this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2024
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Holy shit that's the wildest thing I've never heard of.
I haven't seen any mainstream satire about this. It's so funny that he reads a "poem" like a little bedtime story at all his events about the scary immigrant coming to bite us. It's an awful message but that's so wild
Yep, it's wild. But rather than be a bed time story - it appears to be a highlight of his campaign events.
Usually his events are like an hour of him ranting and riffing, people just getting to see him talk... Usually half way or two thirds of the way through he'll notice the crowd getting sleepy or losing interest, and he'll say "do you wanna hear The Snake poem?" - and the crowd will cheer.
Sometimes near the end, they'll join in with the words.... Then he'll go back to just talking about whatever he wants. Then often without warning you'll start to hear this music ramping up, and he'll go into this prepared verbatim speech with the music in the background getting louder and louder.
Same swelling music, same faster paced campaign speech over it - always at the end of his events. The events are very much rituals. Like going to church, because it's a cult of personality.
Having one of these campaign events on in the background of what you're doing and half tuning out of it whilst going about your day is a very strange experience. Like something out of a TV show. An American cult of personality playing out in real time. It becomes obvious he was giving people's lives meaning and zest.
...and I agree with your reading of the poem's meaning. It's anti-immigrant, "save our women", white nationalist type of stuff. But it's very clever, because the original lyrics were written by a black guy (it's some song from the 70s), so he can use that if he's accused of it being racist. So he's really got his bases covered.
The way he reads it, it's very sly, because maybe it's about the democrats, or foreign aid, or the media, or the disabled. Accuse everyone else of being a snake, so no one's looking at YOU as the snake.
I think it's the kind of thing his mentor, Roy Cohn would have taught him. Roy was a gay lawyer for the mafia, who loved discos, young blonde men, and being a psychopathic tyrant, and Trump used "Ready-Mix" brand concrete for all his buildings in NYC, a brand/type of concrete the Mafia exclusively controlled the supply of.
Roy Cohn also collected toy frogs, and I think it's interesting the alt-right used a frog (pepe) as their mascot. Perhaps Trump paying homage to Roy.