The following words are perhaps the most quoted words of the week.
"She was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage. I didn’t know she was black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn black and now, she wants to be known as black.... All of a sudden she made a turn and she became a black person."
"[Trump's] 34-minute talk ... left audience members stunned," observed Politico — which is precisely what he was going for.
This was no "disaster" for him, as so much of the media reported. This was classic Donald Trump, rattling the nervous systems of those still unaccustomed to his middle-school approach to politics. Although obnoxiousness is instinctive to, and irrepressible in, the GOP's Don Rickles without the humor, his childish behavior also serves three purposes, all of which he has honed to a t.
First, it shores up his base. For reasons known only to eight-grade minds, his racist, misogynistic followers find his schoolyard taunts rewarding; to them his belittlements of others cause them to feel superior. They also find his taunts genuinely amusing, but again, the reasons for this are known only to those who remain mired in the 'tween-mentality years.
And, almost unbelievably, Trump's childish behavior still gets him headlines.
As harmful to the body politic as his calculated distractions may be, and as essential as they are to his campaigning — purpose #3: divert the electorate's attention from policy issues — they also subordinate or simply bury from public notice certain axiomatic Trumpisms that will be far more harmful in the long run, should the adolescent's verbal eccentricities succeed in returning him to the White House.
As one example, consider this exhibit reposted by Trump on Truth Social — reposted while political journalists were obsessing exclusively over his all-too familiar putdowns of a black woman.
Should it not come to you right away, the gentleman pictured is Christopher Wray, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. And the picture's text is explicit: the "retruthing" of the FBI director as the person who gave the order to assassinate Trump. (Rather than hiring an experienced sniper with elite military and CIA training in political assassinations, it seems Mr. Wray — according to the retruther and Trump, anyway — opted for a 20-year-old crackpot with either poor vision or a poorly sighted rifle.)
Implicit — yet bordering on explicitness - in the text is that the FBI director was only the middle man in the order's issuance. Wray, a long-term survivor of the political minefields heavily scattered on the path to the agency's bureaucratic top, would not have unilaterally ordered Trump's assassination. That he would do (which of course he never would) only at the insistence of the commander in chief.
So here was a public announcement from the Republican Party's presidential nominee asserting that the nation's highest-ranking law enforcement officer had ordered the nominee's assassination at the behest of his then-political opponent, the sitting president of the Untied States.
This would be headline news blasted in the largest available font in even the ripest of banana republics still harboring some simulacrum of an independent press. Yet in the United States and under its First Amendment — nothing. Not a word. All those were being consumed by the Fourth Estate's obsession with Trump's thousandth, cheap disparagement of a black woman.
I cannot be alone in thinking that a lot of American voters would have been supremely interested in knowing that possibly the next president of the United States is telling his fanatical followers that the Oval Office's incumbent ordered his assassination, as though President Biden was but another Adolf Hitler plotting his own night of long knives.
To me, that seems more than just a trifle newsworthy. In fact, it strikes me as the end of a psychotic demagogue's career.
Well let's just suppose for a moment that Biden took advantage of the kingly powers recently granted to him by SCOTUS and ordered the hit.
Whether it was an expert sniper or a 20 year old crackpot, according to Trump himself, it's covered under official presidential powers now. We better hope he doesn't get back in. Who knows what he'll do with that extra authority.
Posted by: Anne J | August 02, 2024 at 02:05 PM