The Trumps and the Royals Belong Together

What's with all the media frenzy over the Trump dynasty sullying the Windsor dynasty?

The conventional corporate wisdom is that if Donald Trump weren't such a gross oligarch, he would have cancelled his sullying of the British oligarchy -  because the invitation to sully was issued by a sullied prime minister who was forced to resign because of the Brexit mess. 

And it's not just the sullying. Trump is unfairly "meddling" in British politics by referring to various British politicians as either losers or as his personal pals. This rhetoric from a sitting US president is deemed highly abnormal and deviant.

What was considered normal and proper was former President Barack Obama, right before the Brexit vote, warning the Brits on their own soil that they would suffer dire trade consequences if they dared vote to leave the European Union.

Obama had the good taste to threaten the UK with being politely moved "in back of the queue" whereas Trump outrageously called the mayor of London a "stone cold loser." Ouch. 

 If Trump had any normality at all, he would at least have deployed one of his political operatives across the Atlantic to properly meddle in British politics. Obama himself adhered to exceptional American procedure when he graciously didn't say a word when his campaign strategist, Jim Messina, meddled by advising both Theresa May and David Cameron as they successfully vied for back-to-back Conservative Party residencies at Number Ten, Downing Street.

Of course, the very worst thing that Trump did in preparation for his visit to the U.K. was to insult Meghan Markle. When a tabloid journalist informed him that she'd called him "divisive and misogynistic" in a TV interview during the 2016 US presidential campaign, Trump used his favorite anti-woman buzzword ("nasty") when reacting to her remarks. He hastily added that he still thought that she'd be "a successful American Princess."

Cue the mass media outrage. And be sure to preface all the diatribes with such made-for-Lifetime headlines as "The Princess Vs. the Demagogue," as the New York Times's Charles Blow did in his latest biweekly #Resistance broadside.

This contrived controversy is an irresistible way for the liberal corporate media to fulfill their perpetual assignment. Their constant duty is to divert the attention of the hoi polloi from the Class War of the rich vs the rest of us. Instead we must learn to care very deeply abut the Intra-Ruling Class War of the good billionaires vs the bad billionaires. 

The Trump vs. Markle narrative is essentially a variation on the stale neoliberal romance theme of Girl Meets Billionaire, Girl Loves Billionaire, Girl Loses Billionaire, Girl Finally Marries Billionaire.

The plot of the latest potboiler is "Girl Meets and Marries Virtuous Oligarch Only To Have Her Happiness Sullied by Villainous Oligarch."  Peasants of the World are hereby urged to unite and defend the honor and serenity of Our Princess as she is assailed from without the walls of her castle by the Usurper to the American Throne. If we all just join together, and vicariously become Meghan Markle, we can momentarily forget about our poverty, our lack of health care,  our joblessness, our homelessness. Even if we're among the fortunate and the comfortable few, we too can find some relief from our crushing boredom and loneliness as we tune in to the saga.

Meghan Markle, according to Blow and other liberal pundits, is being punished for bravely going on TV and joking to Larry Wilmore that she'd stay in Canada permanently should her candidate, Hillary Clinton, lose. Blow paints her as the rare celebrity who broke from the mold and dared to criticize Trump, thereby putting her brilliant acting career at risk. It was almost as bold and as rare a move as if a Hollywood celebrity went on TV and cast doubt on the Russiagate cult. Of course, not even Meghan Markle could have cast doubt on the Russiagate cult before the Clintonites had even invented it. And nobody is casting doubt on it now. 

Just as bad as Trump are the right-wing tabloids accusing Markle of timing the birth of her baby to cynically avoid Trump during his state visit. Maternity leave is just an excuse. So let all the righteous pick a side: unite and defend royal motherhood from the Usurper, or defend the Usurper from royal motherhood. Those are your two choices.

But before we get too carried away, we must also remember that as much as we Americans fawn over royalty, and canonize Americans who marry royalty, we must first and foremost patriotically embrace our own hegemonic system of government as we fawn from afar. Charles Blow writes:

I have no royalist fetish or reverence. Indeed, I find the existence of royalty in any society problematic. But this isn’t as much about Trump’s reaction to a princess as it is about his reaction to a woman, in this case, a black woman.

It is so problematic that Blow pulls a Trump and elevates Meghan Markle from her official title of duchess to that of princess. Methinks he doth protest too much.

He glosses over both classism and racism by making the class and race war all about Trump against Meghan Markle. By celebrating her achievement-by-marriage and by calling her a princess, he simply exposes himself as a more politically correct chauvinist. By eliciting empathy for and celebrating a wealthy woman of color, he can also ignore the fact that mortality and morbidity for black mothers and babies in the United States is nothing less than shocking and shameful.  

And Flint still doesn't have clean water.

By championing Meghan Markle's right to speak her political mind, Blow and other pundits engaged in the business of selling their Moments of Trump-Hate can also ignore the fate of WikiLeaks' Julian Assange, lying gravely ill in a British prison as the Trumps and the Windsors whine and dine, and the press corps gawk and wag their fingers at Good Dynasty vs Bad Dynasty.

And the Windsors can also bask in their own slickly marketed nouveau-liberal limelight and forget their own past fascist sympathies as they welcome a biracial American bride and new grandchild to their midst.  According to the royal family's media apologists, the Windsors were just ignorant victims of scary times. Unlike Trump, they were simply engaging in a harmless prank when they posed for the camera with their Nazi salutes. It is so unfair of the right-wing press to dredge up all those harmless scary memories, you see.

If Prince Harry can forget about once attending a costume party dressed as a Nazi, in the 21st century, then so should we, as we direct all our precious ire against Hitler-Trump.

We can also forget about Trump and Prince Andrew both being pals with convicted billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Maybe they can reminisce on the golf course.

And we can forget about the times that Prince Charles was a perfectly willing occasional guest at Trump's Mar-A-Lago palace during his forays into Palm Beach society and elite polo matches played for charity. When Trump was still just an ordinary social-climbing real estate mogul, according to an entertaining new book by Laurence Leamer, Charles even once personally called him from his private jet to grovel and ask if he could drop by. Trump was so excited that he abandoned his golf course right in the middle of his game to personally extend the welcome mat to the equally eager Prince of Wales.

Wealth and power always attract wealth and power, no matter the source. And white male supremacy is always an incestuous match made in hell. No matter how the media narrative spins it, the Trumps and the Windsors are crispy birds of a feather. Fair is foul, and foul is fair.

Trumps in Jerusalem: Smashing the Frames of War

Were it not for the corporate media's disdain for the Trump administration and the oafish damage this oligarchic crime family does every day to the reputation of the permanent ruling class, I doubt that American audiences would ever have been treated by CNN to the grotesque, side-by-side images of a simpering Jared and Ivanka and scores of Palestinians getting mowed down in cold blood by Israeli snipers. 

The message could not have been made any more graphic if Ivanka had been pictured digging her designer stiletto heel into a wounded child, her finishing-school bromides vainly competing with the sound of gunfire and the stench of human slaughter.

This pictorial juxtaposition is quite a new, sympathetic development in the media's portrayal of the prisoners of Gaza and American war in general. For purposes of critiquing Trump, the Palestinians have been granted an unprecedented modicum of humanity by the media-political complex. For the first time in a long time, the "other side" of the story is being told.

When the White House discounted the massacre, coinciding with the 70th anniversary of Israel and the removal of the official capital to Jerusalem as Hamas "propaganda," and when Jared Kushner's words blaming Palestinian protesters for own deaths were censored from the official government transcript of the event, the Fourth Estate took notice and spoke out. With Trump and his neocon enablers bellowing out their xenophobia in decibels guaranteed to make even the most jaded ears bleed, the media has had no choice. When the minister tapped to deliver a speech at the dedication of the new US embassy gave his personal blessing to Jared and Ivanka, his racist past - he once called black people "monkeys" -- had even some of the most valiant supporters of the apartheid state of Israel cringing in discomfort.

This speaking of truth to power is almost entirely new, given that the media and both establishment political parties have never exactly been critics of the Gaza concentration camp and the historical atrocities unleashed by Israel against the inmates behind the barbed wire. For the first time in a long time, American audiences are not being granted the customary sanitized "safe distance" between the violence directed against the powerless by the powerful. Either the media have finally undergone an ethical epiphany, or their almost universal hatred of the Trump regime has made truth-telling suddenly and politically convenient. You decide.

Previous corporate media accounts have, for example, usually cast the child victims of Israeli overkill as "human shields" used by their terrorist parents. This is a propaganda ploy, used for the sole purpose of rendering even the tiniest Palestinians in Gaza as less than human creatures.

As philosopher Judith Butler lays out in Frames of War, the lives of civilians targeted in American wars have traditionally been cast by the corporate US media as "ungrievable."

Ungrievable lives are those that cannot be lost, and cannot be destroyed, because they already inhabit a lost and destroyed zone.... To destroy them actively might even seem like a kind of redundancy, or a way of simply ratifying a prior truth.

That's how we can understand Jared Kushner's cold portrayal of the slaughtered Palestinian protesters as nothing but propaganda puppets. If they were already effectively dead to him anyway, how could they possibly be murdered again?

This mindset is nothing new in Imperial America, of course. The late Barbara Bush infamously opined that Hurricane Katrina victims were doing just fine packed in the Houston Astrodome because they had been "underprivileged to begin with." American authorities have never bothered counting or naming the "collateral damage" of their drone assassinations in Yemen and Pakistan, because as denizens of "tribal areas" they are not only not considered human, they are demonized as "militants." As apologists for US hegemony have rationalized it, why count victims if their lives never really counted in the first place? This is further rationalized by pleading that the counting of the dead would entail endangering more precious - and grievable - American troop-lives.

The massacres of Middle Eastern children are simply not as "grievable" as the massacres of American children in their classrooms. Similarly, the shooting deaths of black and brown people in The Homeland are not grieved (covered) in the media and by politicians as much as the shooting deaths of white people, especially white celebrities. As Butler describes it, it's all a matter of the media "framing." 

Framing is contrived by "norms" defining who and who is not a person, and whose status of living is open to apprehension. A picture is framed, but so too is a criminal suspect (by the police) or an innocent person (by someone nefarious, often the police) so that to be framed is to be set up, or have evidence planted against one that ultimately "proves" one's guilt. The frame of a picture serves as a limiting editorialized embellishment of the image, if not a self-commentary on the history of the frame itself. It is also possible to frame the frame or the framer and expose the ruse.

As far as the Trumps In Jerusalem story is concerned, the framing has been effectively stretched far beyond the heretofore artificially narrow canvas, exposing the grotesque surrealism of the painting for the whole audience to see. The New York Daily News correctly called Ivanka "Daddy's Little Ghoul" as she primly applauded while real human beings were being murdered just 50 miles away from her latest insipid Project Runway public relations event.

So we might just be making progress against American war propaganda in spite of ourselves. Neither norms nor frames are meant to last forever, so the sooner that the four rigid corners of acceptable media war discourse can be broken, the better.

The Trump framers have been framed, and the whole neocon ruse is being exposed.