By now, most people have become familiar with the face-eating leopards meme as it applies to President #47 and his wrecking crew. This meme goes all the way back to 2015, when a Twitter user called Adrian Bott (@Cavalorn) tweeted,

“I never thought leopards would eat MY face, sobs woman
who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party.”

The Face-Eating Leopards Come Back to Bite You

Since then, the expression has proliferated as a reference to voters who have experienced buyer’s remorse over their vote because that decision has come back to bite them.

Several things continually astonish me about how many Americans have wished evil upon other Americans while secure in the assumption that whatever terrible idea or policy or law they inflict will never affect them.

The Opposite of Christian Values

First, this behavior—along with the awfulness behind it—demonstrates the very opposite of the Christian values most of them claim to espouse. It is, in fact, the opposite of what virtually every major religion in the world preaches: “Do not do unto others what you would not want them to do to you.”

Too many Americans these days want to do awful things unto others without recognizing, or caring about, any possible consequences to them.

Second, it shows once again how many Americans have no idea that their choices will have implications. Somehow, they think that the bad stuff will only affect Democrats, or Blue States, or the Libs. They simply don’t understand:

• How government works
• Which states subsidize other states
• Many states experiencing climate disasters are Red States
• The economy depends on immigrant labor and consumer purchasing power
• Deporting your workers and customers is not good for business
• Cutting taxes often means defunding services you depend on
• There are two sides to deficits: income and outgo, not just spending.

The Joy of Evil

Third, with what glee they anticipate inflicting on Democrats, Blue States, or the Libs. They take outright joy in the thought of ruining the lives of people they don’t like. Or that they have been told not to like. This says more about them than it does about their self-described enemies, but that doesn’t occur to them.

As evidence,I offer this exchange from Mr. Musk’s X site:

Trump supporter: “I think that people are ridiculous that they think Putin is such an enemy. He isn’t doing anything. He just wants back what was his”

Reporter: “He invaded Ukraine, killing thousands of people”

Trump supporter: “That’s fine with me.”

As Bill Kristol and Andrew Egger say in “Morning Shots,”

“Trump’s biggest fans are no longer styling themselves as half-ironic transgressors against liberal speech codes. The libs no longer enter into it. The guys cheering on deportation ASMR videos aren’t trying to trigger anybody; the guys identifying with Patrick Bateman aren’t pretending to occupy any moral high ground. As with their newfound love for using slurs like “retard” or their consistently cruel rhetoric toward trans people, they’re openly, unapologetically luxuriating in sadism for its own sake.”

There is a word for taking pleasure in the problems of others: schadenfreude. While I sometimes experience that when I read about people who voted for President #47 and now have the leopards at their door, I try not to give in to it. But it’s difficult to resist. After all, these people not only brought the leopards to their own doors, they turned them loose on the rest of us as well.

Siccing the Leopards on Our Fellow Americans

Fourth, they also don’t realize that their “enemies” are other American citizens, people they would probably like and enjoy meeting if politics was removed from the conversation. Many belong to their own families. I experience this all the time when I am giving tours to people from all over the country. Unless they are wearing NY Yankees gear, I assume they are good people and I will like them. I am rarely disappointed.

Today, we are at the point where, as Mr. Kristol and Mr. Egger say:

“But it seems to me that this analysis misses the ways in which the Trump years have genuinely made so many right-wing people worse. What they have undertaken has been a long, slow, corrosive education in vice: from giving themselves permission to rationalize away Trump’s cruelty, to indulging in it in a quasi-performative way themselves, to realizing—almost to their own surprise—how much they liked the taste.”

The leopards like the taste, too, however. And they don’t discriminate when it comes to choosing faces.