The GOP’s Birthday Boy Defense
Republicans built a brand on “f your feelings.” Then the DNC called Stephen Miller ugly, and they found theirs.
On Wednesday, a top White House official looked at a photo of a Texas Senate candidate and decided the worst thing he could call him was “transgender.”
The candidate, Democrat James Talarico, is cisgender and heterosexual. Miller knew that, and reached for “transgender” anyway, because he wanted an insult and that was the one he grabbed. The DNC had posted a photo of Talarico with the line “Fired up. Ready to go. It’s time to take back Texas,” and Miller quote-tweeted it: “The Democrats made history in Texas by nominating their first transgender senate candidate.”
The DNC wrote back: “shut up you ugly fuck.”
And then the fainting started.
Katie Miller, Stephen’s wife, went on Laura Ingraham’s Fox show and warned that the DNC’s five-word insult was “the same violent political rhetoric that is leading people to shooting up, whether it be the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, or President Trump in Butler.” A party account told her husband to shut up, and she heard gunfire.
This is the household, remember, where Stephen Miller calls the Democratic Party a “domestic extremist organization” and promises the government will “dismantle and destroy” what he labels the left’s terror networks. He talks about taking the opposition apart with the power of the state. His wife thinks the word “ugly” is how people end up shot. They’re married to each other.
The press found the cursing genuinely newsworthy. Mediaite reported that the DNC “wildly berates” a Trump official, as though the wild thing that happened this week was somebody typing “fuck.”
There’s an old tweet that explains all of this better than I can. It’s gone now, I think deleted along with the account that posted it, but it went around for years. In 2019, a user going by PissJugTycoon (yes, I know, lol) wrote:
I dated a 5’8 guy who’d taunt every jacked, 6’3 bro he met until they’d pull their fist back to beat him up, whereupon my ex would go “heyheyheyyy c’maahn I’m little guy, I’m just a little guyy, noo, it’s also my birthday, I’m a little birthday boyy” & it somehow always worked
That’s the move, start to finish. You go looking for the fight. You poke and poke until the other guy finally pulls his arm back, and then, right when it might actually cost you something, you crumple into the little guy. I’m just a little guy. It’s my birthday. You wouldn’t hit a little birthday boy. And it works, because now the big guy is the one who looks bad for almost swinging at someone so pitiful.
The whole Republican Party runs this play. Its officials spend their days saying genuinely vicious things about entire categories of people who can’t hit back, and the moment one of them takes a single insult from someone who can, out comes the birthday boy: the wounded innocence, the lecture about civility, the warning that words like this get people killed. The performance has one purpose, and it’s to make your swing the only blow anyone remembers seeing.
Whatever happened to “fuck your feelings”?
Getting the other guy to lower his fist is only half the move. The other half is the part where it turns out his feelings are precious and yours were never really feelings at all.
Another tweet lost to time, this one from 2018, put it as well as anyone has. User KrangTNelson wrote:
no no no you misunderstood. I said “fuck YOUR feelings”. MY feelings are very important and must be handled gently, like a tiny baby hummingbird
They sold this, by the way. Literally. “Fuck Your Feelings” went on T-shirts and got run up flagpoles starting in 2016, and “Make Liberals Cry Again” went on hats. For the better part of a decade, the brand was simple: other people’s hurt feelings were funny, and the tears of your opponents were the whole point.
So which of these tough customers turned out to have the tiny baby hummingbird for a heart? Stephen Miller. The man who took children from their parents at the border and built the current deportation machine. His whole career is an argument that some people’s suffering doesn’t register. And his were the feelings that had to be cradled, live on Fox, because a political party was rude to him.
The hummingbird routine works fine, as long as nobody looks too closely at how these same people talk about everyone who isn’t Stephen Miller.
The stuff that doesn’t count as uncivil
Start with Randy Fine, the Republican congressman from Florida. When photographs went around of Palestinians starving in Gaza, his response was “Hey Muslim terrorists, cry harder. #StarveAway.” He’s called Muslim members of Congress “terrorists,” and when people demanded he apologize, he said, “Boo hoo.” He’s also offered that “the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one,” and confirmed he meant the dog (no one was seriously suggesting anyone needed to choose between the two). He said that “mainstream Muslims” should be “destroyed.” The movement that produced him spent this week clutching itself over the word “fuck.”
Then there’s the president. In December, closing out a cabinet meeting, Donald Trump called Somali immigrants “garbage,” said “they contribute nothing,” and told the room “I don’t want them in our country.” His cabinet cheered and applauded; the vice president pumped his fist, and the defense secretary said, “Well said.” Within days, federal agents were moving through Somali neighborhoods in the Twin Cities.
Then there’s the way they talk about trans people. At CPAC, the Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles said “transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely,” and when that went over badly, explained that it wasn’t a call to harm anyone, because in his telling trans people don’t really exist to begin with. His Daily Wire colleague Matt Walsh calls the trans movement “the greatest evil our country faces.”
In a congressional hearing, Representative Nancy Mace, who calls herself a “proud transphobe,” shouted “Tranny, tranny, tranny! I don’t really care“ and said she wouldn’t be lectured by “men who have mental health issues dressing as women.” Stephen Miller reaches for almost the same words, calling trans troops “men in dresses pretending to be women.” When the deputy White House chief of staff and a sitting congresswoman land on the identical sneer, you’re looking at the house style. And nobody on the right worried that “eradicated” might be the kind of word that gets people hurt.
That move, taking a whole category of people and turning it into the insult, is the one that started this. Miller called Talarico “transgender” as a slur; Trump decided Chuck Schumer “used to be Jewish. He’s not Jewish anymore. He’s a Palestinian.” The insult is built to land on everyone in the group at once.
None of it summoned a civility brigade. There were no fainting couches for the starving, the deported, or the eradicated. Every one of these landed on people with no way to answer back, and the right’s tender new concern for everyone’s tone switched on at the exact moment the target was a powerful man who could.
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