In May 1856, Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner took to the floor of the Senate to deliver a speech denouncing slavery. Sumner was a fiery abolitionist; in his maiden speech on the floor of the Senate four years earlier, he had called for the repeal of the Fugitive Slave Act, which an Alabama senator disparaged thus: “The ravings of a maniac may sometimes be dangerous, but the barking of a puppy never did any harm.” Sumner continued to inveigh against slavery and its apologists throughout his first term. Clearly, he suffered from Pierce Derangement Syndrome (Franklin).

Among those Sumner attacked directly in his May 1856 speech was his Senate colleague Andrew Butler of South Carolina. His words were, to be sure, impolitic: “[Butler] has chosen a mistress to whom he has made his vows, and who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight—I mean the harlot, Slavery.”

Two days later, in one of the most infamous incidents in American political history, Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina, a first cousin once removed of Butler’s, walked over to the Senate chamber, waited until no women were present in the gallery (Southern chivalry!), and attacked Sumner on the Senate floor with a metal-topped cane, beating him within an inch of his life.

Alex Padilla, the Democratic California senator, did not bleed Thursday. He wasn’t even hurt. But the sight of a U.S. senator being manhandled by FBI agents was shocking enough. Lawrence O’Donnell said Thursday night that Padilla was the first senator in history to be so accosted by law enforcement officials. I don’t know for sure that that’s true, but (1) I suspect if there were another, we’d know about it, and (2) even if he’s the second or third, that wouldn’t make how he was treated any better.

With so many major decisions coming down—with implications for the role of religion in public life, efforts to restrict gender-affirming care, gerrymandering—not to mention the serious threat to our Constitution, there’s a lot to unpack. 

Join us on July 2 to analyze and discuss the end-of-session Supreme Court rulings and their legal and political ramifications.

The incident didn’t last that long. But the real damage came after, when the lie machine reliably revved itself into action. It started with Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary whose press conference Padilla had interrupted. She went on Fox News within the hour to say he “burst in” and was “lunging” toward her and “did not identify himself.”

All lies. As anyone can see from the video, he was a good 10 feet away from Noem. But even if he had lunged—and even if he were not a senator but a mere citizen, or really any human being who is not threatening violence—this is how Donald Trump’s FBI treats such people? Escort them away—OK. But push them to the ground and cuff them, when they’ve left the room and are no longer in any way a plausible “threat”?

And it was in that moment—the decision by the agents to take the matter to a totally unnecessary, completely gratuitous extreme—that we find lurking the essence of Trumpism.

The essence of Trumpism is just this: Dig in the heel of the boot; step on the enemy’s neck; determine in any situation the action that would be appropriately small-d democratic, and then do the opposite—go intentionally overboard, do something that shocks and offends the democratic sensibility. And then lie about it and try to reverse reality—to convince America that it didn’t see what it just saw. That truth is not what it seems.

A few Republican senators, and I mean a precious few, responded appropriately. Like, one: Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski said, “It’s horrible. It is shocking at every level. It’s not the America I know.” Susan Collins emitted the usual timorous excretion. Otherwise? Democratic Senator Chris Murphy said on Morning Joe Friday that he and colleagues Cory Booker and Brian Schatz waited on the Senate floor—who knows, perhaps not far from Sumner’s Desk 29, occupied today by New Hampshire Democrat Jeanne Shaheen—for their GOP colleagues to appear and denounce what happened. Not only did they not do that, Murphy said: “They basically said he deserved what he got simply because he was disrespectful to the president.”

But Trump was surely most pleased by House Speaker Mike Johnson, who put all the blame on Padilla and called on the Senate to censure him: “I think that that behavior at a minimum rises to the level of a censure. I think there needs to be a message sent by the body as a whole that that is not what we’re going to do; that’s not what we’re going to act.” Note the “at a minimum,” which leaves dangling the insane possibility that Padilla should … what? Just be expelled? Again, the essence of Trumpism is found in those three words.

This is what they do. All the time. Trump federalizes the National Guard and sends in the Marines; he crows that if he hadn’t acted, Los Angeles would have been “completely obliterated.” Think about the scale of that lie, referring to protests in a four- or five-block area in a city of 500 square miles. He told it over and over in various forms, as did Noem and others. The behavior has its precedents in the United States: Southerners accused Sumner of faking his injuries. They argued that the cane was not heavy enough to cause severe injury. Others, more direct about matters, piped up that Sumner deserved a caning every day.

And the right-wing media, like the Southern press in the 1850s, reliably echoed every word Trump, Noem, and the others said. Meanwhile the mainstream media failed dramatically this week by accepting the lazy frame that immigration is a “winner” for Trump. Two polls came out—this one and this one—showing this emphatically not to be the case. The second poll, from Quinnipiac, was bleak for Trump across the board. Only 27 percent of the country supports the big ugly bill. That’s not even all of MAGA America. People are beginning to understand that they indulged themselves last year in some fantasy projection of “Donald Trump.” They’re seeing the real article now, and they’re remembering his viciousness, his ignorance, his incompetence, and his lawlessness.

And it’s going to get worse. Trumpism proceeds by the successive breaking of taboos. Each time a new one is broken, the previous one is normalized, made to look not so bad by comparison. The cuffing of Padilla was a red-line moment. And yet: There’s plenty of reason to worry that in four months, we’ll look back on it as a moment of comparative innocence.

Last week’s quiz: How many were going to St. Ives? A quiz on nursery rhymes. 

1. What is the first authenticated starting point for narratives that were labeled “Mother Goose” stories?

A. A German book of children’s folk songs from 1644

B. An English book of children’s rhymes published in 1677

C. A French book of children’s rhymes published in 1695

D. An American book of children’s rhymes and songs published in 1741

Answer: C, France. As ever, there’s debate over this sort of thing, but here’s the general story. Fella by the name of Charles Perrault.

2. In “Jack Sprat,” what word rhymes with “lean,” as in, “His wife could eat no lean”?

A. Bean

B. Spleen

C. Thrapston-on-Nene

D. Clean

Answer: D: “And so between them both, you see, they licked the platter clean.” The origin story seems to have to do with King Charles I (the one who was executed and replaced by Oliver Cromwell) and his desire to raise taxes to finance wars. 

3. In the British nursery rhyme “The Muffin Man,” where does the title character live?

A. Drury Lane

B. Camden Road 

C. Wapping High Street

D. Finsbury Circus

Answer: A, Drury Lane. It’s a beginner’s piano tune that my daughter learned many years ago.

4. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, in seventeenth-century England, this well-known nursery rhyme name referred to a drink of brandy boiled with ale.

A. Old Mother Hubbard

B. Little Jack Horner

C. Little Bo Peep

D. Humpty Dumpty

Answer: D, Humpty Dumpty. Explanation here.

5. This nursery rhyme has its origin story in the London Great Plague of 1665, when many of the bodies of the deceased—as much as 15 percent of London’s population—were burned.

A. “Baa Baa Black Sheep”

B. “Ring Around the Rosie”

C. “Jack and Jill”

D. “Georgy Porgy”

Answer: B, “Rosie.” This should have been easy if you thought about the words; I gave you a nice, Jeopardy!-style clue with the bit about the bodies being burned (that’s what “Ashes, ashes, we all fall down” refers to). Here’s a web page I found with this and nine other interesting origin stories.

6. This nursery rhyme song has popped up in a host of other contexts: as the apparent basis of a Schumann piece; in an Art Blakey jazz version; as a Three Stooges theme song; and, in calypso form, as a tune sung in an early scene in the first James Bond film, Dr. No.

A. “Rock a Bye Baby”

B. “London Bridge Is Falling Down”

C. “Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush”

D. “Three Blind Mice”

Answer: D, “Mice.” Here’s the scene. The “mice,” three Jamaican men, are contract killers hired by the titular villain.

This week’s quiz: If you remember what 33 and 45 mean … then you might do well on this quiz on classic record labels.

1. This label, founded in 1947 by Ahmet Ertegün, was known mostly for R&B and soul stars like Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles; by the rock era, it also picked up Led Zeppelin and Yes.

A. A&M 
B. Tamla
C. Chess
D. Atlantic

2. After his early hits on the regional, Memphis-based Sun Records, Elvis Presley went big-time by signing with what label?

A. RCA Victor

B. CBS

C. Reprise

D. Capitol

3. What’s the most famous classical music label of the great era of vinyl?

A. Charybdis
B. Hyperion
C. Deutsche Grammophon
D. Chandos

4. What’s the name of the famous jazz label whose artists included Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, and Ornette Coleman?

A. Verve

B. Blue Note

C. Vanguard

D. Prestige

5. Who thought of the name Apple for The Beatles’ label?

A. John

B. Paul

C. Clive Epstein (Brian’s brother)

D. Yoko Ono

6. Match the mega-selling 1980s artist to their label.

I kept this focused on the big labels, but my greater interest is the old small, independent labels that flourished in the golden age. Maybe we’ll have a quiz on those soon. Answers next week. Feedback to fightingwords@tnr.com. 

—Michael Tomasky, editor 

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