Jordan faux-fearlessness is the norm among the MAGA male set, of course. It’s why he’s become such a celebrity in right-wing media and a power player in the GOP. He’s a perfect avatar of the toxic masculinity of the 21st-century Republican: Loud talking, followed by fleeing at the first sign of a real challenge.
Donald Trump, of course, is the most prominent example. He uses social media near-daily to threaten his political and legal opponents while cringing from any real danger behind a phalanx of taxpayer-funded security. But this week, he made a pathetic effort to bring his phony tough guy act out in person. He returned to court in Manhattan on Tuesday for the ongoing trial to determine how much he’ll be punished for decades of fraud. He’s been absent for a couple of weeks, once it became clear that his presence wasn’t garnering the press coverage he craved. His return appears to have been an attempt at witness intimidation.
Honestly, “coward” would piss them and their sycophants off more. One is just an insult. The other has weight behind it.
It’s not clear to me that “those people” have a sufficiently developed moral compass to have a functional sense of shame based on some kind of parliamentary proceedings. They’re able to write it off a “gobernment bad”.
However, I do agree that embarrassment is an effective forcing function. I think we could move the needle if there was a way to physically embarrass these people in a public way. They need to be shamed but they have none. So it’s gotta go further. It needs to be an almost physical emotional response of embarrassment. The kind of thing that a person never forgets. I’m not sure what that is yet but I’m working towards it.