Eminem is not similarly constrained.

The superstar rapper has been marshaling profane lyrics, rejecting political correctness, calling out hypocrisy, and raising a defiant middle finger at critics for 25 years, a period in which he became one of the world’s best-selling recording artists. His many fans appreciate that he says what he thinks. Oh, and he’s from the Rust Belt. If there’s a more apt foil for Trump, or any celebrity of comparable stature who could seem half as authentic calling him “Trump the bitch” on national TV (while insisting that the president doesn’t have the balls to respond), I don’t know who it is.

And yes, “Trump the bitch” is too vulgar for many to celebrate. Alas, as long as Trump inhabits the White House, Eminem-style vulgarity is presidential. Trump’s banter with Billy Bush was certainly more degraded than anything in Eminem’s substantively civic video, where after a few fits and starts, the flow smooths out and the blows start to land:

Eminem underscored the irony of his emergence as a moralizing political critic with the line, “Trump, when it comes to giving a shit, you’re as stingy as I am!” In fact, Eminem’s reputation for not giving a shit, his impulse to burn everything down—if only metaphorically—with his lyrics, and his explicit hostility to the notion of serving as a role model, lend a fraught wrinkle to his turn as an earnest denouncer of Trump’s depredations. If Eminem feels a need to object, if Eminem can easily seize the moral high ground from the president of the United States, and if it now falls to Eminem of all people to defend core civic values, what does that say about us?

Yet here we are, with years of Trump ahead of us, and all divisions his tenure will stoke. “Any fan of mine who’s a supporter of his / I’m drawing in the sand a line,” Eminem rapped. “You’re either for or against / And if you can’t decide who you like more and you’re split / on who you should stand beside, I’ll do it for you with this [middle finger].”

Will the president respond?

Said an observer on Reddit, “never underestimate Trump’s stupidity, but I have to believe someone on his staff would physically remove the phone from his hand before he started a war of words with a master battle rapper with 21,000,000 followers.”

In this chaos presidency, with even Eminem worried that the erratic president who commands the U.S. military may needlessly start a war that kills millions, that doesn’t seem a safe bet.