For various reasons—mostly rooted in the administration’s own deliberately provocative, yet also highly thin-skinned behavior—it’s been easiest for us, lately, to think of Donald Trump’s White House as a collection of very weak online posters: The kind who pick fights incessantly in order to look good, then get their lunches handed to them by people actually forged in the fires of internet “discourse.” We’ve seen this in Trump And Co.’s inability to avoid feeding South Park‘s brutal trolling of them, and we’re seeing it today, as the administration forgot one of the basic rules of internet survival: I.e., do not take a swing at people who are willing, ready, and able to go completely nuclear on you at the drop of a hat.
This is per Consequence, reporting that rocker Jack White gleefully rose to the challenge this week after White House officials responded to his mockery of Trump’s redecoration of the Oval Office, which has gone very heavy on “Stuff you put on top of a piece of cake to make dumb people pay 20 extra dollars to eat it.” Bless his heart, White House communications director Steven Cheung tried to take a decent swing, telling The Daily Beast that White was a “washed up, has-been loser posting drivel on social media because he clearly has ample time on his hands due to his stalled career.” Which is a fine enough attack, even if White seems to be doing pretty well for himself via his Third Man Records label. White, for his part, took the insult as a “badge of honor,” unleashing in return a multi-page, highly detailed attack on a man he calls a “a 3 card monte dealer,” “a grifter,” and “a thief.”
White opens with his amusement at the fact that, of the many, many mean things he’s said about Donald Trump since the man’s public entrance into politics—helpfully enumerated—it was his “Home Depot” decorating skills that finally provoked a response. He then widened the scope, calling Trump a “low life fascist,” “bankrupter of casinos,” “professional golf cheat,” and more. It really is an object lesson in the joys of the disproportionate response, as White reminds any hypothetical Trump voters reading Jack White’s Instagram that their commander-in-chief is largely interested in enriching no one but himself and his already-rich cronies. That includes attacks on the administration as a whole; we’ll refrain from posting the full text of White’s post—you can read the whole thing here—but he does dump especial ire on those who have supported Trump’s rise and continued holding of the reins of power.
He’s masquerading as a christian, as a leader, as a person with actual empathy. He’s been masquerading as a businessman for decades as nothing he’s involved in has prospered except by using other people’s money to find loophole after loophole and grift after grift. His staff of professional liar toadies like Steven Cheung and Karoline Leavitt have been covering up and masking his fascism as patriotism and fomenting hatred and division in this country on a daily basis.
