Jon Langford's "Loser" Reveals the Inner Trump

A screenshot from “Loser” by Jon Langford’s Skull Orchard

The Mekon and Waco Brother uses Mardi Gras costuming to present his vision of the man the president sees in the mirror.

Trump impressions all have a point. When Stephen Colbert and Seth Meyers give voice to Trump, they present him as a smug dolt, stumbling through his presidency, and that vision creates the sense of the situation is almost tragic. American democracy might go down in flames at the hands of someone who might not be able to tie his shoes without quietly saying to himself, “The rabbit goes around the hole ….” There are more vicious portrayals, though. John Di Domenico reads Trump’s tweets on Slate.com’s “Trumpcast” as a smugly vengeful prick, someone too consumed by his ego and petty squabbles to see or care about how much damage he’s doing. 

Each is in its own way brutal, but my current favorite comes from Jon Langford of The Mekons and The Waco Brothers. On Friday, he got in the game for the video for “Loser,” the latest song from his band, Skull Orchard. In “Loser,” Langford wears a Mardi Gras-calibre costume including a costume shop wig and Trump’s trademark tanning bed raccoon eyes to give us a picture of a man who’s never happier than when he’s reminding the less fortunate who’s better than who. He sings, “I’ll walk a mile in your shoes / and here is what I’ll say / ‘I have your shoes / now I’m a mile away.’” Later, Langford sings, “Workers in the Rust Belt / your factories shut down. / You’ve been replaced by robots and slave labor.” To finish the thought, he opens his arms wide and grins as he announces, “and I’m not going to save ya.”

Langford gives voice and physical expression to Trump’s inner self and presents him as someone who gets almost masturbatory pleasure from his class-based cruelty. Langford plays Trump as a villain explaining his plan, and he does so with just enough attention to Trump’s uncomfortable physicality for it all to ring true. When he sways ecstatically to the beat, Langford gives Trump an unimaginable sense of rhythm, but you know that in his mind’s eye, Trump sees himself as a dancer. 

“Loser” came out in a week dominated by #BlackLivesMatter protests, and the song was clearly recorded before the death of George Floyd. Still, it makes sense now because Trump’s genetic level disposition to see the world in reductive binaries played out last week, just as it has every day of his presidency.  And in a way, the song is right on time. This week, we saw the lengths that Trump would go for his own self-interest—not only the epically cynical photo op but the day spent tweeting more than 200 times including a retweet of an interview disparaging George Floyd. Langford gives voice to Trump’s inner monologue when he sings, “You’re all losers.”