And how we got to having a POTUS posting a fake video of himself on his "Truth Social" media platform in a fighter jet labeled "King Trump" flying over the "No Kings" marchers and dumping shit on Americans.
More evidence of his complete mental and moral decline, as well as the people who continue to support this despicable, loathsome man.
President Trump has posted what appeared to be an A.I.-generated video on social media that showed him wearing a crown and flying a jet labeled “King Trump” that dumps brown liquid (shit) on protesters.8
The short video, shared on Mr. Trump’s Truth Social account late Saturday, was posted on the same day that protesters participated in a daylong mass demonstration, known as “No Kings,” against the Trump administration. The protests were held in cities and towns in all 50 states, with participants holding signs such as “I Pledge Allegiance to No King” and chanting slogans against the president, accusing him of acting in authoritarian ways.
The fake video, set to the song “Danger Zone” by Kenny Loggins, shows the plane dropping a brown liquid resembling feces onto the heads of protesters, who appeared to be gathered in a city.
The White House on Saturday also posted on social media an A.I.-generated image of Mr. Trump and Vice President JD Vance wearing crowns. “Have a good night, everyone,” the post said, with the crown emoji.
“The Depth of MAGA’s Moral Collapse.” ‘How we got to “I love H1tler.”’
By George Packer. The Atlantic. Oct 17, 2025, 2:06 PM ET.
“When leaders of Young Republican groups around the country exchange texts that say “I love H1tler,” that joke about gas chambers & rape, approve of slavery, sneer about “watermelon people” & monkeys in zoos, & throw around words like “faggot” & “retarded,” they aren’t just exposing their own anti-Semitism, racism, homophobia, & misogyny. To see only the varieties of bigotry with which we’re painfully familiar is to miss the depth of MAGA’s moral collapse.
Professing love for H1tler is more than anti-Semitic—it’s antihuman. It’s a proud refusal to be bound by the most basic standard of goodness, a deliberate expression of contempt for everything decent. The texts degrade all of us.
And they’re hardly surprising. Cruelty & humiliation have become the Trump administration’s common currency. With permission from President Donald Trump’s coarse rhetoric & vows of hatred, Elon Musk’s Nazi salute, Tucker Carlson’s flirtation with Holocaust denial, & Stephen Miller’s rage-filled threats, the young loyalists who wrote the texts were speaking the language of the people they admire most. Nor was it surprising when, the day after “Politico” revealed the texts’ existence, the image of an American flag altered into the shape of a swastika appeared on the cubicle wall behind a staffer in the Capitol Hill office of a MAGA congressman. In that culture, the rehabilitation of the man who stands for the worst in humanity was inevitable.
Having been given permission from the country’s most powerful person, the Young Republicans received forgiveness from its 2nd-most-powerful. Vice President J. D. Vance refused to condemn their words, explaining: “I really don’t want us to grow up in a country where a kid telling a stupid joke—telling a very offensive, stupid joke—is cause to ruin their lives.”
But the authors of the texts have already grown up—they’re men in their 20s & 30s, climbing the rungs of Republican Party ladders in Kansas, Arizona, Vermont, & New York, firm in the belief that the viler their language, the higher they’ll go. One is already an officeholder.
For Vance, ethical judgment has become a pure matter of partisanship, to the point of overcoming his most personal bonds. When a DOGE member was revealed to have posted “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity” & “Normalize Indian hate,” Vance—married to an Indian American—scoffed at the ensuing outrage & demanded that the offender be rehired.
But when private citizens anywhere said something ugly about Charlie Kirk, the vice president went after their livelihood. Once morality is rotted out by partisan relativism, the floor gives way & the fall into nihilism is swift.
The abandonment of a universal morality isn’t just philosophically wrong—it’s politically stupid. Any successful opposition to Trump has to begin with a lucid understanding of what’s at stake: not just past & present harms done to the marginalized, but everything that Americans once believed they cared about, including the values that were co-opted by the right before MAGA abandoned them—respect for law & custom, patriotism, family ties, common decency. To some liberals & progressives these values came to sound old-fashioned, corny, even dangerous.
But anyone frightened by the country’s downward spiral has to believe that our society still shares them, & can still respond to them if someone makes the appeal.
If the Young Republicans’ texts are seen merely as attacks on the groups they name, then they become the problem of Black & gay people, Jews, & women. But the texts represent a larger atrocity, one that has befallen all of America. Once you base moral judgments on group identity & political convenience, it becomes possible for people on the left to be anti-racist & anti-Semitic, & for people on the right to embrace Muslim haters in Israel & Jew haters in Germany.
If moral values aren’t simple & universal—if they require a facility with the language of graduate seminars & single-issue activism—they won’t move the immobilized, alienated, numb Americans who still haven’t given up on their country’s promise. The dehumanization of any group dehumanizes everyone. There will never be an end to learning this lesson.”
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