One word I love beyond reason is all the rage right now; “simp” conveys its meaning perfectly. A postmodern insult rooted back to the 1650s, when “simpleton” made its first appearance on the stage. As the owner of a physical, multivolume Oxford English Dictionary, I enjoyed going down this linguistic rabbit hole today.
“Simp” is drawn from the traditional “simpleton,” which of itself was always an appealing insult, with the bonus verb form coming in from “simper.”
Simp -- sometimes conflated with the 1950s vintage “symp” (for “sympathizer” (“Com-symp” being the peak of the form) -- and simping shine brightest today online, in which incels and submissive men in unrequited virtual relationships, either of adulation and sexual obsession, pay and pay and pay for the object of their attention.
Particularly in the bespoke community of “findom” (a portmanteau of “financial” and “domination”) with women on OnlyFans and a host of other camgirl sites, there’s a demo of men who get off on being humiliated by a woman they’ll never engage with intimately.
But these dysfunctional men will pay them.
This brings us to the biggest simp in politics: a man so shallow, eager for approval, and energetically involved in a one-way relationship where his counterparty gets and he gives. Like the incels clicking the credit card link while a scantily clad woman in a camgirl cube farm abuses him about the size of his pathetic…wallet, Donald Trump keeps simping for Vladimir Putin.
As he sits in his cubicle wearing kitten-ear headphones and Louboutins making ahegao faces while collecting more adulation and tribute from Trump, Putin's price isn’t money.
It’s power. Putin’s price isn’t dollars or bitcoin or an Amazon wish list.
It’s the humiliation and subjugation of American values and interests at the hands of Donald Trump. It’s the destruction of NATO, the abandonment of Ukraine, and the recession of American power in the world.
If we re-elect Trump, Putin will get everything he commands of Trump.
The Russians helped Donald Trump win in 2016. They wanted Trump in office, and their investment had massive, ongoing ROI. From 2016 until 2020, Putin couldn’t believe his luck.
Trump, a proven fan of autocrats from Adolf Hitler on down, was, of course, the perfect patsy for Putin. The wily old KGB operator still has a few tricks left in them, and one of them is manipulating a man running for the highest office in America. In intelligence, the old rule of recruiting agents was MICE: money, ideology, compromise, and ego. Any one of those was usually sufficient.
Take a look at Trump, and you’ll see that every one of those elements is present at scale. The Russians didn’t need to sit in a hotel room or cafe and make a deal with Trump. He was practically a walk-in. Trump took one look at Sexy Vova’s profile on OnlyFascists and clicked hard.
Books can and have been written about how dangerous Trump’s first term was for America’s security, and the most dangerous of his actions all had to do with placating Russia, its interests, and its allies.
Sure, there’s also the growing right-wing cult that wants America to emulate Russia and who go turgid with anticipation at agitprop garbage like Tucker’s Moscow Follies. Steve Bannon and others would love to emulate Vladimir Putin’s Russian autocracy under the auspices of Donald Trump. Their ideas of creating a new America where democracy, liberty, and individual freedom, to say nothing of those pesky press and contested elections, are a thing of the past shows the death rattle of any claims the GOP is a party of liberty and freedom.
If Trump wins a second term, the damage he’ll do at Putin’s behest cannot be calculated. And for what?
Trump’s sucking up to Putin is beyond the silly roleplay and financial exploitation of the usual incel/camgirl story in its consequence but not its particulars. Despite Trump’s endless protestations of manly power, in the end, he’s nothing but Putin’s biggest simp.
Trump is so stupid he thinks simping is a city in China.
“He was practically a walk-in”
Would be funny if not so deadly accurate
As the great Stuart Stevens wrote about the GOP, paraphrasing only slightly “Trump isn’t the CAUSE of the GOP today, he’s the RESULT of decades of decline”
Trump isn’t the only walk in.
The party is teeming with morally bankrupt, Fox News eager, unprincipled useful idiots, who when they aren’t thumping their Old Testament bullshit, are taking direction and money from Putin. Who? Start with the Moscow 8; then work your way to Mike Johnson and his iPhone porn detector.
And they could win in November