If you listened carefully to President Trump’s disgraceful dressing down of his Ukrainian counterpart in the Oval Office last week, you heard gripes galore, but with one theme above all others: Americans had been played for fools. We’d been suckered, swindled, bamboozled. In all our goodness and glory, we’d forked over hundreds of billions of dollars to Volodymyr Zelensky and received nothing in return — no assurance of victory, no mineral rights, not even a properly flowery thank-you note.

What chumps we were.

If you looked for a through line in Trump’s titanically self-indulgent blathering to Congress on Tuesday night, you saw the same bitterness, the identical complaint about Americans’ treatment by trading partners, by supposed allies, by fraudsters in the federal government, by woke zealots. We could slap giant tariffs on countries that had long taken lavish advantage of us — or we could continue being chumps. We could cheer on Elon Musk as he derailed the gravy train of frivolous government contracts and superfluous federal employees — or we could consign ourselves to chumpness forevermore.

Trump isn’t simply telling Americans that they haven’t been given their due. He’s insisting that they’ve been duped, and the choice before them is to finally get smart or to continue getting scammed.

The word “grievance” is frequently attached to what Trump traffics in — I may have used it somewhere myself — but it’s not a perfect fit for the pettiness and puerility of the language he chooses,66jogo the stories he promotes and the lessons he identifies. Democratic initiatives that he opposes aren’t just bad decisions. They’re mockeries of common sense, and the politicians pushing them are laughing behind fair-minded Americans’ backs.

In marketing parlance, a phenomenon that is likely to have played at least a small role in Tupperware’s demise is known as genericization, which is when a brand name becomes so well known that it supplants the product itself. Think of brands like Kleenex, which is synonymous with facial tissue, or X-acto, which has become a stand-in term for any type of modeling knife.

Those Democrats not only put a welcome mat at the border but also put migrants up in fancy hotels. They made chumps of the rest of us. Social justice warriors framed critical race theory and offices of diversity, equity and inclusion as necessary correctives for centuries of discrimination when the point of it all was really perks and preferential treatment for minorities. We were chumps to fall for and allow it. But we won’t be falling for it anymore. Trump is the chump antithesis. The chump antidote. A walking, talking, golden-lidded canister of Chump Be Gone.

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To make that sale, he exaggerates wildly, lies promiscuously and elevates conspiracy theories, which tend to begin with or circle around to a whole class of people being marked as chumps. The enemy within is rigging elections. Foreign countries are dumping patients from psychiatric hospitals on America. FEMA is diverting taxpayer dollars from disaster relief to migrant coddling.

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