There is tone deaf, there is oblivious and then there is Donald Trump. He’s starting up his MAGA rallies on June 19 in Tulsa. Juneteenth, or Emancipation Day, commemorates the anniversary of the reading of the General Orders, No. 3, which officially informed slaves that they were free. Couple that with the fact that this is happening in Tulsa, where CNN reports, “Tulsa was the site of one of the most vicious acts of racial violence in American history when, in 1921, a mob of white people attacked a section of the city known as Greenwood or “Black Wall Street” and murdered hundreds of African Americans. (The event was the basis for HBO’s “Watchmen” series.)”
Now if that’s not enough to convince you that Trump is doubling down on racism, as opposed to finding a way for the nation to come together and heal, he is giving his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention on the 60th anniversary of “Ax Handle Sunday,” yet another horrific act of racial violence, characterized as “one of the darkest days” in the history of Jacksonville, Florida. New York Times:
The event for Mr. Trump in Jacksonville, not in Charlotte, N.C., as planned, coincides with one of the darkest days in the city’s history. The president will address his supporters on the 60th anniversary of “Ax Handle Saturday,” when a white mob organized by the Ku Klux Klan attacked mostly black civil rights protesters sitting at the city’s whites-only lunch counters. The attackers hid ax handles in the brush at Hemming Park, said Alan Bliss, the executive director of the Jacksonville Historical Society.
The city’s white mayor at the time, Haydon Burns, suppressed news about the beatings, Dr. Bliss said, and it was not until 2001 that the day was commemorated with a marker, paid for by the historical society, at the park. The current mayor, Lenny Curry, a Republican, removed a bronze Confederate soldier statue from the same park this week.
It was not clear that the historical resonance of the date for the city, which is about 30 percent African-American, was known to Republican officials before its selection.
“it was not clear.” Okey doke. So it’s just random coincidence at play here, that Trump is kicking off his reelection campaign in a city with a past of racial violence, on the anniversary date of Emancipation and he will end the Republican convention in another city with the exact same past, and on the exact same date of its worst racial incident, too? is anybody here a bookie who wants to lay some odds on this being mere coincidence? And then anybody want to explain why, when these coincidences were pointed out, the Trump campaign and the RNC just let the dates stand? Speak up, we’re all dying to hear the answer.
One can only speculate the reason for this racist clarion horn, forget about dog whistle — this gets any louder, eardrums are going to shatter — but my best speculation is that the RNC is going along with Trump, hoping against all odds that he can capture lightning in a bottle twice. Trump’s dearest hope is that the racist streak that he tapped into in 2016, the geyser of hate, at that point tempered by decency, which Trump then labelled and simultaneously demonized “political correctness” is the force of nature that he’s going to ride to reelection. That is his proposition, and he feels comfortable going with it, because he won in 2016 by being a troll.
What he doesn’t seem to realize is that 2020 is not the same set up. He’s running as the incumbent, not the iconoclast, the outsider who’s going to go in and show ’em how. A lot of Americans went ahead and voted for the freak show, because they’d never seen anything like this in politics before and because they could. They said, “Okay buddy, do it. You can talk the talk, now let’s see you walk the walk.” The only walk we have seen so far is down the hall of shame, with Trump bouncing off the walls and tripping over his own shoelaces. We see that now more than ever, as crisis after crisis arises that Trump completely lacks the wherewithal to deal with at all, let alone effectively. He’s lost. New York Times:
While Mr. Trump has a long history of making insensitive and tone-deaf comments on race, including remarks widely seen as racist, he has never appeared more isolated on a dominant social and political moment in the country, hunkered down at the White House tweeting conspiracy theories about injured protesters and describing demonstrators as “THUGS.”
He regularly uses harsh and violent language that no other American leader employs, vocally supporting the views of white nationalists and even defenders of white supremacy rather than the views expressed by majorities of Americans in polls.
“He’s talking as if this is a country in the 1950s and not 2020,” said Levar Stoney, the mayor of Richmond, Va., where a multiracial group of protesters has prompted the city and state to take down Confederate statues.
At a time when the country is confronting three overlapping crises — the coronavirus, an economic collapse and a reckoning with racism and injustice — Mr. Trump’s inability to demonstrate empathy illustrates the limitations of his political arsenal. He is well equipped to compete in a campaign where slashing negative attacks are the order of the day, and few salesmen speak in superlatives like the former hotel magnate. Yet when the moment calls for neither pugilism nor promotion, he has little to say.
People worrying about Trump’s reelection chances probably see him as bringing a knife to a gun fight but it’s much worse than that, it’s more like bringing a firecracker to a bomb site. He has nothing in his limited arsenal with which to deal with the issues at hand, jack nothing. And if you doubt for a second his complete and utter insensitivity to what’s going on around him, jaunt on over to his campaign website and buy a “Baby Lives Matter” onesie. Seriously. Welcome to Decision 2020.
Himself hasn’t updated his brain since the early-to-mid-fifties, so I’m not surprised he thinks that’s a great way to run the country. Most of the rest of us prefer the 21st century.
That would probably be right. Trump himself has said he’s the same person that he was in the first grade. He was born in 1946 so the first grade would have been 1952 or so and that may have been the peak of his mental development.
I known I’m not the same person I was in first grade. I don’t think my first-grade classmates are the same people now as they were then – and a lot of us went to the same schools, right into HS.
So he was a little prick, even then. Interesting but stupid!
Well, I’d say he has updated his brain since the fifties in at least one respect: Divorces and remarriages.
It used to be that even wealthy men (which doesn’t necessarily include Trump) rarely actually would divorce their wives, willingly or otherwise, without the MAN being viewed as the (literal and proverbial) “bad guy” in the process. One of the very few ways that the man could seek a divorce, without coming off as a heel, was to have proof of her cheating on him (something I don’t think applies to either of his first two wives) but, by the same token, his own image would be somewhat tarnished as a guy “who can’t keep/satisfy his own wife.”
Wealthy men usually didn’t need to divorce their wives simply because they could pay off the woman (in any number of ways) to “look the other way” to his philandering while less well-off men would simply deal with the public scorn/ridicule and accept that other people would think less of them (sure, they’d do business with the guy but there would always be an air of judgment about him). By the same token, a wealthy man would let his cheating spouse go on with her life without getting a divorce (circumstances would have to be very dire for the “d-word” to come up) while the less well-off guys would have to weigh whether the inevitable “sympathy” for finally dumping the “hussy” was really worth the time and effort of going through the divorce (and a more drastic “solution” was rarely a reality).
But, as we’ve seen, Donald has divorced two wives without seeming to give a rat’s ass about his public image and, to be fair, he lucked out to be in an era when the public didn’t generally give a rat’s ass about the subject of divorce any more.
GOP leaders are playing some long, long odds which given the current protests and even the DOD saying it’s time to start talking about renaming some of our military bases AND Evangelical support slipping a bit the odds have gotten longer. I keep thinking about how he got away with insulting McCain’s service – his “I like guys that weren’t captured” comment but McCain sometimes (not as often as too many people believed) sometimes bucked his Party over the years.
But that particular moment has to be in the front of GOP leader’s minds and they are terrified on two fronts!
First, with the current protests that are leading to more statue removals and as I noted talk about renaming bases there is the subject of Robert E. Lee who as far as the racist crowd is concerned took Jesus’ place at “the right hand of God the father almighty.” Trump’s rambling could lead to a different kind of McCain moment, such as in response to another Lee statue coming down or something named after him being changed could lead to another uncontrolled riff about Lee having been pretty good and winning a lot of battles but not being able to get the job done – he lost. That would be bad enough but Trump being Trump he could well add “I like generals who never surrendered.” The Secret Service would never let him out of his bunker again! Okay, maybe not that big a lockdown but he’d lose all that racist enthusiasm and without those people voting for him in droves he and the GOP are toast.
The other situation involves those evangelicals. They made a cold and calculating trade off in their wholehearted support of Trump, but he’s paid them off “bigly” exactly the way they’d hoped. Sure, they would like to see every current opening on the federal bench filled with one of their Jeebus style Taliban judges but they’ve gotten more than they ever dreamed they could. They also got to keep control of SCOTUS and while they wouldn’t lose a moment’s sleep if RBG died and they got to replace her before Trump is gone. And don’t kid yourself if it came down to it McConnell would force through a confirmation during the lame duck/transition period (especially if he gets beaten in Nov.) as a last fuck you to us all.
However, at least among younger (under 55) evangelicals his support has slipped by a noticeable amount. Still, even though they know he doesn’t mean it he still says a bunch of the shit they want to hear about how great Jeebus is and his “deep” KKKristian faith. However, he’s been taking a lot of shit over his bible holding stunt in front of that church, and if he gets defensive and starts rambling again about how he’s never done anything he needs forgiveness for, and is challenged with a couple of actual bible factoids about what Jesus actually taught watch out. It could lead to yes, an uncontrolled riff about how Jesus went and got himself executed so how great could he have really been? HE (Trump) has never been “convicted of anything” much less executed.
I for one think his mind is so fucked up by now, he’s under relentless political attack on multiple fronts and (horrors!) losing AND his instinct is to lash out he might actually say the one thing that could make evangelicals say “We got what we wanted from him and we’ll just sit things out until the next election because the Democrats can’t undo all we’ve gotten in a generation, much less a couple (or four) years!
That’s what I think swirls in the minds of so many honchos in the GOP, and especially McConnell because with either type of gaffe he can kiss his majority leader status (and probably his seat with it) goodbye. I really do think they have good reason to be terrified, especially with him resuming his rallies. Sure, he riffs in his press conferences but aides can pull the plug on those if need be. However, on the stage at a rally pulling him off or shutting the thing down would literally put staffer’s lives at risk.
Again, the mean part of me enjoys the thought of these enablers breaking out in cold sweats fearing what Trump might say next.