Trump's immoral campaign is also incoherent

[Zorro]

President Trump’s defense of white nationalism — from his glorification of Confederate statues to his refusal to acknowledge, let alone address, systemic racism to his demonization of immigrants — is immoral and un-American. Moreover, both the message and the mass events he uses to propagate it are unsustainable as the basis for a presidential campaign. Here are 10 reasons why:

• If left-wing mobs are attacking the country, why doesn’t/hasn’t Trump done something about it? He’s president after all.

• Does Trump have a plan (beyond statues) to address this non-problem? (Hint: It’s not a problem; it’s not “solvable”; and it offers nothing but a conduit for bile.) A president is expected to govern, not simply to vent.

• Why should Americans care about statues when some 127,000 people are dead from covid-19 and unemployment is in double digits? His obsession seems especially bizarre given that the country is experiencing actual carnage thanks to his incompetent response.

• Since no significant violence is perceptible, how does he sustain the illusion that his followers are under siege? (Watching a crowd tear down a Confederate monument or two is not exactly bloodcurdling.)

• What states can be won without nonwhite voters, college-educated voters, young voters and suburban women (granted, there is some overlap among these) for whom his message is repulsive? (He can hold his racial-grievance sessions in red states such as Oklahoma and South Dakota, but how do his messages play in states that are actually in contention?)

• Who are these Democrats that he claims support violence? (I haven’t seen any of them on the ballot.) Does anyone outside his cult think former vice president Joe Biden defends mayhem?

• What will Trump do when events he needs to spread his message of racial grievance and belligerent opposition to medical expertise add to the pandemic death toll (since they are held without mandatory masks and social distancing)?

• With states such as Texas and Pennsylvania requiring masks and/or banning mass events, will Trump appear and break the law, stay away or capitulate to health experts?

• Will any incumbent Senate Republican in a competitive race (e.g., Maine, North Carolina, Colorado, Montana, Georgia, Arizona, Iowa) appear with him? While Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) can be counted on to regurgitate Trump’s message of white grievance, does Trump plan on throwing overboard any Republican who won’t?

• As corporate boycotts pressure Facebook to police hate speech and Washington’s NFL football team to pick a name that is not racially offensive, what happens when Trump’s donors and surrogates (not to mention right-wing media outlets) come under similar pressure to sever ties with him?

Trump is running a campaign akin to George Wallace’s in 1968, when he denounced “a few anarchists, a few activists, a few militants, a few revolutionaries, and a few Communists … [whose day] is going to be over soon.” If you think I exaggerate, consider that Wallace in 1968 declared, “The American people are not going to stand by and see the security of our nation imperiled, and they’re not going to stand by and see this nation destroyed, I can assure you that.” Wallace insisted, in words that are eerily familiar to voters who listen to Trump: “The pseudo-intellectuals and the theoreticians and some professors and some newspaper editors and some judges and some preachers have looked down their nose long enough at the average man on the street.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/07/06/trumps-immoral-campaign-is-also-incoherent/

[lagomorph777]

1. Trump is the Dumb Guy's George Wallace.

His anusmouth is spewing the same diarrhea, but Trump can't pronounce the polysyllabic words Wallace used.

[chriscan64]

2. Good point about why hasn't he stopped the mobs already.

What will be different if we elect him? Is there some sort of crackdown in the works, and if so, will it somehow reduce the violence?

[markwbradley]

3. If a country on our border was committing atrocities against its own people...e

Let’s imagine there’s a country on our border, the government of which is committing unspeakable atrocities against its own people. And let’s further imagine there is a steady stream of refugees attempting to cross over into our country in order to escape the horrors that await them, should they be unsuccessful in seeking asylum in our country. Is it not likely that the decent and fair minded people of this country would demand that their government make some good faith effort to rectify the situation in this living hell on our border? And is it so hard to imagine that our government might feel compelled by public outrage to plan a punitive expedition to liberate our neighbors and restore good government to their suffering people? Of course not. We have seen all this played out in our history, ad nauseam.

So now we’ve reached the point in our hypothetical narrative where our president orders the military to invade this neighboring country. Plans are carefully laid out by our generals, with an eye toward a pursuing a blitz campaign designed to “shock and awe” our enemies into suing for peace at the earliest opportunity.

Four years later, our enemy finally admits defeat, and our exhausted, bedraggled soldiers occupy the key strategic points in the smoldering ruins of what was once an agricultural juggernaught. We have successfully freed four milliion formerly beaten, maimed, and tortured human beings.
It has cost the lives of a hundred thousand of our soldiers.

So what now? The answer to that is obvious, is it not? We must immediately set about casting bronze statues of the most bloodthirsty and ravenous of our enemy’s military leaders, in commemoration of their wanton slaughter of 100,000 of our brave young men.

Huzzah!