Pervert Politics: Trumpism’s Body Obsessions
How Republicans went from the party of prudes to the party of perversion.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth addressed the country on Wednesday in a press conference about the ongoing war with Iran. It was a lurid, machismo-driven appearance that almost smelled of bloodlust through the screen. As MS NOW commentator Mika Brzezinski described it, it was “a childish litany of accomplishments…a lot of rhetoric about death and destruction and power and no real reasoning about what the immediate threat was.”
Hegseth’s focus on the imagery of pain and ruin echoed Trump’s State of the Union last week, in which the president repeatedly described the bodily suffering of various individuals, including U.S. servicemembers. Trump offered the image of West Virginia National Guardsman Andrew Wolfe, the victim of a November shooting in D.C., in his hospital bed with “blood all over.” He detailed the injuries of Eric Slover, a member of the strike force that seized Maduro earlier this year, by saying, “He absorbed four agonizing shots, shredding his leg into pieces.”
Throughout the speech, one was left with the clear sense that Trump was at his most animated when describing the bloodied and mangled bodies of other people. This obsession with the body—and particularly with the body as the subject of serious injury, even death—is a hallmark of right-wing politics in America. …
Continue reading this article by Alan Elrod, “Pervert Politics: Trumpism’s Body Obsessions,” here: https://www.liberalcurrents.com/pervert-politics-trumpisms-body-obsessions/