Literary Corner: Party of Country Clubs

Country club crowd lining up for a Biden speech in Detroit, 9 March 2020. Photo by Jeff Kowalski, AFP/Getty, via Wall Street Journal.

I Hear America Kvetching

by Senator Rafael Edward Cruz, Esquire, BA (Princeton), JD (Harvard)

They look at Donald Trump and the millions of people who went to battle
fighting alongside him and they’re terrified.
They want him to go away. Let me tell you this right now:
Donald J. Trump ain’t going anywhere,
The Republican Party is not the party of the country clubs,
it’s the party of steel workers and construction workers and taxi drivers and
cops and firefighters and waitresses. That is our party!
these deplorables are here to stay!
Every one of you has a platform.
Every one of you has a voice.
The corporate media wants to silence these voices.

As he said with wall-to-wall coverage by the cable news, amplified through Twitter and Facebook and everywhere else. Junior, also screaming about being silenced, is devoting his Twitter account to promoting his Rumble videos. Parler is apparently back. What do you think Cruz means by "went to battle fighting alongside" Trump? Me too: an open reference to 6 January, when Trump promised to march to the Capitol with the mob (he was lying about that, of course, he was too scared to join other than by Twitter from the White House, but the mob thought they were marching with him, and that's the point) to stop Pence from certifying the election results, which they came remarkably close to doing: 

13:10

Mr Trump ends his speech with the words: "We fight. We fight like hell and if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore. So let's walk down Pennsylvania Avenue."

Shortly afterwards a Capitol police officer calls for backup.

"They're throwing metal poles at us," he says. "Multiple law-enforcement injuries," he adds in a panicked voice.

Tom Conway, president of the United Steelworkers International, wrote in 2019:

A president who supported organized labor would oppose free-riders who won’t pay their fair share but still want all the benefits of union membership. A president who supported unions would not issue executive orders crippling unions representing federal workers. A president who supported unions would not delay or eliminate health and safety regulations designed to protect workers from sickness and death.

That’s not Donald Trump. He supported Mark Janus, an Illinois government employee who wanted everything for nothing. Janus was fine with collecting the higher wages that the labor union representing him secured for workers, but Janus didn’t want to contribute one red cent for that representation.

So with right-wing corporate billionaires picking up the tab for him, Janus took his case to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ordered unions to provide workers like Janus with essentially a free lunch. That is, the court said unions must represent freeloaders like him, but those workers don’t have to pay anything for all they get, no dues, no fees, no nothing.

Of course, there is no such thing as a free lunch. The whole point of Janus’ and the billionaires’ court crusade was to bankrupt and try to kill unions. And Trump was on their side. 

I realize you know already, but I really can't get over this. Oh, and also "Donald Trump ain't going anywhere" is incorrect English, an implausible register mix; should be "ain't going nowhere". Virtually every English speaker knows this, but Cruz doesn't. Incompetent fraud.