Ran out to Meny this morning to shop for a lunch we were hosting. We had plenty of canned beer at home, but I wanted to have a few bottles of something nicer. I came across these:
If it’s hard to make out the picture, those are two IPAs from Fanø Bryghus: Mango Mussolini (a “New England IPA”) and Warmonger (a “Milkshake IPA”). Both feature cartoons of Donald Trump on the label. On the Mango Mussolini label, the background is a field of American Eagles. On Warmonger, it’s a field of flying missiles.
Both are selling at a price of 40 kroner per bottle.
I’d like to assume Meny had sold out of the novelty Obama beers and is still awaiting their first shipment of Biden brews. I would like to, but I won’t, because that would be stupid. No brew masters are going to produce a Biden label, and even if they did no chains would stock them.
Go ahead, world: prove me wrong. I’d be delighted.
It’s just the retail version of the same one-sidedness we see in the Danish media. Trump’s like Mussolini, see, because they’re both fascists, and Trump’s obviously a warmonger, so these labels are hilarious and clever and also genius marketing because everybody hates Trump and knows what a fascist warmonger he is, because of all the fascist things he does and all the wars he’s monged since taking office. Right?
Right?
An article published in May 2016 was entitled “I asked 5 fascism experts whether Donald Trump is a fascist. Here’s what they said.” It reported that they had unanimously stated that Donald Trump was not in fact a fascist.
National Review? American Greatness? Breitbart?
No: the article was published on the reliably leftist Vox. (But author Dylan Matthews helpfully offers a dozen other slurs that the young adult* Vox readers could use against Trump instead.)
Here we are four years later, 3½ years into a Trump presidency, and the fascism of Donald Trump has yet to materialize.
But the warmongering! Who can deny the Bad Orange Man’s constant monging of war? Most American presidents launch at least a couple of military engagements with ground troops: Reagan did in Lebanon and Grenada, Bush pére did in Panama and the Gulf War, Clinton did in Somalia, Bosnia, Haiti, and Kosovo, Bush fils did in Afghanistan and Iraq, Obama did in Libya and Syria, and as for Trump…! Where do we even begin with Trump?
No, I mean it, I honestly don’t know where to begin because after 3½ years in office he has not started a single military engagement that sent America troops to foreign soil.
That’s the crazy kind of warmongering we get from this guy. Sneaky!
And now he’s brokered a peace deal between Israel and the United Arab Emirates that even The New York Times and The New Yorker were forced to acknowledge as a game changer.
Worst warmonger ever.
But none of that matters, really. Because everyone knows what a fascist Trump is, even when left wing websites cite leftist professors as stating categorically that Donald Trump is not a fascist, and even when he’s monged fewer wars than any American president in half a century.
And because everyone knows these things, they’re hilarious, and totally effective at marketing beer, and Meny is really doing a public service by stocking such beers so their customers don’t forget what a fascist warmonger Trump is.
* During his magnificent reign as editor of the Wall Street Journal’s “Best of the Web” column, James Taranto always prefixed Vox with “the young adult website.”