We all knew he would get an early start, and true to form, sixteen months before the general election, Donald Trump has completely poured himself into being Drunk Uncle Twitter Troll, spewing overtly racist attacks on duly elected members of the House of Representatives while his Republican colleagues lamely play rhetorical defense, desperate to hold onto their party’s precious rubber-stamp chief executive who is giving them all they ever wanted and more. Pretty amazing to hear the likes of GOP congressman Tom Cole on NPR gaslighting us all on the issue of whether or not Trump is race-baiting (clue: Cole says “no”), then engaging in some truly ridiculous what-about-ism (speaking to NPR correspondent Noel King):
KING: You just don’t think it was racist.
COLE: No, I don’t.
KING: OK.
COLE: And frankly, I also think that if you – you have to remember here, too, there’s – we’ve had colleagues that are routinely called down by presiding officers for using inappropriate language toward the president. We’ve had people that have said federal workers are running concentration camps. We’ve had people that have said if you support Israel, you do it for the money. We’ve had people that have referred to the president with vulgar epithets and said they’re going to impeach him. None of those people were subject to resolution. So the double standard here, in terms of accepting comments on your own side of the aisle and criticizing essentially – what, you know, others might think are a similar thing to another is just – you know, it’s breathtakingly inappropriate.
(NPR Morning Edition, July 17, 2019)
See what he did there? He literally attacked the same four representatives Trump baited on Twitter. Cole predicated this on his earlier statement that the president’s tweets about the four congresswomen of color were “inappropriate” and “offensive”, but not racist. That little twist makes the president’s comments equivalent to, for example, Rashida Talib’s using the word “ass” when talking about impeaching Trump, or Ilhan Omar making virtually the same observation about the effect of AIPAC political contributions that Thomas Friedman made without any negative reaction. This is a standard package of what-about-ism that Republican strategists whipped up quickly over the last day or two, and they’re all reading from the same hymnal.
Of course, the corporate media spends a lot of time pondering whether or not Trump is racist. That’s immaterial. We should have zero interest in what that fool thinks or how he feels. It’s what he projects and works to engender in other people that should concern us. It’s no accident or mere caprice that he chooses the targets he chooses, as I’ve said here before. It all follows the same theme, from the birther conspiracy, to bashing immigrants from Mexico at his campaign launch, to announcing his Muslim ban, to telling the toxic lie about Muslims celebrating 9/11 in New Jersey, to calling out Colin Kapernik or any one of a dozen women of color in Congress. It’s about othering people. It’s about framing black, brown, and non-Christian people as not true Americans, somehow disloyal, a fifth column, from somewhere else. Even his claim that 3 million undocumented immigrants voted in 2016 rolls into this – he’s basically saying that the margin of popular vote victory for Clinton was delivered by people with no right to vote … people of color.
This is not just Trump being Trump. This is his 2020 campaign, and it will get worse, just wait and see.
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Omar is the perfect target for Trump. She’s a woman, a person of color, an immigrant from Somalia, and a Muslim who, like many Somali women, wears a headscarf. The orange-faced jackass has attacked all of those things separately on many occasions – by attacking Omar, he gets more bang for the buck. Would that he were the only one so eager to jump on her over an anti-AIPAC tweet. Democratic leadership really showed their ass this week, following up on their shameful support of Trump’s Venezuela policy from the previous week. A really poor performance. Still, Trump and Kevin McCarthy both get extra credit for crying antisemitism when their own track records on bigotry are unambiguously offensive. Both McCarthy and Trump made George Soros the bête noir of the mid-term campaign last year. Not subtle.