Who Cares About Motivation When Trump's Actual Actions Are This Evil?

By Emily Cutler | Late Night TV | January 31, 2017 |

By Emily Cutler | Late Night TV | January 31, 2017 |

“Nobody has any idea what’s going on.”

Yesterday I asked if the Trump Administration is crazy or incompetent. Then last night I found myself Sherlocking. No, not using my immense powers of deduction in order to tease apart a mystery which no one else is able to solve. I mean ‘The Lying Detective’ Sherlocking. Specifically, creating overly complex and intricate plots to explain away something that should be fairly obvious. Maybe President Trump Bannon is front loading his presidency with objectionable acts because he knows we’re ready to fight him on his policies. Maybe he wants us to flame out in so much protest furor. Or maybe he’s playing the long con, and is actually hoping that protests are the new brunch. That while a vocal minority of Americans are happy about the protests, the larger amount will eventually tire of the new political climate and lose interest in the protests. Or even worse, President Bannon is lying in wait for the eventual backlash against the protesters. He knew his administration didn’t have the support of most Americans, and is therefore constructing an opposition party out of protesters and the media. Once the majority of the country has turned on us like we’re so many It Girls of yesteryear, he can instruct his staff to commit all sorts of atrocities we’d never even thought of.

Then I realized: fuck all that.

1) This isn’t the game that they’re playing. The Far Right hasn’t made it their business to play calculated media games or intentionally leak disinformation to the media. They just tell bald-faced lies. Trump said for months that Bannon wanted him to enact a Muslim ban. He’s now signed the half-assed Executive Order preventing entry to Green Card-carrying citizens from Muslim majority counties, and it’s somehow not a Muslim ban?

2) What the hell else are we going to do? Trump announced that Bannon asked him to sign this Executive Order preventing Muslims from entering the country, in some cases from returning to their homes. People who had every legal right to enter the country were being detained at airports. People who had done nothing wrong other than be born in a country that Bannon doesn’t like were being interrogated about their political and personal beliefs. So I ask again, what the hell else were we going to do?

We don’t have to protest dumb, and we shouldn’t protest violently (unless it’s a Nazi, because no one should give any fucks about a Nazi getting punched), but I’m done worrying about attacks, counterattacks, and long cons. If Bannon and Co. are doing something morally reprehensible (and you’ll know they are because they’re awake), I’m protesting it. Because even if I have doubts about the U.S. being the greatest country in the world, an Iraqi who risked his life to act as an interpreter for us and was detained for eighteen hours at JFK believes it is. That’s good enough for me.