{"id":31376,"date":"2020-12-02T10:10:39","date_gmt":"2020-12-02T16:10:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/?p=31376"},"modified":"2020-12-02T10:10:39","modified_gmt":"2020-12-02T16:10:39","slug":"its-not-the-odor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/2020\/12\/02\/its-not-the-odor\/","title":{"rendered":"It’s Not The Odor"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a> from yesterday:<\/p>\n

\n

But putting that aside, why in the world does the outgoing president keep referring to dogs like this?<\/p>\n

In June, Trump was interviewed by Sean Spicer, his former White House press secretary, and\u00a0argued<\/a>\u00a0that 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.<\/p>\n

The phrasing seemed familiar for good reason. As regular readers may\u00a0recall<\/a>, shortly before his State of the Union address in 2019, Trump told a group of television anchors that Virginia Gov.\u00a0Ralph Northam<\/a>\u00a0(D) “choked like a dog” at a press conference a few days prior.<\/p>\n

A few weeks before that, we learned of an anecdote from Cliff Sims’ book in which Trump told then-House Speaker\u00a0Paul Ryan<\/a>\u00a0(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!”<\/p>\n

It’s clearly one of this president’s favorite metaphors. Retired Gen.\u00a0Stanley McChrystal<\/a>, for example, was “fired like a dog.” According to Trump, so were conservative media figures\u00a0Erick Erickson<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Glenn Beck<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And it finally came to me:<\/p>\n

Dogs are the epitome, at least in American society, of the concept of loyalty. You think loyalty, you think dog.<\/em><\/p>\n

Our cats here at UMB<\/strong><\/em> are failing to take umbrage. They know how the dominoes lie.<\/p>\n

And, for President Trump, innate loyalty is for suckers<\/strong>. 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<\/a> General Flynn (I still can’t believe that was allowed to go through, as he had not finished contesting his earlier guilty pleas!).<\/p>\n

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<\/a> to certain Arab powers.<\/p>\n

Mystery solved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 \u2026 Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31376","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31376","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31376"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31376\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31377,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31376\/revisions\/31377"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31376"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31376"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31376"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}