemish, never descended to such belligerent indecency; nor did any other Republican president or aspirant within living memory—from Eisenhower through to Mitt Romney—stoop to the dehumanisation of political adversaries or ordinary citizens.
Nor, indeed, have our Democratic presidents done so. Barack Obama, at his most incautious, made his now-infamous remark concerning rural Americans who “cling to guns and religion”—a comment that drew sharp rebuke, yet was expressed within a thoughtful, analytical frame and contained more than a measure of truth (and nothing offends such types more than hearing hard truths about themselves). Obama did not, however, produce puerile videos depicting his critics as yokels being drenched in filth, nor indulge in crude name-calling and mockery.
Manners matter. The current president and his acolytes would do well to rediscover that elementary precept of civil society. They have already learnt that millions of their countrymen are neither cowed nor compliant, and that we will not simply lie down and die to humour their authoritarian fantasies.
President Trump ought, at the very least, to issue a public apology to those he hath insulted—but of course he will not. Neither his party, nor the pliant media apparatus that shields him, nor the cultish fervour of his followers, will exert the slightest pressure upon him to do so. On the contrary, they are collectively manufacturing a civil war—and they shall have it, unless they remember, and swiftly, how to behave like human beings once more. But they won’t. —Arthur Newhook, 19 October 2025.
Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.
