BBC: Trump Has Been Cancelled

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Donald Trump is the king of cancel culture
No other politician has spent more time trying to cancel those who offend
him.
President Trump (Carlos Barria/Reuters)
Image without a caption
By Mehdi Hasan
Mehdi Hasan is a senior columnist at The Intercept and host of the
Deconstructed podcast.
June 30, 2020

“President Trump stands against … cancel culture, which seeks to erase our
history,” White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany declaimed on
Monday.

Talk of “cancel culture” — defined as the “popular practice of withdrawing
support for (canceling) public figures and companies after they have done
or said something considered objectionable or offensive” — is everywhere
these days. “Social justice warriors are waging a dangerous 'Cancel
Cultural Revolution,’” screams the headline in the New York Post.
“Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, who’s next on the statue cancellation
tour?” demands Fox’s Greg Gutfeld. Democrats are being “driven by this
radical 'cancel culture’ left,” insists Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio).

So perhaps it isn’t surprising that the left-bashing president has jumped
on this particular “culture wars” bandwagon.

But here’s the hypocrisy: Donald Trump has embraced “cancel culture” his
entire life. I cannot think of another politician, or public figure, who
has spent more time trying to “cancel” critics than the thin-skinned
former reality TV star in the Oval Office. Over the years, Trump has
called for the boycott of leading U.S. brands such as Macy’s, Apple, and
Harley Davidson, among others, because they displeased him in one way or
another. He forces those around him into nondisclosure agreements and then
threatens them with legal action if they dare speak out against him —
including his own niece Mary, whose forthcoming tell-all book the
president is desperately trying to … cancel.

This approach has only been amplified since he came into office, a period
that has found him publicly and repeatedly trying to cancel both social
media companies (“We will strongly regulate, or close them down”) and
network news channels (“Challenge their license?”) while calling for
prominent journalists who have upset him, such as Chuck Todd and Jemele
Hill, to be fired. (In private, Trump has gone much further: according to
his former national security adviser, the president wants some journalists
to be “executed.”)

The 'reasonable' rebels

Then there is Colin Kaepernick. The president not only supported the
benching of the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback but insisted NFL
owners sack other players, too. “Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL
owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, ‘Get that son of a
bitch off the field right now. Out! He’s fired. He’s fired!’” he ranted at
a rally in September 2017.

Trump’s interest in silencing his opponents — the very thing cancel
culture’s conservative critics decry — is more pronounced when he’s
targeting members of his own political party. Take Mitt Romney. The sole
Republican senator to vote for impeachment in February faced an intense
backlash from both the president and his ideological allies — especially
after Trump labeled him an “ass” and a “fool” and called for Romney’s
impeachment. The president’s son demanded the Utah senator be expelled
from the GOP. The chairman of the Conservative Political Action Conference
said he could not even guarantee Romney’s “physical safety” should the
senator decide to attend the organization’s annual event. In short, at
Trump’s behest, the Republican Party canceled their own former
presidential candidate.

Romney, of course, wasn’t the first independent-minded GOP member of
Congress to endure such mistreatment at the hands of the Canceler-in-
Chief. Remember Jeff Flake? Canceled. Bob Corker? Canceled. Justin Amash?
Canceled. Mark Sanford? Canceled.

It’s no secret that Republican officials now live in fear of having their
careers ended by Trump, and/or his base, if they step out of line. After
Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), the fourth-ranking Republican in the Senate, dared
to vote against Trump’s declaration of a national emergency at the
southern border, in March 2019, he was disinvited from a local dinner by a
Missouri county GOP committee. After Anthony Scaramucci, the president’s
former communications director, described Trump’s attack on four
congresswomen of color as “racist and unacceptable,” in July 2019, he was
disinvited by the Palm Beach County GOP from its annual Lobsterfest
fundraiser.

Even loyalists aren’t safe from a potential cancellation. After Rep. Matt
Gaetz (R-Fla.), “the Trumpiest congressman in Trump’s Washington,” voted
in favor of limiting Trump’s authority to start a conflict with Iran, in
January, a White House official told The Washington Post that it was
“quite unwise” for him to have cast such a vote and “added that White
House officials would not be returning Gaetz’s phone calls, text messages,
‘smoke signals or his kneelings in the snow.’”

Then there are the public servants who dared to testify against Trump
during the House impeachment hearings. Ambassador Gordon Sondland and Lt.
Col. Alexander Vindman were both canceled by the president for having the
temerity to speak out. Trump even canceled Vindman’s brother for the crime
of being his identical twin.

The dead aren’t spared, either. The late Republican Sen. John McCain is
such an objectionable figure to the president that White House officials
asked “the U.S. Navy to move ‘out of sight’ the warship USS John S. McCain
ahead of President Trump’s visit to Japan,” according to the Wall Street
Journal in May 2019. (The ship was named after the father and grandfather
of the late Republican senator — so much for Trump standing against the
“erasing of our history”!)

While Trump has taken “cancel culture” to new and authoritarian heights,
the conservative moment as a whole has spent years loudly withdrawing
support for those deemed “objectionable or offensive.” The Republican
National Committee boycotted MSNBC and even the conservative National
Review. A conservative group tried to boycott Burger King and Kit Kat for
(what it claimed) were offensive ads. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) tried to
cancel Nike and the NFL. Fox News fans tried to cancel Keurig by smashing
the company’s coffee machines. Right-wing pundit Erick Erickson tried to
cancel the New York Times — by shooting bullets into a copy of it!

What critics of 'cancel culture' really hate

Recall also what happened to the Dixie Chicks — now known simply as the
Chicks. In March 2003, in the run-up to the illegal invasion of Iraq, the
band said they were “ashamed” that President George W. Bush was from their
home state of Texas. In response, conservatives denounced them as
“Saddam’s Angels,” “Dixie Sluts, and “traitors,” and banned them from
hundreds of conservative radio stations across the country. In Bossier
City, La., hundreds of pro-Bush protesters used a 33,000-pound tractor to
physically crush the band’s CDs.

The list of conservative “cancel culture” targets stretches back decades,
long before the dawn of the Internet. In 1966, right-wing Christians tried
to cancel John Lennon, after he claimed the Beatles were “more popular”
than Jesus. The British band received death threats in the United States
and a Birmingham, Ala., radio station announced a bonfire and invited
teens to burn their Beatles records.

So ignore the hysterical attacks on “cancel culture” from the right. Not
only because they are a distortion of the facts and endless talk of a
leftist “cancel culture” mob is a “joke” and a “con,” as Osita Nwanevu has
documented in the New Republic, but because they are a product of bad
faith and brazen hypocrisy.

Right now, in 2020, here in the United States, we have an anti-free
speech, authoritarian egomaniac sitting in the White House, backed by a
cultish political movement steeped in grievance politics, constantly
cracking down on critics, dissenting voices, and unpopular opinions.
Donald Trump and the Republican Party have never stood against “cancel
culture.” To the contrary, they embody it.

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