“These disgusting people”
Olivia Troye, who until recently served as Vice President Mike Pence’s top coronavirus task force adviser, slammed President Donald Trump’s pandemic response in an interview with The Washington Post and in a new video for the group Republicans Voters Against Trump.
“When we were in a task-force meeting, the president said, ‘Maybe this COVID thing is a good thing — I don’t like shaking hands with people. I don’t have to shake hands with these disgusting people,'” Troye says in the two-minute video. “Those disgusting people are the same people he claims to care about. These are the people who are still going to his rallies today, who have complete faith in who he is.”
Yebbut they don’t have huge apartments with everything shiny golden shiny, and they don’t have a melania, and they don’t have forty seventeen failing golf courses. They’re disgusting.
I can hear it now: “Awful Olivia? Disgruntled ex-employee. Fake news. I hardly knew her, not really that bright. Off to work for Sleepy Joe. Sad.”
I can well imagine him saying something like that, but this is odd, because I recall that Trump was seen shaking hands with people well after it had stopped being a good idea.
That’s a powerful statement, and I’m impressed that she made it. But I can’t help but think that it won’t mean much to the intended audience because she’s not a man.
One wonders precisely how many betrayals of this kind can occur before even the most hidebound Trumpist starts to think that Trump isn’t really very good at inspiring loyalty.
Winners, losers, geniuses, suckers… some people seem to like the idea of a society stratified this way. They would prefer to accept loserhood as long as they can see their loserhood as only temporary. They think most people are disgusting too, but imagine that someday they’ll be the ones tweeting on the golden toilet. Their current circumstances are only a temporary embarrassment.
Telling these people to accept who and where they are, and to work to make that better incrementally, for everybody, is almost an insult to them.
To be fair, people can be disgusting, that’s understandable, but what Donnie Dipshit has is deep contempt. He’s displayed this contempt for decades. Disgusting is only a small turd in his sewer of condescension. That’s why he inspires reciprocal contempt in people who see this about him.
In one way I find it surprising that he “doesn’t like to shake hands,” because he clearly enjoys crushing people’s hands and pulling their arms out of their sockets.
On the other hand, . . .
“these people” aren’t “disgusting,” they are merely deplorable.