Trump’s Toxicity Will Extend for Generations
We live in a world where 4-year-olds are dropping F-bombs in the Oval Office
A remarkable thing happened recently. A private citizen wearing a tech bro uniform and carrying a booger-hurling four-year-old boy invaded the Oval Office. He reminded us all that not only has Donald Trump lost control of the country, but has stolen our children.
CSPAN recorded the carnage:
And although it made most rational Americans realize they were witnessing the usurpation of an American president’s power in living color, I was reminded of something else.
It made me think of how lost our youth is. And that we may never get them back. It made me realize that the Trumpification of America, more than anything, is affecting our kids’ brains, their psyches, their souls. It made me think of Jacob Marles.
Jacob Marles was ten when Trump was first elected. Jacob was exposed to Trump’s first toxic presidency until he was 14. Among the things young Jacob learned during those years was the Trump way of treating a lady. I could go on, but most of you are already familiar with Trump’s many layers of mendacity.
Jacob cut his sports appreciation teeth while closely following Barstool Sports, whose podcasts and website articles are often sports bro fermentations laced with misogyny and bigotry against the LGBTQ+ community.1 Barstool Sports was, and is, an extension of the Trump persona that has infected the country.
So is Joe Rogan. Jacob tunes into Joe Rogan the same way my crazy neighbors in Texas used to lounge at the side of their swimming pool listening to Rush Limbaugh every day. Rogan, for those of you not familiar, is a bro culture2 podcaster with a massive audience who helps amplify misogynist causes on the regular3. He’s not a hater so much as a disinformation artist and maligner, someone who encourages the disintegration of whatever dollops of feminine tranquility remain in his male listeners’ personalities.
Jacob was 15 when he joined nine million Twitter users to follow Andrew Tate. Tate is a malignant former kickboxer who allegedly ran a pyramid scheme for an outfit named Hustler University, which promoted cryptocurrencies and other hustles dear to the MAGA community, before being hit with rape, human trafficking, and child sexual exploitation charges.4
When Elon Musk purchased Twitter, he was already known to some of us as a toxic racist with Apartheid leanings5 (see the Notes below). That reputation grew slowly but very surely as he wrote increasingly disturbing tweets to his 216 million Twitter followers that reflected his narrow white nationalist views.
I was concerned the moment he bought Twitter. 6, 7 I’m fairly certain many of you were, too.
Kids like Jacob ate it all up. In the eyes of young American boys and semi-men who lived in a comic book world of mythological phantasm, Musk was the superhero. He was the Tony Stark of the real world, who created cars, rocket ships, and brain implants with his bare hands all while making babies at a preposterous rate.
Trump never shut up after he lost to Biden, so Jacob was exposed to four more years of Trump’s relentless savaging of norms until Jacob reached his eighteenth birthday.
During this process, Jacob also latched onto Musk and discovered a similar form of depravity. But Musk’s depravity was couched in delicious techno-blabber that made Musk a hero among men. Thus began a two-pronged attack against the easily molded mind of young Jacob Marles.
Jacob Marles is a fictional character, but you probably know him. Perhaps he’s your son. Or your brother’s or sister’s son. He might be your younger brother. Maybe he married your daughter or niece. You may not even know exactly who he is, but if there is a young man in your immediate circle, it may be him, or one of his friends lingering somewhere, like a hooded figure lurking in the dark.
If you sniff around enough, you’ll find his distinctive odor. Through no real fault of his own, it comes from a flesh made rancid by the overwhelming assault on his senses by a bro culture gone mad with a self-fulfilling prophecy of incel rage. This bro culture is everywhere. It reaches deep into the souls of young men throughout the nation because the modern American parent is unwilling or unable to monitor their online whereabouts with any authority.
What we sometimes forget, because we are all so overwhelmed with what Joyce Vance refers to as Trump’s firehose of attacks on our democracy,8 is that everything a president does bounces around the minds of impressionable young people.
When Obama was in office, his values seeped into the general ether. His respect for his daughters and wife were regular features of television fare for eight years. When those eight years were over, you could feel Obama’s persona reflected in the respect many kids seemed to have for, well, everything.
After Trump entered the scene and ruined the American body politic while soiling the fabric of American culture, Biden’s subsequent appearance in the Oval Office did little to cleanse the excrement that Trump left behind.
Biden was too quiet, too isolated, too focused on the technical details of repairing the country. In one sense, this was of great benefit to the nation’s soul, even if Americans seemed unaware of it.
His quiet strength provided a respite from the official presidential malignancy established by Trump.
That said, the failure of the Biden administration to install Trump into the American penal system might be better remembered by history than his reconstruction of Trump’s battered economy.
I have often wondered what weekly fireside chats from Biden might have done to help counter the barrage of Trump news, which seemed to benefit Trump even when it reflected horribly on his nature as a human being. A weekly presidential visit from a quiet man fixing things may have changed the course of what now looks like a broken country.
It certainly would have benefitted America’s youth, whose only views of Biden were tainted by the mass media’s interpretation of him as a feeble, clumsy old man who secluded himself in the glen of a distant place, perhaps working on something, maybe not, but assuredly much too old for any of it to matter.
And now, our country, staggered and weakened, is witness to a remarkable display: A dangerously comical tyrant in Musk who has conquered another tyrant. Trump’s mental deterioration has left him a raging foil who now appears to be little more than a glowering spokesman for the Project 2025 chicanery that is hellbent on destroying the nation’s infrastructure and converting its government into the Gilead of Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid's Tale.”9
Musk openly disses Trump to such a point that he brazenly wears a wrong-colored MAGA hat and showed up in the Oval Office with a small, obnoxious, nose-picking kid affectionately called by Musk’s brain-deprived followers, “Lil X,” who dropped a big, beautiful F-bomb in full view of an exhausted American public:
Lil X also said to a mildly startled Trump, “You’re not the president, you need to go away!”10
We don’t know who Lil X was dropping the F-bomb for. It could have been Trump, or it could have been an associate, or one of the pool reporters asking questions during this Oval Office summit of demons.
It doesn’t matter. The kid had no idea what was going on. He doesn’t have an opinion on any issues of the day.
Four-year-old children are parrots in disguise. Lil’ X isn’t some evil little monster hatched through some new Musk laboratory (not that such an event would surprise). He’s just a kid who is imitating Daddy.
In this case, two things are clear. Lil X is hearing, most likely repeatedly, Musk tell people that Trump is not the president.
The other clear thing is that Musk drops F-bombs around his kid on the regular.
I’m as big a fan of the F-bomb as anyone. I issue one if something as simple as a hole in my sock says hello. But it’s not something that should be imposed upon four-year-olds. Let them discover it themselves when they’re ready for it.
What sang loudly to me, however, wasn’t the craziness of that moment. What I thought of during that moment was how the constant refrain emanating from the Oval Office for the next four years, and amplified through Musk’s huge propaganda Twitter network, will influence the next Jacob Marles at ten years old. And millions like him.
Lil X unknowingly represented the assault on America’s youth that began about a decade ago when Trump first glided down that escalator like a recruiter from Dante’s Inferno.
Do the math. Consider all the kids in the country and think about all that they have witnessed through speeches, behavior, and horrific actions during the last ten years, and what they will see and experience during the next four. Think about all the ways this darkness will pervade their souls during their formative years.
And then ask yourself: “How the hell can any nation survive this?”
How can we protect them?
Notes
I don’t hold out much hope for Jacob Marles, so I suspect that as he grows into full adulthood, he will replace the “s” at the end of his name with “y,” and carry an increasing burden of chains through the rest of his days.
Here are some of the warnings I’ve made regarding Elon Musk’s here on Ruminato, which are only relevant to this sad tale in a sort of, “I told you so” sense:
Footnotes
“5 Things You Should Know about Barstool Sports If You Care about Being a Good Person.” 2022. IRIS. 2022. https://iris.virginia.edu/5-things-you-should-know-about-barstool-sports-if-you-care-about-being-good-person.
Wait, Charles, says the keen observer. Didn’t you also beat your chest as a young male back in the day? Yes, indeed I did. I’ve had to unlearn many bad habits over the years. I am not sure I would have unlearned them in this media environment.
Obeidallah, Dean. 2022. “Joe Rogan and Spotify Know There’s an Audience for His Racist, Sexist Garbage.” MSNBC.com. MSNBC. February 8, 2022. https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/joe-rogan-spotify-know-there-s-audience-his-racist-sexist-n1288827.
Das, Shanti. 2022. “Inside the Violent, Misogynistic World of TikTok’s New Star, Andrew Tate.” The Guardian. The Guardian. August 6, 2022. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/aug/06/andrew-tate-violent-misogynistic-world-of-tiktok-new-star.
I’ve been warning folks about Musk since at least 2022:
Bastille, Charles. 2022. “That Stench You Smell Is Musk - Ruminato - Medium.” Medium. Ruminato. December 16, 2022. https://medium.com/ruminato/that-stench-you-smell-is-musk-55450b90744c?sk=0718598806004dde65713bcccc7f03d7.
Bastille, Charles. 2022. “I Just Snagged Elon Musk’s Layoff Notice to Twitter Employees.” Medium. Ruminato. November 4, 2022. https://medium.com/ruminato/i-just-snagged-elon-musks-layoff-notice-to-twitter-employees-631bc8d84552?sk=ebf1ad22bc4d3c54f14fa429da2b0216. (no paywall)
Bastille, Charles. 2022. “Elon Musk’s MasterClass on How to Ruin a Company - Ruminato - Medium.” Medium. Ruminato. November 16, 2022. https://medium.com/ruminato/elon-musks-masterclass-on-how-to-ruin-a-company-7b2be9596417?sk=e0ce25128996cb1dca167c5155f1f21f. (no paywall)
“Handmaid’s Tale Atwood | the Melikian Center: Russian, Eurasian & East European Studies.” 2017. Asu.edu. 2017. https://melikian.asu.edu/research-and-partnerships/projects-and-initiatives/reading-group/Handmaid-Atwood.
Twitter link: https://x.com/TizzyEnt/status/1889724837972627470
This is an important essay. Of course, it’s not just kids who become infected by crass behavior. I’ve noticed society at large becoming more corse. Evidence of that is the relative lack of coverage or discussion of Lil’X’s behavior in the Oval Office. We know that little kids of that age can only parrot what their parents say. That it shows Musk is so classless and negligent as a parent to use such language around their child is bad enough. (I never heard my father use the f word until I was 20 years old during the summer I worked with him as a painter’s helper on a paint crew. I nearly dropped my brush, I was that startled. My dad said f…?) But it also shows that Musk is plotting against Trump. He’s actively building the case with someone, we don’t know who, to label Trump an illegitimate president, and the only reason for that is to depose him. Granted, maybe he just fumes around the house while he’s drinking schnapps and tweeting on Ketamine. But it’s just as likely the kid is overhearing conversations. If the media wasn’t so afraid of crossing Trump we would be hearing a lot about it.
An excellent column.... I saw this on Kate Morgan Reade's Substack this morning and it fits here:
“You must cherish one another. You must work — we all must work — to make this world worthy of its children.” - Pablo Casals
The "adults" are failing our kids.