“Michelle Obama is a man. Am I right, America?”
Josh Hokit, at the White House lawn after winning his fight, June 14.
Desecration has purpose and effect. It is political speech. It is a message:
There is nothing sacred about the U.S. Not its places, institutions, or norms. We have power and will use it however we want, so, fuck you.
The cage fight took place on the White House lawn. Award ceremonies took place at the Lincoln Memorial. The event was a commercial event with paid ticketing, advertisements, and sponsors. People who accuse Trump of being thoughtless and impulsive are not wrong. But he has superb instincts about political messaging. The event was a political message of Trump marking his territory like a dog urinating on a wall, fresher and higher than the previous dog, or a graffiti-tagger putting something new and bigger on top of another tag.
The USA has a civic religion. The country was not installed and consecrated by a pope who crowned a country's leader. The Constitution begins with "We the People." We formed it. We made it special. We have substituted civic institutions, places, and symbols for religious ones. Children stand to say the "Pledge of Allegiance." We stand for the National Anthem, and when someone kneels for it, even respectfully, a great many people object. We debate from time to time whether to limit the First Amendment's free speech clause to say that burning the U.S. flag is not permitted speech.
I have been to the Lincoln Memorial. It feels like a temple. Imposing. Silent. Words engraved on the wall stating our purpose as a country.
Josh Hokit was celebrating his victory. With what, exactly, with his comment about Michelle Obama? He was celebrating the power of transgression. He could be racist and misogynist and offensive. He could be obscene, in the Greek drama sense. He could put before the people that which should be off-screen, i.e. obscene.
I wrote yesterday of my great disappointment with Republicans, people who had happily voted for Ronald Reagan, who said he never took off his suit jacket in the Oval Office out of respect for it, and John McCain, whose sense of military honor kept him tortured in a North Vietnamese prison for extra years rather than be released out of order of men held longer. Republicans voters have understood honor and personal character in the past.
Barack Obama's election seemed to have changed something in Republicans. Trump's accusation that Obama was illegitimate from the beginning found political traction within Republican voters. Obama's education and credentials were fine; he had been a state senator then a U.S. senator. But he is black -- half black, a half-breed -- and therefore uncomfortably foreign, an outsider. His wife became part of that illegitimacy. She spoke about wholesome food and healthy exercise, a good anodyne concern. They were married, scandal-free, and had two children. But there needed to be illegitimacy somehow. The right-wing trope emerged. Michelle Obama was in fact a man, making her a fraud and Barack Obama gay. The story has persisted for a decade, advocated by Elon Musk's father, by right wing trolls, by social media commenters. It is untrue, physically impossible, but persistent.
The accusation created an idea, or cemented an idea out there in the zeitgeist that the U.S. government is a fraud. That our institutions are a fraud. That playing by the rules is a sucker's game. That polite is for sissies. That norms are to be broken because actions are legitimized by the power to take them.
Donald Trump staged a cage fight award ceremony at the Lincoln Memorial to de-sanctify the Lincoln space and what it represents. Josh Hokit's comment was not out of place. It was part of the process of vandalizing.
Perhaps, a decade from now, when Trump is gone, Republican voters and officeholders will have swept up the mess and remember themselves as never, ever having been part of the Trump movement. MAGA, they will say, was about making America great, not vandalizing it. They will pretend to forget, and then they won't need to pretend. They will have re-written their memories.
