Playground Politics

As Donald Trump wipes his ass with the Constitution, his abettors and enablers speak in schoolyard taunts

Jan 20, 2026

Protesters, including a drag performer and a woman dressed as the Statue of Liberty, protest Donald Trump’s policies at a No Kings rally at the Capitol building in Austin, TX, June 14, 2025. Photo credit: Vic Hinterlang/Shutterstock

“My mom is so gay!” [Rebeca] responded. “She won’t let me out of the house in a suit!” Lacy challenged her, “Why are you calling something you don’t like gay?” Rebessa stated, “I always do that. I always call things I don’t like gay.”

C.J.Pascoe, Dude, You’re a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School (2011)

On January 4, the day after President Donald Trump announced the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro by a special operations task force, MAGA influencer Matt Walsh, a noninterventionist, took to social media to make a U-turn. “I'm as reflexively non-interventionist as anyone can possibly be,” Walsh wrote, “but Venezuela appears to be a resounding victory and one of the most brilliant military operations in American history.”

As to charges that the operation was illegal (it was), Walsh argued that a higher code prevailed:

I want America to rule over this hemisphere and exert its power for the good of our people. If some shitty little tinpot third world dictator is harming our country or interfering with our national interests, we should do exactly what Trump did to Maduro. Why not? "International law" is fake and gay. The only international law is that big and powerful countries get to do what they want. It has been that way since the dawn of civilization. It will always be that way. And we are the most powerful country on the planet. It's about time that we start acting like it.

The next day, Jonathan V. Last commented at The Bulwark: “From the point of view of MAGA, why would it only be international law that is `fake and gay’? Why would it not be true domestically, as well, that the biggest and most powerful people get to do what they want? After all, from the dawn of man until about five minutes ago, that has been the historical norm.”

Subsequent vents in Minneapolis have shown that the Trump administration does, in fact, think all laws are fake and gay, since invading an American city is unconstitutional. Walsh’s post, however, evokes a Darwinian history of international relations that never existed, since even before the Congress of Vienna in 1814 (not fake or gay), the known world was highly regulated by treaties, alliances, royal marriages, and the Pope.

Walsh’s post is not only historically wrong, but it is also deliberately dishonest. Among other things, the evidence that Venezuela was interfering with American national interests, legally or illegally, is thin. Furthermore, international law was dramatically strengthened after World War II exactly so that big and powerful countries did not get to do what they want. Furthermore, Maduro, that “shitty little tinpot third world dictator,” was not ineffective. He remained in power for 13 years, weaving together a combination of internal security and external dealmaking that might be the envy of a Xi or a Putin.

This doesn’t really get to the heart of what Walsh means when he says international law is “gay.” A generic insult that has stubbornly survived decades of secondary school DEI trainings, Walsh does not mean that international law is homosexual, but that it is the equivalent of what homosexuals are in the MAGA-sphere: weak.

So, why doesn’t Walsh just say that, particularly since in the 20th century alone, international law is, in fact, arguably stronger in its aims than in its enforcement? If you only look at the 20th century, it has a remarkably mixed track record of restraining authoritarians—Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Hideki Tōjō, Josef Stalin, and Saddam Hussein, to name a few—from adhering various treaties, compacts and courts intended to govern relations between states.

However, this misses the point. Walsh wants to convey international law is not just weak, it is despicably weak. And therefore, to ignore it is a virtue, and a restoration of the natural order.

MAGA consistently invokes a mythic “natural order” to justify white supremacy and male dominance. Paying attention to this makes sense of why the movement’s social influencers have put numerous terms back in circulation on social media that properly belong on a playground or in the men’s room of a pole dancing club.

Can you convert to paid? $5!

By doing so, they work to degrade anyone who opposes Donald Trump as not just wrong, but ridiculous. Hence, the return of the slur “retard” on the right—short for retarded, which was a mainstream term for developmentally delayed people when I was growing up, and is no longer in circulation because it described exactly nothing but a form of second-class humanity. Or the endless propaganda that “Boomers,” who have ruined the United States for subsequent generations, are the only people who show up at anti-Trump protests.

Why? Because, according to Russ Greene at The Free Press, they are “luxury Communists.” The essay is accompanied by a helpful photograph of old, White people drinking wine on what looks like a Hamptons estate.

Recall JD Vance’s 2021 lament to Tucker Carlson that, under Biden, the nation was being run by Democrats, elites and “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” Who were those “childless cat ladies”? Buttigieg literally meant “politicians without children, “and specifically named two women on color and a gay man: Kamala Harris, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Pete Buttigieg.

For the record, only AOC does not have children; Harris has two stepchildren and Buttigieg, with his husband Chasten, was a month away from becoming a father of twins. So why did Vance use the term “childless cat ladies?” When even members of his own party criticized him for stigmatizing women who were not mothers, Vance defended himself by saying he was criticizing the Democratic Party in general for being “anti-family and anti-child.”

That’s not true. If they learn anything there, law school graduates learn to be very specific with language. What Vance meant was that Harris, Ocasio-Cortez, and Buttigieg are unnatural and mentally unfit for national leadership—and calling them “childless cat ladies” conveyed exactly that. And is it any accident that there is a long history of women’s suffrage activists and gay men being mocked as “childless cat ladies?”

Gay men and suffragists had something else in common in the early 20th century: both groups were understood as mentally unbalanced. The re-introduction of casual, derogatory accusations of mental illness is also a hallmark of MAGA-speak. Recently, Stephen Miller posted on X that the anti-ICE protests were populated by “a large volume of professional class leftists acting in psychotic fashion in response to routine immigration enforcement.” JD Vance is particularly fond of calling people “crazy,” not just the disturbed young person who tried to break into his Ohio home (who almost surely would have been immediately identified as a Democrat had he succeeded in harming anyone), but the Episcopalian Church, people who exercise their right to free speech by demonstrating against him, and the Biden administration.

MAGA influencers have also begun to refer to any woman who opposes them as obviously mentally ill and have extended this to the proposition that the bulk of those who are opposing ICE are Democratic women who have nothing better to do with their time. At Fox News, opinion writer David Marcus lectured that civil disobedience had a “stoic dignity” which “in and of itself grants the words of its practitioners a gravity and profound humility,” but that Minneapolis and other cities are currently besieged by “organized gangs of wine moms” who “use Antifa tactics to harass and impede Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.”

Others on the far-right mock the women who resist ICE as AWFUL, or “Affluent White Female Urban Liberals.” As Clyde McGrady wrote at the New York Times, “Beyond labels and name-calling,

the death of Ms. Good and the protests and anger in its wake have sparked a response from many on the right that is particularly targeted at white women in the streets, even though men have been just as involved. A majority of college-educated women, including white women, have long been skeptical of President Trump’s Make America Great Again movement, and that skepticism has been growing, according to exit polls after the 2024 election. And for months now, such women are attracting the ire of the president’s supporters.

Reconfiguring middle-class white women as a terrorist threat is, as Michele Goldberg also pointed out at the Times, the latest turn for a movement that has, until now, relied on reviving established stigma and are —like “crazy” and “gay”—intended to “smear the entire movement.”

What is at stake here is worse than a coarsened public sphere: it is the dehumanization of legitimate protest and democratic opposition to Donald trump’s authoritarian agenda. That dehumanization has consequences. Renee Good would not be dead if ICE agent Jonathan Ross had seen her as a human being, rather than a “fucking bitch.”

It’s not just the misogyny, or the homophobia, or the bigotries great and small. It’s that all of these slurs converge on real people, much as gangs of kids gather around the “fag” in the hall who is meeting the fate that comes with being a fag.

And that’s the message the Trump administration has sent for a year now: if you are not MAGA, you will be hurt, and you deserve it.

Why? Because you aren’t even really a person.

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