This Vet is Vermin!

Happy belated Veteran’s day: that glorious holiday where, for 24 hours, we are legally allowed to kill anyone who doesn’t say “thank you for your service” or offer us free food. It’s just nice to feel appreciated, you know?

Anyway, here’s how Trump commemorated the occasion this year:

In this house, we clutch no pearls and pull no punches, and we’re not going to clutch our pearls today. Anyone with a cursory knowledge of 20th century history knows what “vermin” hearkens back to, and also what “rooting out” those “vermin” looks like in practice. The reference is on purpose. It is intended to both rally the base and to entice Radical Leftist Vermin into calling MAGA folks Nazis. Pretty hard to avoid doing that when the Nazi rhetoric gets trotted out and conservatives go, yep. That’s my guy. He’s gonna Make America Great Again.

By the way, here's the Trump campaign’s official response to people who are worried about the whole “vermin” thing

“we didn't say we were going to kill you and if you think we said that? We're gonna kill you” is some end-stage language. That's not even a dog whistle. It's just a whistle.

Here’s the thing, though. Like most of Trump’s promises, he cannot deliver on this one. There is no feasible way to “crush the entire existence” of everyone Trump considers vermin. Over thirty percent of adults in America cast a vote for Joseph Robinette Biden in 2020, which, by MAGA’s deranged definition, makes them Radical Left Thugs. Compare this situation to 1930s Europe, where Jewish people comprised 1.7 percent of the population and the people of Europe were primed to embrace Jewish genocide by millennia of antisemitism. And European countries still didn’t all go that route.

You cannot simply “root out” thirty percent of your body politic and put them into camps. For one thing, it would tank the economy. For another, the people won’t stand for it. Radical Left Vermin are not some lunatic fringe or tiny, isolated minority. We are friends, neighbors, children, parents, and partners. The truth is, most MAGA folks are not Nazis, no matter how much filth Trump spews. Ask MAGA to cheer for the death of something abstract, like Antifa, and they’ll do it all day. Ask them to stand by while their blue-haired child gets dragged away to a concentration camp? Some people will. Plenty of them won’t.

Also, who does Trump think is going to do all this rooting, exactly? I assume, based on the context of this Veteran’s Day tweet, he thinks it’s going to be the military. Good luck with that. The American military has a centuries-old tradition of not messing with domestic policies, and the military is nothing if not tradition-bound. Like everyone else, Soldiers and Sailors and Marines and Airmen have friends and family who are Radical Left Scum and also—guess what? Some of them are Radical Left Vermin too.

Which brings me to my core point.

Mr Trump, I am one of those great Veterans you address in your Veteran’s Day post. I deployed twice to Afghanistan. Didn’t see combat, but I didn’t get captured either, and I know how much you like that. I am also a Radical Left Vermin. I think Marx made some really good points. Items on my wish list include universal healthcare, free education, and the replacement of police gangs with institutions that actually maintain law and order. I also have a tendency to live like vermin, I confess it. My room could be cleaner. I dislike direct overhead light. Because my desk is underneath my loft bed, I spend a lot of time hiding under furniture.

I’m far from the only Radical Left Vermin to ever serve our country. Some of the most radical folks I know are vets. We lived neoconservative praxis. We brought freedom and democracy at the point of a gun to people who wanted neither thing—or, perhaps, whose idea of freedom understandably involved fewer American guns. Some of us changed our minds pretty dramatically. Others came in liberal and left as leftists. Vets have led protests against further international violence for years. Vets formed the Wall of Vets during the Portland protests. We have felt your rubber bullets and tasted your tear gas, and we are willing to do it again.

You cannot talk about your great Veterans without also talking about Radical Leftist Thugs, because our military is a cross section of America, skewed as it is towards military families, and that means it includes many types of Americans, including the ones you do not like.

We are not the enemy within. Many of us vermin, myself included, are patriots: not capital-P-Patriots, but in the original meaning of that word. We love this country, which is why we’re hard on it sometimes. We don’t want to make America great again; we want to make America greater than it has ever been. We do not want to destroy the American dream; we want to expand it, so everyone has a shot at it.

We are not a threat to America, but we are definitely a threat to your power and ambitions.

I hear your rhetoric, over and over again, in the speeches I watch and the events I attend: “Real Americans” this, “Patriot” that. You’re wrong. We will not accept these labels. I am a real American. My father came to this country because he loved it and chose it; he embraced the American Dream, he tried very hard to achieve it. My mother’s family traces back to the Puritans; they were here before this country was a country. I was born here. I served here. I fully plan to die here, though hopefully not for a while. I am a real American, and I am not alone.

You can’t have this country. If you win in 2024, you won’t actually root out all the vermin you hate, but you will have plenty of opportunities to silence and terrorize them. You will have the opportunity to re-implement Schedule F and gut the bureaucracy, then replace those you fired with hand-picked loyalists ready and willing to subvert the will of the people in favor of the will of your people. You will have the opportunity to declare martial law and deploy DHS and Border Patrol to restore order by any means necessary. You could even have a few camps for the most egregious Leftist Scum: the Antifa types, the Trans Agenda, a regular protester here and there to discourage resistence.

The country that remained, when you were done, would not be America. It would be something else entirely.

The dream would survive, though. The one you like so much. It would get a new name and new tactics and perhaps move overseas, but the dream of a better, more just world, where anyone can realize their ambitions if they work hard and where everyone can live in comfort, will not die.

Be careful what you call us. Rats, mice, cockroaches: we are infamously hard to kill. We can live anywhere, on very little, for as long as we need to. We are clever and resourceful and we can easily fit through the cracks in your foundation. Good luck with the rooting. You’ll need it.

Thumbnail: Flag by 51581; rats by Eden, Janine and Jim, CC license. Modified by Laura Jedeed