Trump’s Hurricane of Bullshit Tour, Part Three
Des Moines, Iowa
Double-Chin McGee returned to the rumored birthplace of his corn-silk hair on Thursday, December 8th, to bask in the adoration of his True Believers a little more and top off his toupee.
Yes, I know that’s The Donald’s real hair. But The Donald never lets the truth get in the way of a good one-liner, or even a bad one-liner, and neither do I.
As I did for Parts One and Two of this series, I watched the playback of his Thank You Tour 2016 event on YouTube, tweeting out my reactions and notes for later reference. I keep torturing myself like this for two very good reasons:
- 2018 midterm elections beckon, a glimmer of hope on the horizon. If Democrats are going to win back conservative voters when Trump sells them out — his Cabinet picks and lack of divestment from his business empire suggest that he will — we need to understand what makes these people tick.
- When future historians want to know what the American people were thinking when they selected their own fascist leader a scant 75 years after going to war with Hitler, I want there to be plenty of records showing that not all Americans were willing cheerleaders to this madness. [Note to the Editors: consider printing out all Trump-related articles for archival purposes against any future server-wiping catastrophes.]
My reports should get shorter as the tour drags on. There are only so many ways that Trump can reshuffle the themes of his rally speech. I will try to focus on whatever fresh insights can be gleaned from the latest manure, rather than repeating old bullshit ad nauseum. I’m sure that some of you are trying to eat while you read this.
Darth Pence: Sith Apprentice
Oddly, there was only one warm-up speaker for the Des Moines rally. The Governor of Indiana took a break from negotiating bribes to keep factory jobs in his patch of the Rust Belt so he could appear tonight in his role as Vice President-elect.
Before the election, a number of conservative commentators expressed hope that Mike Pence would act as a moderating influence upon the mercurial Donald Trump. That no longer appears likely. Pence’s opening speech shows that he is now fully on board the Trump Train, wherever it leads, and the Trump Train has no brakes.
In Trump, Pence sees a president that will “name our enemy: radical Islamic terrorism.” Saying one or even two of those words is insufficient for enemy-naming purposes; you must say all three:
- Radical Islam, sans terrorism, could be radically peaceful.
- Radical terrorism, sans Islam, could describe homegrown attacks like abortion-clinic bombings and shootings at black churches, and we’d rather not call those things “terrorism” because that’s something only foreigners do.
- Islamic terrorism only became radical when it was turned against the United States and Europe. We didn’t mind the mujaheddin so much when they were giving the Soviets hell back in 1980s Afghanistan.
Fun fact: if you say “radical Islamic terrorism” aloud three times in a row, an ISIS fighter will appear before you, like Beetlejuice.
Pence reiterated the call for repealing Obamacare, but this time he gave a little more of the game away. He wants to replace the Affordable Care Act with “free-market healthcare reforms.” This may sound odd to some listeners, since the ACA was itself billed as a free-market healthcare reform, a grand bargain with Big Insurance lobbyists who were scared shitless by the prospect of a single-payer program like Medicaid For All. The most plausible and likely outcome of Pence’s proposal would be a return to the pre-Obamacare insurance system remembered fondly by Republicans as FYIGM, which stands for Fuck Yours, I Got Mine.
After that, Pence continued reading from the PowerPoint bullets displayed on the teleprompter: build the wall, enforce “law and order,” and a promise to “end illegal immigration once and for all.” [Emphasis mine.] I had not heard that promise phrased quite this way before now. Historians may note that Nazi officials also promised to “end the Jewish problem once and for all,” though in fairness this may not be the most precise translation from the German.
Pence ended by praising the “strength” and “vision” of his new boss. The emphasis on strength is most telling. Democrats like strong leaders with vision too, but how often do you hear them praise strength qua strength? We usually focus on strength manifested through other personal qualities, like compassion, honesty, competency, and wisdom. But the working- and middle-class Republican faithful always demand strength from their leaders. Not those namby-pamby liberal ideas of ‘strength,’ but the bullish kind that confronts all problems head-on with belligerence and domination. STRENGTH.
Ethnic Nationalism, the Remix
When The Donald took the stage himself, he thanked the people of Iowa for joining “a movement the world has never seen before.” At this late hour, unfortunately, I could not reach any senior citizens alive during the 1930s for comment. Mark Joseph Stern, however, remembers stories from his Jewish grandparents in Poland, as do many others, and sees parallels in the death threats he received from rabid supporters of Trump’s movement after their candidate won.
A few other people present at the rally saw those same parallels. While this was not shown in the live Internet video feed, the Des Moines Register reports that three protesters unfurled a banner reading “Iowa says no to hate,” then chanting “No Trump, no KKK, no fascist USA.” The crowd’s boos drowned out their chant while they were escorted out by police.
In case you missed it during election season: Trump received a full front-page endorsement from The Crusader, a newspaper affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan. Trump’s campaign officials did issue a statement denouncing The Crusader and distancing themselves and their supporters from white supremacist ideology. But Trump himself has devoted far more personal effort and tweets to the denunciation of the New York Times, Saturday Night Live, and the cast of Hamilton. And let’s not forget that his father, Fred Trump, was arrested at the scene of a 1927 Klan rally in his native New York City, though he was never conclusively tied to that group. Still, you’ll understand me for opining that The Donald’s denunciation of the Ku Klux Klan rings somewhat hollow, given all this circumstantial evidence.
After praising recently deceased astronaut John Glenn and giving a quick pee-and-you’ll-miss-him introduction of Iowa Governor Terry Branstad, Trump’s nominee for Ambassador to China, Trump returned to pitching his brand of economic and social nativism — red meat for those most loyal followers who obtained tickets to this event.
Trump praised those veterans who made sacrifices for OUR country — emphasis his. He did not specify who belongs to OUR group, but given the racial demographics of the attendees — Iowa is about 93% white, according to the most recent census data — it does not require a great leap of cynicism to read a white nationalist angle into that statement. If Trump extends this Thank You Tour into Arizona and a larger Latino population joins the audience, it will be interesting to hear whether he repeats this line with the same emphasis. I did not hear this emphasis in Fayetteville a few days ago, with more African-Americans visible in the audience and Diamond and Silk in the opening lineup.
If that was too subtle, Trump also vowed that all rebuilding of our national infrastructure would be done by “our own people,” not “people from other lands.” He could simply be referring to American citizens, of course. But his earlier objections to having the Trump University fraud case heard by US District Judge Gonzalo Curiel strongly suggest that he tends not to see American citizens with non-European ancestry as “our own people.”
Trump also crowed about “doing great with women” on Election Day, glossing over that he only won a narrow majority of white women.
Reaganomics, Take Two
Trump talked a little more about his economic poilicy tonight. His “bold structural reform” — which he said less about in Fayetteville — seems to mostly consist of a standard GOP wish-list that hasn’t changed much since the Reagan administration. However, Trump’s personal platform includes two major planks that many party veterans regard as heterodoxy:
- A proposed set of spending rules for national infrastructure spending: Buy American and Hire American. This is part of why Trump says that companies “won’t be leaving so fast anymore,” i.e. not relocating their manufacturing operations to foreign countries.
- “There will be consequences” for American companies that move operations abroad and then export goods back into the American marketplace. These unspecified consequences would most likely take the form of tariffs.
While these planks don’t sit well with many conservative economists, they seem wildly popular with Trump’s white working- and middle-class base, many of whom are concentrated in the so-called Rust Belt states which have seen decades of erosion to their manufacturing sector. And it certainly fits with the Blood-and-Soil style of nationalism described earlier.
Aside from those planks, the rest of Trump’s economic platform is pure Reagan: massive tax cuts for all income brackets, with the greatest cuts reserved for the rich — including a cut of the business tax rate from 35% down to 15%. There’s also a promise to cut “every wasteful regulation.” He does not go into much detail about what makes a regulation wasteful, but that comment was soon followed by a promise to “end [Environmental Protection Agency] intrusion into your lives.” Somehow, though, he says this will not come at the cost of reduced protection for natural resources. The magician is always careful not to reveal too many of his tricks, as they say.
He also talks about making loans more freely available to entrepreneurs starting up their own businesses. Not even a decade has passed since the global financial crisis brought on through subprime mortgage lending, and now Trump appears to be advocating for something like subprime business lending.
It’s worth mentioning that the economic prosperity of the Reagan era was largely enjoyed by wealthy businessmen — like Trump — and less so by working- and middle-class people, who have seen little to no increase in real wages (adjusted for inflation) since the 1970s.
Meet the New Vision, Same as the Old Vision
Trump renewed another policy proposal that he floated during the campaign: a repeal of the so-called Johnson Amendment to our tax code that prohibits tax-exempt non-profit corporations from supporting candidates for elective office. This rule has long been a thorn in the side of the religious right, who have long wished for a freer hand in influencing public policy in what they see as a Christian nation. Never mind that pesky separation of church and state in the First Amendment of our Constitution.
It was quite clear that repealing the Johnson Amendment was promised as an overture to the Christian right, seeing as how Trump preceded that promise by thanking them for their support in the election: “Evangelicals! I love you!”
So to recap Trump’s vision for our country — which Pence praised him for during his opening speech — it appears to include:
- barely-veiled ethnic nationalism,
- economic windfalls for the upper classes, and
- hacking the firewall between church and state.
This sounds like the American dream of wealthy white Christians, along with poorer white Christian workers who believe that they’ll join that upper class once their white Christian status is properly protected again.
Do the protesters chanting “no KKK, no fascist USA” still sound paranoid?
They could be, of course. I could be paranoid too. It’s entirely possible — probable, even — that most of Trump’s voters don’t see this danger at all. Sixty-three million American voters can’t be that wrong, can they?
Towards the end of his speech, Trump rattled off a one-liner that sounded rather ominous to this observer:
You don’t know what you did when you put me in this position.
Soon after he walked off to “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” by the Rolling Stones, a favorite played during the campaign rallies too.
But if you try sometimes, you just might find… you get what you NEED.
Many commentators have observed that this was an odd choice for a rally song, but now I’m wondering if there’s a significance that was overlooked: this is Trump’s way of slyly signaling that most of us will not like what he wants to do, but he’s going to do it anyway for our own good.
Oh boy.
When he’s not writing about politics, Dave crochets to relax. He also works a night job at an I/DD group home that probably gives him way too much time to think.
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