GUEST POST: Scheisskrieg! Trump's AI Slop-Jar Video Is a Perfect Metaphor for His Presidency
In an AI-generated video, Trump shits on everything we value and everyone we care about.
On the eve of the No Kings marches in October, a friend and fellow journalist was wondering why the Trump regime’s assault on America hadn’t added any phrases to the lexicon of war metaphors, like “crossing the Rubicon” or “blitzkrieg.”
I suggested one: “scheisskrieg.” A German compound word, “shit-war.”
That conversation happened before either of us had seen Donald Trump’s AI slop-jar video, which depicts him wearing a crown and flying a Cold War-style fighter plane with “King Trump” painted on the side, over a city street packed with No Kings protesters. He then douses them with a tankload of semi-solid dooky.
The New York Times euphemism for that was “brown liquid.”
This is what the presidency has come to: simulated videos of him dumping giant globs of fecal matter on Americans peacefully exercising their right to freedom of assembly.
It’s a perfect metaphor for Trump’s strategy and tactics. His longtime unofficial adviser, white supremacist Steve Bannon, made that explicit when he urged a second-term strategy of “flood the zone with shit.” Do so many things so fast that opponents won’t be able to focus their outrage on what to stop.
So, in his first nine months in office, Trump fired thousands of federal workers and ripped up their union contracts; put an anti-vaccine quack in charge of the nation’s public-health system; kidnapped immigrants and shipped them to foreign prisons in contemptuous defiance of the right to due process; extorted compliance from major media owners, law firms, and universities; and purged federal prosecutors who wouldn’t to file bogus criminal charges against his opponents, replacing them with sycophants who would. In the long run, the most destructive part might be his insistence on environmental suicide: revving up fossil-fuel production while cancelling wind-power projects, public-transportation construction, and federal climate-observation science.
Projectile diarrhea spraying so many corners of American society that it’s impossible to keep up.
They don’t even try to argue their case on the merits. They meet every criticism with identical lies and insults. When they imprison and deport construction workers, tamale vendors, and mothers of children with cancer, the incessant party line is “we’re getting rid of the worst of the worst,” criminals and gang members. When Democrats demand restoring the Trump budget’s devastating cuts to Obamacare and Medicaid, the party line is that they “shut down the government to get free medical care for illegal immigrants.”
This, of course, is all enabled by a rubber-stamp Republican majority in Congress, a feckless Democratic leadership, and federal courts packed with enough ideological stooges to grant deference to the regime’s most delusional and dishonest claims, like that Washington, Chicago, and Portland, Oregon are “war zones” that need federal troops to restore order, or that ICE detaining American citizens is as painless a process as showing ID to get into a bar.
Trump’s crudeness illustrates his dictatorial attitude, but it’s not the main point. He’s been far more blatantly public about it than any previous president, although he’s not the only boorish one.
Richard Nixon was recorded in private White House conversations ranting about a “Jewish cabal” in the Bureau of Labor Statistics, while Ronald Reagan called African United Nations delegates “those monkeys.” Lyndon Johnson did not feel that having to defecate was a reason to interrupt a meeting, so he would continue the discussion while seated on the Oval Office toilet. Yet Johnson’s crudeness did bequeath us his classic explanation of why he reappointed J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI director who denied the existence of organized crime while obsessively spying on leftists, queer people, and political opponents he could try to blackmail: “I’d rather have him inside the tent pissing out than outside pissing in.”
The Times euphemism for that was Hoover “behaving badly.”
Johnson’s presidency also left us the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Medicare, Medicaid, the Clean Air Act, and the end of the racist 1920s national-quota system for immigration.
Trump’s scheisskrieg is trying to destroy every one of those legacies.
He is grotesquely ignorant, but that’s also not the main point. He doesn’t know or understand the details of government, but he’s got plenty of malevolent nerds to put the devil into those details.
The best metaphor I have for that is also scatological: Donald Trump is someone who couldn’t change a diaper without smearing shit on the baby’s face.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would insist that ingesting shit is actually a very healthy probiotic for the baby’s gut flora and immune system.
Project 2025’s architect Russell Vought, now budget director, is like someone who’s spent his entire career researching the most virulent strains of E. coli bacteria and the most effective ways of infecting babies with them.
Steve Wishnia is a labor reporter, editor, tenant, and musician. He writes for Work-Bites, HellGate NYC, and more.
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This is a thoughtful and well-observed post, Steve. Thank you for fighting the good fight. I'm sorry you don't have an opponent worthy of your talent. President Trump would need a dictionary, a thesaurus, or an AI translator from intelligent to idiot to keep up with your argument. I fear he's so far gone, and nothing will get through. However, to end on a positive note, saying the quiet part out loud is appreciated by those whose voices are not heard. That video is proof that President Trump is either a moron or, and I seriously fear this, heading toward dementia. Beautifully done!