Speaking of Sadism and Stuttering

Once a bully, always a bully in MAGAland

If there is one universal characteristic of modern day reactionaries, and especially the MAGA crowd, it’s the delight they take in disparaging people outside their clique. It's a linguistic shorthand for expressing their prejudices, aimed at other humans, one aimed at making themselves feel better than others and causing emotional pain in groups of people.

If you bore down on these actions, practitioners of this behavior will say they’re being “cruel to be kind.” It’s a form of sadism used by the likes of Donald Trump to induce pleasure in their audiences, who as a result barrel past manners or empathy as an expression of their affinity.

You’re one of the “gang” if you thought the former president making fun of the current president’s lifelong struggle with stuttering wasn’t wrong on many levels. The crowd at the event where this mocking occurred roared with laughter in response.

I doubt that Trump was self-aware enough to understand the pain he was causing in others. His privilege in life means he’s never been on the receiving end of bullying, despite his public pity parties when things are going his way.

The not-funny part of this mocking is that just about every accusation (mocking others speaking) is an admission of what his own difficulties are in verbalizing. Ask Trump any question that he doesn’t have a pat answer for and his response will be a nonsensical word salad. In campaign speeches he frequently slurs his words and mistakenly uses others in his narrative.

Somehow this is okay for his supporters, thanks to the “strongman” persona the former president cloaks himself in. Unfortunately, too much of the media tasked with covering Trump neglects or downplays his verbal screwups. Those covering him fear losing access or, worse, living through the threats unleashed at their families when the man indicates his displeasure.

At this point I’m in favor of mandatory rotation of persons doing any political coverage to counter games of access along with better ensuring reporting not tethered to a particular silo.

This bullying, i.e., inflicting mental and emotional pain on others as an act of fealty extends to all Trump’s (often imagined) critics and those (often correctly) perceived as a threat to his ambitions. It has infected society at large, making threats against authority figures a common reality. 

I take no pleasure in saying I have experienced elders battling the onset of dementia exhibit similar speaking patterns. Not being of sound mind should be an area of major concern when it comes to selecting the leader of our nation. Having a corps of (usually) anonymous supporters is doubly concerning.

Perhaps the former president has crossed a line with this weekend’s performance. It certainly is a sharp contrast with Joe Biden’s words of encouragement for a young person he encountered a while back.

The video showing the current president, while on the campaign trail in 2020, encouraging a young boy who also stutters has resurfaced. Here’s some of the dialogue, via John Stoehr and Newsweek Magazine:

• The boy's father introduced his son as Brayden and said: "We're here because he stutters. He wanted to hear you speak."

•  “I’ll tell you what,” Biden told him.

• Don’t let it define you. You are smart as hell, now you really are. You can do this.” He asked the boy for his phone number. “I can tell you the things that worked for me,” he said.  

• Biden went in to hug Brayden and said: "I'll tell you what—Don't let it define you. You are smart as hell, now you really are. You can do this."

• The president then asked to get a phone number from the boy so that he could speak to Brayden about how he dealt with the condition. Biden said that he works with about 25 other people with the condition, adding "I can tell you the things that helped me."

• Biden explained that managing his stutter "took a lot of practice, but I promise you, I promise you, you can do it."

• "And you know when I say I know about bullies—You know about bullies, the kids who make fun. It's going to change, honey. I promise you," Biden said as he leaned in closer to the boy.

Politico is reporting on a network of “proud stutterers” inspired by the reactions of author Maya Chupkov, a San Francisco-based stuttering advocate.

• Chupkov was flying home from a weekend trip to Los Angeles when her husband texted her a video clip of Trump. “I’m gonna bring the country tuh-tuh-tuh-together,’” the former president said as he parodied Biden’s State of the Union Speech on Saturday.

• “Just hearing the audience laugh took me back to the bullying days,” she said, recalling painful high school memories.

• Within hours, Chupkov and a network of stutterers around the country sprang into action. They sent a press release to major media outlets denouncing Trump and launched campaigns to urge stutterers to respond on social media and write letters to the editor.

• The response has been swift. Around the country, advocates have been giving media interviews and sharing emotional testimonials.

• “This time, we’re not going to stay silent,” said Chupkov, who wrote a comic book called “Proud Stutterer” and hosts a podcast of the same name. Her nonprofit holds events around the country.

About 10% of all families include a child who stutters. Every one of those children lives through being bullied. Here’s what parent @RealJakeBroe had to say on social media:

• Joe Biden was born with a stutter.  Millions of Americans were born with a stutter.

• When Trump attacks Biden for having a stutter, he is attacking the families of every child in America who fears a bully making fun of them for being born with a stutter.

• Trump is an ugly bully.  He has been a bully his whole life and he is not going to stop being a bully at age 77.

Lest you think I’m making a mountain out of a molehill, take a hard look at the policies likely (based on what he says) in a second Trump administration. Bragging about putting 10 million people in “holding camps” for deportation certainly should dispel questions about this candidate’s capacity for empathy. And, yes, empathy is a necessary quality for good leadership,

Let me tell you’all. Losing the ability to speak at all (cancer x 3) is one of the most humbling experiences I’ve lived through. It’s not just difficulty in communicating (I use a white board); all-too-often seeing/hearing people judge you as a stupid human is a regular condition of my existence. Because I can’t speak, many people assume I’m deaf, a whole other experience of degradation. So, yeah, it’s personal. 

At least my fingers work to communicate with my writing, and, on occasion, I’ll only need the middle one. 

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Tuesday’s News to Think About

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The United States just had its warmest winter on record. Via Daily Kos

• Meteorological winter was the warmest winter on record for the contiguous U.S., with an average temperature of 37.6 degrees F — 5.4 degrees above average. Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New York, North Dakota, Vermont and Wisconsin each had their warmest winter on record. Twenty-six additional states saw their top-10 warmest winters on record.

• Total winter precipitation was 7.71 inches, 0.92 of an inch above average, ranking in the wettest third of the December–February record. Connecticut and Delaware both had their third-wettest winter season on record.

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Retail theft in US cities: Separating fact from fiction via Thea Sebastian and Hanna Love at the Brookings Institute

• It should be a promising sign for many retailers and communities that the trend of widespread retail theft is greatly exaggerated. Unfortunately, many local and state government officials are in the midst of passing new policies in response to this exaggeration, without letting the evidence lead. For example, Florida recently passed legislation to make “organized retail theft” a felony, despite the fact that Florida cities with reliable data have seen sharp decreases in shoplifting—with St. Petersburg experiencing a 78% decline between 2019 and 2023.

• The consequences for communities could be dire. Years of extensive research demonstrate that neither prosecuting low-level offenses nor increasing punishments based on second or third offenses meaningfully deters crime. A definitive analysis of 116 studies showed that incarceration does not deter people from committing future crimes and, in fact, incarceration for short periods can actually make someone more likely to be arrested and commit crimes later (due to heightened barriers to securing employment, identification, housing, and other basic services necessary to successfully reenter society).

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New data explodes myth of crime wave fueled by migrants by Judd Legum and Tesnim Zekeria at Public Notice

• On Fox News, “migrant crime” has emerged as a coverage staple in less than two months. Host Jesse Watters told viewers in late February that “[t]here is a migrant crime spree killing Americans.” According to the Washington Post, “Fox News hosts, guests and video clips have mentioned ‘migrant crime’ nearly 90 times” in the month of February.

• Notably, the two border states that have completed their Uniform Crime Reports saw particularly sharp declines in murder in 2023, with 15% drop in Texas and 8.8% drop in Arizona. Both states also saw significant declines in violent crime overall. If undocumented immigrants were driving a violent crime surge, as Republicans and some media outlets suggest, you would expect to see it show up in the data from Texas and Arizona. 

• Every act of violent crime is significant, and the modern media environment allows news of individual offenses — like the alleged murder of Laken Riley by an undocumented immigrant — to travel widely. But Asher told Popular Information that "discussion of an increasing violent crime trend driven by migrants is lacking in any factual basis." He noted that "violent crime rates in Texas border counties have remained relatively low and below both the rest of Texas and the US as a whole" over the last decade. That is not the kind of data one would expect to see "if a surge in violent crime was being driven by migrants." Therefore, Asher said, "any hypothesized increases in crime committed by migrants is either too small to show up in reported crime data or the hypothesized increases are not occurring."

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Credit on lead image: MolemanNineThousand on DeviantArt