Trump’s Hurricane of Bullshit Tour, Part Five
West Allis, Wisconsin
For a New Yorker, Donald Trump appeared quite at home among the Cheeseheads when he stopped by the Wisconsin State Fair Expo Center on Tuesday, December 13th, to continue his victory lap and stay away from those pesky intelligence officers who keep trying to brief him.
As in Parts One, Two, Three, and Four of this series, I watched the playback of this event on YouTube to analyze the rhetoric of both Trump and his guest speakers. For convenience’s sake I dropped the Twitter notes. They were too ungainly to organize and not popular enough to be worth the hassle.
Why do I keep torturing myself like this? Hunter S Thompson was right: political journalism is a kick more addictive and self-destructive than heroin. It may make me feel like the scum of the Earth, but I cannot look away from this any more than I could look away from the flaming wreckage of a train derailment. A primal urge to bear witness to unfolding catastrophe lives within us all.
As Trump recycles much of his material from one stump to the next, I will devote most of this space to the newest wrinkles in his narrative, and whatever new insights may be found into the minds and hearts of the people who actually LIKE this junk. Or at least that’s how I justify this indulgence to myself: there is a possibility, however remote, that my more politically-savvy readers will find something in my rantings to help them operate within an electoral system held hostage by our rabid Middle American Volkland.
Stage Dressing
The event organizers in Wisconsin evidently decided that they would not be outdone in Christmas spirit by the rally speakers in North Carolina last week. Recognizing that a picture is worth a thousand words, they decked out the backdrop with Christmas trees and swapped the blue ‘USA’ rally placard for a red-and-white one with ‘Merry Christmas’ calligraphy.
Now before somebody starts crying in the comments about my ‘War on Christmas,’ let me just say that I have no problem with individuals wishing me a Merry Christmas. Atheist though I am, I’ll usually reply with my own “Merry Christmas to you too” from a sheer lifetime of habit, and I’ll even mean it. I’m all about enjoying the good times in whatever forms they take.
But when an entire political party decides to retrench itself within ‘Merry Christmas’ over the more modern and interfaith-friendly ‘Happy Holidays’ they’re doing so to send a clear and unmistakable message:
If you’re not Christian, then we really don’t give a fuck about you, because you’re not a Real American in our eyes.
That’s what grinds my gears about all this.
Public Service Announcement to Americans of Color
My black and brown readership may be worried — and rightfully so — about living under increased scrutiny from law enforcement and roving white vigilantes alike. Trump’s first warm-up speaker, Sheriff David Clarke, provides us with a useful tip for surviving these next four strange years. If you must live in or travel through Trumpland, buy yourself a nice cowboy hat. In addition to providing shelter from sun and rain, it provides the owner with a sort of cultural camouflage: rural whites are more likely to acknowledge the wearer of such a hat as a kindred spirit, or at least give them the benefit of the doubt long enough to survive a routine traffic stop.
If your fashion budget allows, consider acquiring the full Walker, Texas Ranger cosplay set. This may make the locals suspicious that you’re trying too hard to fit in — but then again, it may just net you a deputy’s badge for your trouble.
The Usual Suspects
As with other stops on the tour, the opening guest speakers were native sons from the state of Wisconsin. After the aforementioned Sheriff Clarke came RNC Chairman turned White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, whose name is easier to pronounce if you’re familiar with German phonics: long ‘I’ on the first name, long ‘E’ on the second. By the time you get his name right you’ll have forgotten what he said.
Third on the roster came Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, often cited in conservative circles as a model for Republican executives of state. Fresh back from a global tour of US Army bases, he reports a great deal of uniformed-personnel hype for Trump’s nominated Secretary of Defense, former General James ‘Mad Dog’ Mattis. (Thus far, Mad Dog has the dubious honor of being the only Cabinet pick to receive broad bipartisan approval — even from me — which probably explains why Trump drops his name at every rally now.) Walker also touted his record of “common sense conservatism” in the state of Wisconsin, which includes such hits as union-busting actions, opposition to minimum wage increases, and property tax cuts for the landed gentry — all of which help the middle and upper classes more than the white working class so enamored of Trump. Walker expressed hope that the Trump administration will bring this brand of “common sense conservatism” to Washington DC. Gods help us all.
Fourth up we had Wisconsin congressman and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, who had clashed with Trump on and off again during the campaign season over the candidate’s moral failings, including the “textbook racism” of Trump’s objections to having a case heard by Judge Gonzalo Curiel and the leaked Access Hollywood tape where Trump was caught bragging about sexual assault. Ryan spoke with feigned enthusiasm in his voice tonight, but his dead eyes conveyed a message of defeat rather than victory. They spoke of dread at his Faustian bargain of boarding the Trump Train to push his legislative agenda through Congress.
As if sensing that dread, Trump himself would roast Ryan a little later tonight, after the latter was booed by his own crowd of Wisconsin voters:
“Oh no! I’ve come to really appreciate him! Speaker Paul Ryan… honestly, he’s like a fine wine… but if he ever goes against me I’m not going to say that! … We’re gonna work on The Wall, Paul!”
The Donald will never pass by an opportunity for revenge against any perceived slight, no matter how petty. Never doubt this. Read this blog post by fellow billionaire Richard Branson about a lunch date he had with Trump many years ago, and shudder at what may come to pass.
Repeat This Five Times Slowly
After the local speakers had their fun, Vice President-elect Mike Pence took the stage, looking strangely plastic as always — a life-sized Republi-Ken doll. To Mattel’s credit, their automaton remained as disciplined and on-message as ever, tying together themes and slogans used by others, rehashing and repeating them for easy digestion by the crowd. Most of these would later be rephrased by The Donald during his own rambling presentation.
The Republicans did this quite well throughout the campaign, it must be said. They clearly took Aristotle’s rhetorical advice to heart:
Tell them what you will tell them, tell them, tell them what you just told them.
Without consulting my notes, here is what I can remember of their communal talking points, in no particular order:
- We’re going to rebuild and retrain our military, to make them strong again.
- We’ll going to fund and arm our police departments to restore “law and order” to our communities.
- Build The Wall, to stop illegal immigration “once and for all.”
- Repeal and replace Obamacare.
- Lower taxes on the middle class and businesses.
- We’ll get to pick a Supreme Court Justice that defends the Second Amendment and the “sanctity of life.”
- Renegotiate trade deals to bring back manufacturing companies and jobs.
- Eliminate “wasteful regulations.”
All off the top of my head. To my everlasting shame, I cannot do this nearly as well with Hillary Clinton’s platform. Perhaps I could if I had paid more attention to her campaign events, but I was too busy watching the Trump Train-Wreck in horrified fascination.
Trump’s campaign — along with its supporting cast of alt-Reich trolls and Russian propagandists — did a much better job of conveying a message that the average voter could grok, whether they loved that message or hated it. Whether the electoral college stops Trump or not, we liberals will need to streamline our own pitch going forward. We cannot leave the poorly-educated voters scratching their heads behind us; there are just too damn many of them.
A New Axis of Evil
From the podium, Trump confirmed his selection of Exxon-Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson as his appointee for Secretary of State. The Donald promised that Tillerson would help “reverse years of foreign policy blunders and disasters,” while acknowledging that Rex is “friendly with leaders in the world we don’t get along with.” Trump, however, touts this as a benefit rather than a concern. He then pointed out that we’ve spent $6 trillion in the Middle East, yet things are “worse than when we started out fifteen years ago.”
Taken together, these statements signal a pivot back to our Cold War style of Realpolitik, where we used to prop up brutal autocratic regimes to murder the shit out of our ideological foes with a callous disregard for any civilians or democratic ideals caught in the crossfire. Only the roles of the players have changed: where once we armed the Afghani mujaheddin (including a young Osama bin Laden) against the Soviet Union, we are now turning a blind eye to atrocities in Syria while Putin and Assad bomb east Aleppo into rubble and slaughter rebels that have nothing to do with the faction that even Trump acknowledges as our true enemy: ISIS.
But of course in the estimation of Trumpland, our enemy is not merely the rogue caliphate. All Muslims are the enemy. All Muslims are radical Islamists to Trumpland’s way of thinking, primed to become radical Islamic terrorists at the drop of a hijab. As long as Putin keeps “bombing the shit out of them” and “going after their families and children,” Trump and his followers will cheer on the bloodbath. I wouldn’t be surprised if Trump was cozying up to the Phillipines’ murderous strongman Duterte so we could carry the Crusade to majority-Muslim Indonesia next.
The sick irony to this moral capitulation is that it won’t even have the desired geopolitical effect. If anything, it’s likely to make the global jihadist movement stronger over the long term. By targeting and killing Muslims indiscriminately we will be radicalizing the next generation of terrorists against America, just as our “blunders and disasters” over the last three decades lead to the ascent of Al Qaeda and later ISIS.
But hey, at least Putin is a white Christian, or at least pays lip service to the niceties of Russian Orthodoxy as part of his campaign to Make Russia Great. Let the Crusades resume, for Republican Jesus!
Lügenpresse
As calls for an investigation mounted across the country for a bipartisan investigation into the extent of Russian influence within our elections this year — and a few electors demanded a CIA briefing about this topic before casting their votes — Trump and his cohort have cranked up the volume on their long-running disparagement of the press, arguably in hopes of delegitimizing whatever incriminating bomb gets dropped next. [Update: That didn’t take long.]
Tonight the first shade was thrown by Sheriff Clarke, who referred to a number of mainstream news outlets — specifically including the New York Times, Washington Post, and CNN, among a few that lean further left — as the “Fake News Network.” He accused them of trying to sabotage the President- and Vice President-elect, which is true enough and justified now that the full corruption of Trump by the Russians is coming to light. But Clarke conveniently forgets that these same outlets promoted him freely during the primaries, then sandbagged Clinton by playing up the Wikileaks scandal-drip for ratings throughout the general election season. Without that handicap Trump would likely have been crushed like a Happy Gilmore tee shot.
Trump loved the press back when he was winning and they were doing his work for him. Though of course he still had to treat them like women — in his words, “like shit”— so they knew their place.
Over the course of this tour, as pressure mounts to disqualify Trump’s dubious victory the win-wanking segment of Trump’s speech grows ever longer — at least twenty minutes in Wisconsin, by my reckoning. It begins with Trump pointing out the news cameras in the back: “They were devastated on November 8.” Then he starts hyping his miraculous comeback that night. He says the pollsters were “phony” with the exit polls, not merely mistaken. Even though he’s sour about losing the popular vote, having tried (and failed) to disparage Clinton’s 2.8 million vote lead by claiming those were all fraudulent, he now praises the genius of the electoral college system that allowed him to win anyway. (Let’s see how that holds up on December 19th.)
Trump recalls that he spent the final month of the election only holding rallies and refusing to sit for interviews with the press corps — something he once criticized Clinton for doing, and which Trump has now returning to doing again. He hated press interviews because they chopped up and rearranged his “beautiful, flowing sentences” to make him sound like a cartoon villain. (Having watched him speak at great length during these rallies, I can confirm that he still sounds like a cartoon villain, before I even get down to writing. Watch them yourself if you disagree.) He gloats about the journalists and news anchors “looking sick” as they announced each swing state he won. “They refused to call [Pennsylvania] because they’re dishonest people.”
But a curious transformation occurs midway through. He acknowledges that things were looking down early in the evening. He relates a conversation he had with Melania when he thought defeat was probable, saying “If I lose I lose, and we can have a nice relaxing life.” He sounds almost wistful. But then he points out a few journalists “hiding in the back” of the venue, which draws boos from the crowd. Trump doesn’t even try to walk them back this time, as he did at earlier rallies. The mask is back in place.
Have I misjudged Trump? Is he not the fascist I originally thought? I almost get the feeling, in moments like this, that the crowd — and Putin — has played Trump instead of the other way ‘round. He would still be an utter bastard, of course, but perhaps of a different kind: a needy, greedy, narcissistic version of Charlie Chaplin’s hapless barber in The Great Dictator, who got himself in over his head through every fault of his own.
But what happens when his voters realize they’ve been had by a domestic kleptocrat and a foreign autocrat? Will Trump become the dictatorial mask to prevent his ouster? Once removed from power, will voices of reason from both parties be able to reverse the damage done to our civil society? Or will this desperate modern Republican party continue to entice the white ‘populist’ faction for votes, having never learned its lesson?
Whether he’s a genuine fascist or a simple con artist, it’s probably better if Trump never reaches the Oval Office at all. Call your elected representatives today — before December 19 — and demand full disclosure of what the CIA knows about Russia’s involvement in this election to Congress and the electors. This could be our last chance to prevent something terrible.
And if you think I’m wrong about the Russian involvement? Call your representatives anyway and make the same demand. A full disclosure could well prove me wrong, and give your man the aura of legitimacy he so desperately needs to be an effective president.
When he’s not writing, Dave lives the most boring night life ever — he works nights supervising a group home for I/DD adults with behavioral issues, putting that BS degree in Mathematics to good use.
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