25. Flex
The thrill for the abuser doesn’t just lie in the abuse. It lies in committing it in front of people and knowing you’ll get away with it anyway.
The day after Donald Trump’s Town Hall on CNN back in May, Washington Post opinion columnist Paul Waldman posted a Twitter thread about how you get nowhere trying to fact-check Trump in real time: not only does it not work, it’s precisely what he wants.
“When he says ‘The election was rigged,’” Waldman wrote:
or “I did complete the wall,” gets corrected, and then says the lie again, steamrolling over the journalist, it isn’t about which of these competing versions of reality will be judged factually accurate.
The conflict, and Trump’s bullying of the journalist, is the essence of the performance. It says, “We will create our own reality. You have no power over us. And the more frustrated you get, the more we win.”
The journalist with their petty “facts” is essential to the spectacle. Getting fact-checked then bullying the journalist is WAY better than just repeating his lie on Truth Social for the zillionth time.
It shows him defeating his enemy, mocking them, pouring his contempt on them while his fans applaud and cheer. Without that foil there’s no drama. When it’s over he has proven his mastery over the people he and his fans loathe.
That doesn’t mean anyone outside of his base is at all persuaded. But for that base, it creates a visceral thrill no other Republican can touch.
“It sounds like an orgasm,” Bill said, when I read the thread out to him.
“Bingo,” I said.
I was reading that thread to Bill because I was having trouble organizing my thoughts on why I keep bringing up the reality show Cops and police brutality and whether—as a friend asked in a recent email—I know where I’m going with that.
I think I do. I keep harping on police misconduct and relating it to sexual misconduct in the workplace because I believe that the same dynamic is at work in both and that police misconduct is—as workplace harassment was revealed to be in the fall of 2017—well known to be more pervasive than we’re supposed to think it is.
And I bring up Waldman’s thread because the “visceral thrill” he describes is related.
It’s the same rush that Harvey Weinstein got exploiting and mistreating women for three decades in full view of his company’s Board of Directors—or whoever kept making the decision to spend millions in hush money to conceal what they clearly knew to be a pattern of behavior. What those men were saying to Weinstein—just as News Corp was saying to Bill O’Reilly and Roger Ailes before the New York Times broke the Fox News stories the previous spring—was, “We know what you’re doing is wrong and you know it, and the proof is that we’re spending a lot of money to hush it up. But you’re so important that we’re just going to put up with what you do.”
It's not just that all of these things are about the abuse of power. They’re all driven by the same impulse, which is the excitement that some people derive from forcing things on others: a certain kind of behavior, a version of the truth, a kiss. They’re things that the person they’re being forced on doesn’t want or doesn’t want to have to accept. The thrill for the abuser doesn’t just lie in the abuse. It lies in committing it in front of people and knowing you’ll get away with it.
This seems very different from the mindset of the pedophile, say, whose crimes rely on secrecy. The man who molests his girlfriend’s daughter and the abuser-priest can’t afford to get caught. The kind of impulse I’m talking about is more like that of the domestic abuser who can go on beating his wife because he knows she won’t press charges and knows, furthermore, that unless she does no one can do anything to stop him, despite the fact that everyone secretly knows what he’s doing.
This is the abuser who needs what he does to be an open secret in order to get off on it. That’s the thrill. Not the abuse itself, but being able to commit it more or less in plain sight and know that nobody will do anything to stop you. That’s what proves to the abuser how much power he wields. He knows (or thinks) we can’t do without him: he’s Harvey Weinstein or he’s a cop or he’s Donald Trump, and society just has to put up with whatever he does.
I keep harping on Cops and excessive force and police brutality because I think people misread police misconduct in the same way they misread sexual harassment. And, mistaken as to what both are really about, they think these phenomena can be reformed or re-trained out of existence, when in fact they can’t.
The Weinstein scandal erupted into a world that thought men in the workplace fall into the ways of harassment unintentionally, out of poor impulse control or a mistaken sense of what is and isn’t appropriate. But Weinstein didn’t pursue women he had power over because he was sexually voracious or because he didn’t understand the concept of a power imbalance. He did it because of the power imbalance. That was what excited him. What gave him a thrill on the level of orgasm (on top of whatever actual sexual fulfillment he achieved while exploiting and abusing women) was the knowledge that he could get away with what he was doing.
So where am I getting the idea that this is true of police brutality? It’s all about the police and cameras and how cops play to the lens.
There’s a version of the footage from the incident of the Utah nurse that contains a moment when Jeff Payne, the cop who was going to assault Alex Wubbles, talks about the fact that he’s wearing a bodycam. Another officer who has joined him asks if he’s filming the incident, and Payne assures him wryly that he is. “Oh yeah,” he says with a sort of smile in his voice. His colleague assures Payne that he is filming it too. What that tells you is that these guys weren’t just okay with what they were doing, they wanted to be seen doing it.
I found an article by the mid-century political columnist Mary McGrory—I’d printed it out in 2017—looking back on the experience of covering the police riots that took place during Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968. She describes venturing out into the street with the news anchor and war correspondent Eric Sevareid and encountering four cops beating a young man they have spread-eagled on the hood of a car.
What made the scene most hair-raising was that the presence of the press—our credentials were plain to see—had not the slightest deterrent effect. The cops wanted us to see them beating an unarmed and defenseless man and felt no need to explain themselves. They were making a statement.
So what was the statement?
I think it’s the same statement that the law enforcement agencies that collaborated with the producers of Cops were making when they allowed their personnel to be caught on film arresting people just for cracking wise or tasing someone who was fleeing from a pretext stop or throwing to the ground and violently cuffing some down-and-outer who had been loitering, who posed no threat and hadn’t done anyone any harm. They were saying: “We don’t care how we’re perceived because we don’t have to.”
It's a flex. It’s the same flex that Weinstein’s years spent abusing and exploiting women with impunity amounted to—and Matt Lauer and Charlie Rose and a whole bunch of other guys.
And it's a flex the apotheosis of which would come—cops and cameras again—three and a half years later when a black man who had passed a bad twenty would be killed in plain view in broad daylight before a crowd of people while the white police officer killing him showed how little he cared that he was being filmed by staring blandly into the lens of the cell phone camera that was photographing him.