Over the last four years, Steve Benen has, from time to time, expressed puzzlement over a particular quirk of President Trump, which is the use of dogs as a form of deprecation, such as this rant from yesterday:
But putting that aside, why in the world does the outgoing president keep referring to dogs like this?
In June, Trump was interviewed by Sean Spicer, his former White House press secretary, and argued that the impeachment charges against him were “thrown out like dogs.” A year earlier, the president boasted to the world that ISIS founder Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi “died like a dog” — a phrase Trump liked so much, he used it twice.
The phrasing seemed familiar for good reason. As regular readers may recall, shortly before his State of the Union address in 2019, Trump told a group of television anchors that Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam (D) “choked like a dog” at a press conference a few days prior.
A few weeks before that, we learned of an anecdote from Cliff Sims’ book in which Trump told then-House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), in reference to the closing days of the 2016 election cycle, “You were out there dying like a dog, Paul. Like a dog!”
It’s clearly one of this president’s favorite metaphors. Retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal, for example, was “fired like a dog.” According to Trump, so were conservative media figures Erick Erickson and Glenn Beck.
And it finally came to me:
Dogs are the epitome, at least in American society, of the concept of loyalty. You think loyalty, you think dog.
Our cats here at UMB are failing to take umbrage. They know how the dominoes lie.
And, for President Trump, innate loyalty is for suckers. If you aren’t looking out for #1, you’re a mark, a sucker. Trump deploys loyalty strategically, to keep the loyalty of voting groups he considers important, or people who have shit on him, such as the recently pardoned General Flynn (I still can’t believe that was allowed to go through, as he had not finished contesting his earlier guilty pleas!).
But he’s not loyal on general grounds. Given the chance to sell out the United States, he wouldn’t shoot the foreign agent between the eyes; he’d consider the offer, and maybe take it. As I suspect with the sale of arms to certain Arab powers.
Mystery solved.
