From “Man Bites Dog” and “Oh My God” to “Dog Bites Man” and “Oh Well”

On the Trivialization and Normalization of Fascism and Other Evils

On January 6, 2021, as Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors” Trump’s fascist thugs  were starting to attack the US Capitol in attempt to block the certification of Joe Biden’s 2020  election victory, I was driving through downtown Iowa City listening to the horrific events on National “Public” Radio. A well-dressed thirty-something white man passed in front of me on Washington Street. I rowed down my window and told him what was going on.  He said, “you’re kidding, right?”  I said “No, I’m listening to it right now on my car radio” and I cranked up the volume.  Visibly shaken and horrified, he loudly said , “oh my God, that’s fucking disgusting” and ran off.  

I wonder how this guy will respond when the Trumpist-fascists undertake some new form of mass political violence in connection with the next presidential election (as we know they will).  Maybe he’ll just shrug and go on with whatever he was doing, thinking “oh well” and “whatever.”

Which brings me to the phrase “man bites dog.”  It’s an old saying in journalism. The phrase encapsulates the conventional newsroom wisdom that an unusual and infrequent event like a man biting a dog is far more likely to interest an audience (and thus advertisers) than an ordinary, normal, and everyday occurrence such as a dog biting a man.

A coach yelling at and even pushing at a football player is not really a story; it happens all the time.  It’s a normal thing, for better or worse. But a football player yelling at and bumping his coach, like Taylor Swift’s beau Travis Kelce did during the Super Bowl last Sunday, now that’s unusual and is of some special interest. “Wow, did you see that. What was that about?”

But novelty has a shelf life. Player bumps coach or man bites dog is odd, interesting, and perhaps even  (for some) shocking the first few times a player screams at a coach and the first few times a man bites a dog.  But after such previously strange and offbeat things keep happening again, the new[s]ness, surprise, and disbelief wear off. The script-flipping story becomes the “new normal,” the new script. The story goes from “oh my God” to “oh well.”

This morning I shuddered in horror as I listened to a Chicago “Public” Radio newsreader matter-of-fact-ly report that Israel’s genocidal-fascist prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is determined to launch a mass murderous ground invasion of the southern Gazan city of Rafah even as the United Nations and other heads of state warn that this action will be an epic humanitarian catastrophe for the 1.3 million Gazans stuck in that city.  Within 25 seconds, the reporter added that “the Chicago Bulls lost to the Cleveland Cavaliers by three points (108-105) last night.” The US-Israel Crucifixion of Gaza, with a death count of 30,000 Palestinian human beings over the last four months, has become a bit of “oh well” news even as it reaches a new degree of mass homicidal horror.

Chilled by the trivialization of supreme evil inherent in this morning news summary, I reflected also on how little shock talking heads exhibited as they matter-of-factly reported a mass shooting that took place yesterday at a victory celebration for the Super Bowl champions the Kansas City Chiefs. It was like they expected the gun violence and found it commonplace at this point.

This is Trump’s and Trumpism-fascism’s jam, aided and abetted by a dominant corporate media that moves masses from “oh my God” to “oh well” on one terrible human problem after another. Again and again and again some more, the wannabe fascist strongman and his backers and the media have pushed the envelope of “normal” further to the revanchist edge of finally collapsing  previously normative U.S. bourgeois democracy, civility, parliamentarianism, and rule of law.

It goes back to the start of Trump’s first serious candidacy. It was big news that the orange-hued maniac said that he could shoot people on Fifth Avenue and lose none of his support as a leading presidential contender in 2015-16.  And then it wasn’t.

It was shocking to learn that Trump called Mexicans rapists and was caught on tape talking about grabbing women by their genitals. And then it was just “oh well, there goes that Trump again.” 

Same with the news that he wouldn’t promise to honor the outcome of the 2016 election if he lost and that he told his supporters to beat up protesters at his rallies. (“Oh, that Trump and his deplorables. What are you going to do?”) So what if he crudely insulted the looks of a primary opponent’s wife, called other Republican candidates “sweaty” and “low energy,” and called Hillary Clinton “disgusting” and “nasty” while leading chants for her to be “locked up”? “That’s Trump for you. Nothing new here.”  The shock wore off as the fascist malignancy’s toxic political persona became the “new normal” atop the Republican Party.  

It was of course big and shocking news that the vicious ogre actually ascended to the White House (Trump himself was surprised to have won in 2016) and then conducted himself in a fashion consistent with my (and others’) understanding of him not just as a malignant narcissist but also as a fascist.  But over time, numbing set it. The madness of it all became old hat, trite and amiliar under the numbing pressure of the relentless multiplicity of wild Trump actions and statements that I documented at exhausting length in the third chapter  (titled “A Fascist in the White House, 2017-2021”) of my 2021 book This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America [1]

Rabid fascist dog bites bourgeois democratic man became the new news norm – dog bites man, so to speak – as Donald “Be Wild” Trump shocked and then ceased to shock the world with one fascistic outrage after another and another and another.

January 6   --- the literal physical putschist phase of a many-sided rolling coup attempt that Trump and his team had been undertaking since at least the summer of 2020 – was the logical culmination of the new fascist Amerikaner white nationalist normal infecting the Republican Party from the top down and bottom up.  

January 6 was a shock, of course, but it’s been amazing how successful the Republi-fascists have been in domesticating and normalizing it. Now it’s just part of the background for a national politics whose proto-fascistic toxicity has gone from “man bites dog” to “dog bites man.” Even after the bloody sacking of the Capitol by Trump’s demented horde, 147 Republicans in Congress (139 House Republifascists and 8 Senate Republifascists) voted to overturn Biden’s clear Electoral College victory. They did so on the basis of the big Hitlerian lie that fueled the attempted insurrection – the multiply disproven claim that Biden stole the 2020 presidential election.

Just three weeks after the Capitol Riot that left five people dead, House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy travelled to Florida to kiss Dear Leader Don’s ring in Mar a Lago. (“Oh that weasel McCarthy. Oh well.”)

Five weeks after the attempted insurrection that Trump clearly incited, just 7 of the US Senate’s 50 Republican Senators voted to convict Trump after the US House impeached him for inciting insurrection.  If just a third, 17, of those Senators had done the obviously right constitutional thing, the tangerine-tinted tyrant who is now openly channeling Hitler’s rhetoric (see below)  would not be permitted to run for the world’s most dangerous office yet again.  

Then came the continuous drumbeat of fascist insanity all through the ongoing Biden years.  Highlights include:

+ mass Trumpist-fascist attacks on public officials and servants – librarians, teachers, school boards, nurses, public health authorities – across “red” America.

+ dramatically escalated red state book-banning. (“Oh well.”)

+ rampant red state assault on transgender rights.

+ the openly fascist mass murder of ten Black people carried out by a fascist proponent of Trumpian-Hitlerian white replacement theory in Buffalo, New York.

+ the passage by 16 “red” states of laws outlawing the teaching of American history and social studies/science with racial oppression properly included.

+ far right decisions by the illegitimate Trumpist Supreme Court including the ending of affirmative action in college admissions, the approval of religiously bigoted discrimination in the provision of business services, and the brazen repeal of women’s half-century constitutional right to an abortion, leading to the lethal re-introduction of forced motherhood in fourteen states so far.

+ the takeover of the US House by virulent MAGA fascists, who have rejected previously normative bourgeois parliamentarianism by turning the lower chamber of the US Congress into a chaotic hyper-partisan wrecking ball under the de facto command of the multiply felony-indicted neo-Nazi Trump.

+ The Republi-fascist House majority’s determination under Trump’s de facto command to block any bipartisan legislation that might help US President Joe Biden make a case for re-election this year – this no matter how far to the right Biden leans.

+ Wannabe fascist strongman and presidential front-runner Donald “Retribution” Trump’s recent use of openly Hitlerian rhetoric, saying (for example) that non-white immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” and that he will clear the nation of its Marxist, socialist, and communist “vermin” – yes “vermin.”   

+  Herr Trump’s easy and early defeat of all rivals in the contest for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination – this despite his previous and ongoing attempted overthrow of previously normative bourgeois electoral and rule of law democracy.

+ the stark failure and refusal of any of Trump’s serious Republican nomination rivals to call out Trump for his unabashed and escalating fascism (one of those rivals, Ron DeSantis, tried to run as a more fascist version of Trump!).

+ the persistent belief of the great majority of Republican voters in the ridiculous claim that Biden did not legitimately win the 2020 presidential election – a claim shot down in more than 60 court cases (”oh well, tell me something new and interesting”).

+ Trump’s successful delay of the main felony cases against him long enough to make it distinctly possible that he will not face verdicts until after he comes back into the White House and uses his power to suspend all federal charges against him, nullify the state cases, and pardon himself and others on his fascist team. (“Oh well.”)

+ the pathetic delay in the US Attorney General’s appointment of a special federal prosecutor to investigate and indict Trump in connection with his attempted overthrow of previously normative bourgeois democracy and rule of law.

+ the special Trump federal prosecutor’s failure to charge Trump with insurrection, an indictment with the potential to prohibit him from re-attaining the White House.

+ Trump’s successful use of the legal cases against him as campaign assets, fuel for his paranoid- style narrative that the “radical left deep state” is out to get him. (“Oh, that Trump. So it goes!”)

+ Trump’s gathering around him of a giant establishment Republican policy network that is drawing up a giant and many-sided policy agenda for the full authoritarian white Christian nationalist/neofascist takeover and makeover of American government and society.  

+ the Republifascists’ success in getting a special prosecutor to essentially declare Biden as mentally unfit for a second term.

+ the Republifascist Texas governor Greg Abbott’s open Nullificationist defiance of the Biden administration, with the Texas Military Department denying US Border Patrol access to a significant section of the southern US border.  (Twenty-five “red” state governors have signed on in support of this neo-Confederate action!)  

+ the Republifascist House majority’s wild and reckless impeachment of US Homeland Security Secretary and Cabinet member Alejando Mayorkas on strictly partisan, political grounds with no evidence provided that Mayorkas committed any “high crimes and misdemeanors,” the constitutional basis for legitimate impeachments.

+ the resumption of business class funding for Trump and other MAGA Republi-fascist politicians after a brief partial suspension in the wake of the Capitol Hill Riot of January 6, 2021.(”Oh well, that’s big business for you, always wanting a seat at the table.”)

Clearly the Republi-fascist coup never actually stopped; it just kept rolling into the lame Weimar presidency of the hapless and bumbling warmonger “Genocide Joe” Biden.

Like Trump’s feral presidency, the Biden years present us with an exhausting whack-a-mole-like record of fascist insanity, taking American fascism from the “oh my God” shock and surprise of “man bites dog” (MBD) to the normalizing “so it goes”/“that’s life”/“oh well”  fare of “dog bites man” (DBM).

From “shock and awe” to “shucks and ugh.”

What if the United States made a full transition to fascist rule under Donald “Root Out the Marxist Vermin” and “Mass Deportation” Trump and half or more of the population was conditioned not to care – to see this as just more normal/crazy politics, “same as it ever was”?  

This phenomenon of deadly normalizing and numbing is hardly unique to the Trumpism-fascism problem of course. 

Remember how the George W. Bush administration and a compliant media and “opposition party” managed to make it seem normal to masses of Americans that the United States could mass murderously invade and occupy Iraq (killing more than a million Iraqis) on thoroughly false premises?   

The news of extreme and deadly weather events resulting from eco-cidal fossil-capitalist climate change made the MBD-to-DBM transition years ago.

Mass shootings are by now a regular US occurrence that require double figure body counts to make national headlines anymore.  

Images of mangled corpses in the US-Russian war in Ukraine ceased to evoke shock many months ago.  

Israel’s US-backed genocidal mass slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza, replete with readily and widely available images of dead Palestinian children and babies pulled from smoking rubble, is reported in US media as if it’s a new normal. Whatever initial shock Americans may have felt over these terrible scenes has faded for millions of busy, distracted, and historically ignorant USAers. And besides, isn’t Joe Biden trying to get Israel to kill fewer civilians, like the media says (never mind that he refuses to alter Washington’s unequivocal support for Israel’s genocidal policy in any substantive way)?  

“Oh well, that’s  life.  What’s for dinner? How’d the Bulls do last night?”

Beware the normalization of ecocide, genocide, imperial war crimes, fascism, and mass death.

 Endnote

1.  Not a good fit for then US President Barack Obama’s vapid normalizing Rose Garden rhetoric the day after Trump was elected: “Now, everybody is sad when their side loses an election. But the day after, we have to remember that we’re actually all on one team. This is an intramural scrimmage. We’re not Democrats first. We’re not Republicans first. We are Americans first. We’re patriots first. We all want what’s best for this country…we all go forward, with a presumption of good faith in our fellow citizens [that] is essential to a vibrant and functioning democracy…. I’m confident that this incredible journey that we’re on as Americans will go on…. I think of this job as being a relay runner — you take the baton, you run your best race, and hopefully, by the time you hand it off you’re a little further ahead, you’ve made a little progress…ultimately we’re all on the same team.” (Privately, Obama described Trump to Tim Kaine as “a fascist” in the fall of 2016.)