Trump’s Hurricane of Bullshit Tour, Part Six
Hershey, Pennsylvania.
Catch up on previous installments of this series:
- Part One: Cincinnati, Ohio
- Part Two: Fayetteville, North Carolina
- Part Three: Des Moines, Iowa
- Part Four: Baton Rouge, LA and Grand Rapids, MI
- Part Five: West Allis, Wisconsin
The victory parade marches in double-time now, as Donald Trump rushes to squeeze in a few more rallies before the electoral college vote on Monday, December 19 potentially shuts it down for good — though that is admittedly a long shot. In addition to Thursday night’s rally in Hershey, Pennsylvania, Trump will be stopping in Orlando, Florida on Friday and Mobile, Alabama on Saturday. No Thank You Tour dates have been announced for the following week, suggesting that Donald knows full well that Monday could spell the end.
There were no guest speakers tonight at Giant Center. VP-elect Mike Pence once more went through the usual bullet list of campaign talking points covered in Part Five so his rambling boss could ramble freely afterward. So let’s move straight on to Trump’s performance, shall we?
Rückgabe der Lügenpresse
Trump started laying into the press immediately tonight, and the crowd ate it up.
It started as he was pointing out Republican congressmen sitting in the audience, then picked out Jeffrey Lord, former White House Political Director for the Reagan Administration, now a Pennsylvanian Republican strategist and occasional conservative pundit for the cable news networks:
“It’s so unfair, they stack against him seven-to-one, CNN, they stack it up, they stack it. They do.”
This drew boos from the crowd, predictably. I searched CNN later for video clips with Lord, and found no cases where CNN had seven other pundits piling onto him, but maybe Trump was talking about a different set of odds. He decries political speech but has quickly mastered the arts of maddening vagueness and insinuation.
Trump then pointed out the cameras in the back:
“They are not happy with the results of the election… oh-oh, the camera just went off!”
Which delighted the audience, naturally. They feed off each other, Trump and his audience. “Low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity,” as Hamilton said.
Trump would return to the press-bashing throughout his speech, making it the dominant theme of the evening. As in other rallies, he would weave his attacks among boasts about his “landslide victory” in the electoral college — which was less than both of Obama’s wins, and won’t be finalized until Monday — to emphasize the legitimacy of his win and delegitimize the press before their probes into his putative victory can stick. A defanged press will also make it easier for him to get away with whatever bullshit he wants after Inauguration Day.
At another point, he issued what sounded very like a command to the press corps in the back, ordering them to show off the size of the rally crowd:
“Hey press, turn the cameras around, show them.”
Cameras remain stationary. Boos can be heard throughout the audience.
“World’s most dishonest people. These are dishonest people. They aren’t turning; they never turn. Very dishonest people.”
Since when must a free press take orders from a president, let alone a president-elect who has not yet cleared the college? I’m proud that they did not yield here. When the first three estates of our government are all occupied by the same party, the Fourth Estate is the only check on power we have left.
Tales of Voter Suppression, Depression, and Fraud
While reciting his litany of state-by-state wins, Trump, speaking to his mostly white audience, praised the few African-Americans who turned out to vote for him — and the many more who stayed home:
“We did great with the African-American community, so… remember the famous line? I’d talk about crime, I’d talk about lack of education, and I’d say: What the hell do you have to lose? And they’re smart, and they picked up on it, and you know what else? They didn’t come out to vote for Hillary, they didn’t vote. So thank you to the African-American community.” [bold emphasis mine]
Trump’s off-the-cuff speaking style lets a truth slip out every so often. Pew’s data backs him up here: Trump won roughly the same percentage of white voters that Mitt Romney got back in 2012, but non-white voters and younger voters did not turn out as strongly for Clinton in 2016 as they did for Obama during the two prior elections.
The lower turnouts among these key elements of the Obama coalition are probably best explained by a combination of factors: voter suppression and voter depression. (Disclaimer: I cannot make any quantitative claims about the relative impacts of each factor.) By voter suppression, I mean the slew of restrictive voter-ID laws passed in a number of states since the federal approval mandated by the Voter Rights Act was struck down by the Supreme Court in 2013, along with more prosaic efforts by state election commissions to limit voter turnout by operating fewer polling stations and offering fewer early-voting opportunities.
By voter depression, however, I refer to propaganda campaigns designed to curb the enthusiasm of anybody outside of Trump’s true believers. The daily drip by Wikileaks of the Podesta emails may not have turned out anything with the impact of Trump’s Access Hollywood tape, but that drip-drip-drip of potentially scandalous material had a corrosive and demoralizing effect on folks who may have otherwise sided with Clinton. (Call it the oh-god-what-now effect.) It gave opportunistic internet tabloids (what some refer to as “fake news”) plenty of fodder to carve into social-media ammunition through misleadingly selective editing. Clinton supporters, on the other hand, had to spend time debunking each day’s fresh bullshit instead of constructing a positive argument to win votes for her.
Trump wallowed in scandal too, of course, but this did not hurt him as bad because of the nature of his support. His was a pathos-driven cult of personality — they would stick with their man through thick and thin, rationalizing away and laughing off everything that would torpedo a more conventional candidate. He didn’t pay taxes? “That makes me smart,” he would say, and they would laugh at his cleverness in beating the “rigged system” instead of feeling betrayed by their so-called populist. On the other side, Clinton may be accused of many things, but her voters never flocked to her personality: they chose Hillary for her qualifications and experience — her appeal was grounded in ethos rather than pathos. And so her ethics scandals hurt more than his, in the final telling, not because they were more serious, but because she was more far vulnerable to such a line of attack.
Later Trump talked about the ways that his core supporters turned out for him in key states where he was worried about Democratic voter fraud. He talks about buses that were supposed to carry Democratic voters to the polls, and how his red-capped voters boarded those buses instead to go vote for him. This story confused the hell out of me — I had not seen any reports about this in post-election coverage. But Google searches revealed that this tale was most likely an illusion to the Project Veritas videos showing hidden-camera interviews with DNC operatives, heavily edited by James O’Keefe to show what are apparently admissions of voter-fraud tactics including the transport of paid voters to cast fraudulent ballots with fake IDs.
Why did I not see this before, when I spend a good two hours a day on average browsing the news? Because it’s bullshit. O’Keefe’s editing has been discredited so thoroughly in the past, even by conservative outlets like The Blaze, that no reputable news organization gives him much credence now.
So in Trumpland, not all press is bad — only press that is held to any kind of journalistic standards is bad. Stuff like Project Veritas, though? That’s great, because it plays right into the narrative that Dear Leader wants to weave, and it gets spread and absorbed by the faithful long before it can be debunked. Thanks, social media!
The Country That Shall Not Be Named
As I’ve said before, when listening to Trump speak — or any politician, really, but especially a habitual prevaricator like Trump — you have to keep one ear open for what he does not say.
“We’re going to stop trying to build new nations in far-off lands — many areas, you’ve never even heard of these places. Instead, my administration will focus on the vital national security of the United States. And that means crushing ISIS and defeating radical Islamic terrorism…
He goes on about the Islamic threat for a bit, as usual. Then he switches over to touting his economic plans.
But he makes absolutely no mention of Russia as a threat to our “vital national security.” Hell, he doesn’t even talk about Russia as a potential ally this time around. He does not say the words Russia or Putin once during his forty to fifty minutes of speaking.
Trump perceives with the finely-honed senses of a congenital liar that bringing up Russia at all will only invite trouble. Doing so will remind his audience that lots of people outside their communal safe space have some very serious questions about the role Russia played in Trump’s election, and this is one scandal that could actually damage his credibility with his nationalistic base.
It’s tough to think of yourself as a patriot while also passively allowing a foreign power’s intelligence agencies to fuck your nation six ways from Sunday. Even a Trump supporter cannot sustain this level of cognitive dissonance for long.
If his voters ever receive incontrovertible evidence that Trump knew we were getting spy-fucked by Putin and went along with it, they will turn on him with the sudden violence of a rescued pit bull with PTSD from its fighting days — as well they should.
Trump voters may not care whether he fucks over other Americans, but God save Trump from their wrath if he betrays them.
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