Just when you thought that Donald Trump had really gone too far, that his latest projectile belch was so loud and so toxic that even Congress would finally put its foot down, you were bound to be sorely disappointed. The man who bragged that he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and still be elected president could probably shoot someone in the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue and still remain in office.
"Oh, it's just Donald being Donald," they'd yawn, as they eagerly rushed their latest anti-social legislation to his desk for his pudgy-fingered signature.
I don't exaggerate. Because if Trump could re-tweet inflammatory anti-Muslim propaganda videos originating from a notorious Britain-based hate group whose leader is under criminal indictment, and all that GOP connivers like Jeff Flake and Lindsay Graham can do is shrug their shoulders and sigh "that's not helpful," then I think that yes, he probably could actually get away with a lot worse than simply instigating violence on an epic domestic and global scale.
He is, of course, no outlier. Although his drone assassinations and the civilian death tolls of his bombing campaigns already threaten to overtake those of his immediate predecessors, he is only using the lethal and normal unitary executive powers bequeathed to him. His emotional and monetary embrace of the despotic Saudi government, with its mass extermination campaign against Yemenis now vying with Rwanda and the Balkans in genocidal horror, is met with complicit silence from both major political parties. Congress loves war, Congress loves arms sales to authoritarian regimes, and Congress especially loves the campaign donations and the bases and the Homeland Security fusion centers and the nuclear and "conventional" weapons factories which keep military and civilian constituents alike employed and supportive.
So when the New York Times first published the story of Trump's anti-Muslim tweets and his boosterism of a marginalized far-right British hate group on Wednesday, the media world was still busy reeling from news that NBC superstar Matt Lauer had been fired. The Trump article was initially and discreetly placed about a third of the way down the digital home page.
Only days after publishing a much-maligned puff piece serving to "normalize" an Ohio neo-Nazi, the Times drawled in its initial story: "It is unusual (my bold) to see an American president push out this type of content on such a powerful social media platform."
Is it merely "unusual" for the leader of the free world to spread blatantly fake videos which purport to show a Muslim man attacking a child on crutches, and another Muslim man desecrating a statue of the Virgin Mary, and a Muslim mob pushing a man off a rooftop?
White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders defended the president's unhinged outburst with the usual disclaimer that facts don't matter as long as effective lies can serve to bolster his regime's fascist message. "Whether it's a real video, the threat is real," she insisted in true Goebbelsian fashion. "The threat is real, the threat needs to be addressed, and the threat needs to be talked about, and that's what the president is doing in bringing it up."
Look, I've been as sanguine as anybody about the sad reality that this president's Twitter habit serves mainly as a diversionary smokescreen from his own legal troubles and the kleptomaniacal attacks which pose as a White House administration. But this one goes way, way beyond the usual quotidian mischief.
My published comment on the original ho-hum Times article:
"It is unusual to see an American president push out this type of content on such a powerful social media platform."
No it's not. It's unprecedented, it's pathological, and it's dangerous. It might even border on the criminal, should it lead directly to someone, or many people, getting killed. It is an incitement to violence.
Trump is breathtaking in his irresponsibility. He knows, deep down within whatever rational part of his brain might still exist, that his presidency is a monumental failure. His solution, therefore, is to bring the rest of the world right down with him.
Thanks, but no thanks. Congress can either impeach this pathocrat, or they can be complicit with his antics. They don't get to have it both ways, not when so many lives are at stake.
Only when British Prime Minister Theresa May and other European politicians expressed shock and outrage did the Times advance the story to the top of the home page, and later completely rewrite it. The paper removed the banal "it is unusual to see an America president" characterization of the Tweet in favor of the more compelling "no modern American president has promoted inflammatory content of this sort from an extremist organization. Mr. Trump’s two most recent predecessors, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, both made a point of avoiding public messages that were likely to be seen as anti-Muslim and could exacerbate racial and religious animosities, arguing that the war against terrorism was not a war against Islam."
Not that Bush and Obama are exactly friends of Muslims either, given the illegal invasion of Iraq, the occupation of Afghanistan, the military-corporatist re-colonization of Africa, the cluster bombings and drone attacks on Yemeni civilians, the drone strikes in the "tribal areas" of AfPac, and the CIA's illegal program of domestic spying against Muslim Americans. Bush and Obama committed their own foul deeds with pretty and false words, while Trump commits his foul deeds with equally foul words. His bloodthirstiness and racist venom are unacceptably outside the "norms" of American bloodthirstiness and venomous exceptionalism.
But not that unacceptably. Because Trump is a very useful idiot indeed, able to convince his fans and fellow xenophobes that the oligarchic plot to financially ruin the lives of hundreds of millions of ordinary Americans under the auspices of "tax reform" is actually manna from heaven for them.
About a third of the voting population which continues to enable him will go happily to their doom, safe in the knowledge that their president feels not their pain, but their hatred.
Trump is a master of the politics of resentment. And if Congress has anything to say about it, he won't be going anywhere for a very long time. Unless the KFC and the McDonald's fries do him in first, of course.
Is this show ever going to end?
If my math is correct, today's the day that we can finally start singing 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall and apply it to the election.
You take one media episode down, you pass it around, then 98 days till America Votes.
The various plot twists and back stories and cliffhangers necessary to hold the viewing audience's attention are getting more convoluted and outlandish by the minute. And so they must, if Kardashian Nation is not to cut the cord and stay tuned long enough to vote for the Smarter of Two Evils come November 8th.
And so the "horse-race" is looking more and more like a cheap remake of Homeland, in which Hillary plays the flawed but intrepid agent fighting Trump the Terrorist Traitor.
As Carl Bernstein wrote in A Woman In Charge, his biography of the Empress-in-Waiting, Hillary has acted the dual (and dueling) roles of fighting Joan of Arc and victimized Jane Eyre for her entire public life. She essentially sets herself up to be her own straw-woman, then sits back to await the attacks from both right and left, some of which are justified and some of which veer (by design) off into hyperbolic overkill. The formulaic plot then has Hillary donning her shining armor to fight the enemies which she herself has had a large part in creating. And fudging of facts - flying in the face of all fact - has long been a Clintonian weapon of choice.
The latest example of this tactic came a couple of days ago in her interview with Fox News, in which she doubled down on her untruthiness about her private email server. She lied about her lying, thus earning the maximum Four Pinocchios rating from the Washington Post's Glenn Kessler, who wrote:
As we have seen repeatedly in Clinton’s explanations of the email controversy, she relies on excessively technical and legalistic answers to explain her actions. While Comey did say there was no evidence she lied to the FBI, that is not the same as saying she told the truth to the American public — which was the point of Wallace’s question. Comey has repeatedly not taken a stand on her public statements.
Liberals hate Fox with absolute justification, which is probably why Hillary chose it over MSDNC to set herself up, to victimize herself anew and importune her fans to fight back anew against all the "haters."
And thanks to Donald Trump, she has a boorish billionaire-in-the-flesh to deflect voter attention from her own crimes and misdemeanors. It's almost as though he himself was actually a straw man of the Clintons' own creation: a true Clintchurian candidate rather than the "Siberian candidate" that Paul Krugman, among others in the corporate media, has presented for scare-mongering purposes. That's how perfect a two-dimensional enemy Trump is for her tired brand of paranoid identity politics. Because of widespread, media-driven and justified Trumpophobia, Hillary is getting a miraculous second wind and a comparative free pass on the "lesser evil" of her own serial mendacity.
And with traitorous misogynistic Donnie around, she and her new BFF Barack Obama can even get the American public to overcome their annoying "sickly inhibitions" against never-ending wars, get people to either ignore or to cheer on their aerial murders of hundreds of innocent civilians in Syria as well as a whole new unauthorized and undebated round of bomb attacks on Libya. Their use of a dead Muslim soldier's Gold Star parents to attack Trump at last week's convention was a real stroke of genius on their part. It not only elicited the desired xenophobic reaction from him, it helped to squelch any incipient popular anti-war sentiment.
Hardly any Americans are outraged about the fact that over the last seven and a half years, the Obama administration has ordered a drone strike against Muslims on an average of once every four days. They're mad that Trump wears his own Islamophobia on his sleeve and even insults the grief-stricken parents of a fallen soldier.
If you're with Barack and Hillary and the unabashedly militaristic Democrats, then your motto might as well be We're All Neocons Now.
Obama stood in the East Room of the White House today with one of his TPP partners, the prime minister of tax-haven Singapore, to urge Republican leaders to denounce Trump in the name of patriotism. More and more GOP officials are already announcing they'll be voting for the Clinton restoration. This might effectively set the stage for one-party totalitarian rule in the United States, should the top Republican leadership actually heed Obama's call for unity in the service of plutocracy and withdraw their endorsements of Donald Trump -- leading to loss of funding and defeat at the polls.
Meanwhile, Democrats are able to gloss over the Wikileaks revelations of the deep corruption within their own party by actually red-baiting Trump (and by extension, voters) as they point to his alleged friendships and murky financial dealings with Russian oligarchs and Vladimir Putin, whom they accuse of hacking into their emails and databases and trying to mess with an American election.
As I wrote in a Sunday New York Times comment: (in response to a column by Frank Bruni that bemoaned stubborn Hillary's inability to connect with American angst)
There are still 100 days, troves of Wikileaks goodies, media propaganda, natural and man-made disasters to go before this whole interminable spectacle ends (only to start up again in January 2017, if not before.)
I consider myself a political junkie, yet I am beginning to tune out. Every hour there's a new scare-mongering headline. Today it's Trumputin leading us to Trumpistan. Tomorrow it'll be the latest terror plot or hack. If a week goes by without one mass shooting, CNN won't know what to do with itself.
I really hesitate to criticize Hillary too harshly, because as we all know, if you diss her, you're either a secret Trump supporter or a whiny Bernie Bro "purist" -- which is the same thing as being a tool of Putin, which of course means that you're totally Un-American.
And that is pretty much how they want you to feel. If you didn't wave the flag, and bop balloons with Bill Clinton, and weep at all the platitudinous speeches, and rejoice that LGBTs and Muslims and Black and Brown people all have equal rights to fight and die in endless wars in the pursuit of corporate dominance, then there has to be something seriously wrong with you.
I wish that Hillary had mentioned "poverty" more than once in her speech, wherein she promised to be the president of the "struggling, the striving and the successful". It made me think she'll be equally attuned to the rights of billionaires and meritocrats sweating their Ivy League applications.
I need some air.
