The president and his party are facing a potentially disastrous midterm election that, despite a monumentally successful effort to rig district maps and election rules in their favor, may still cost them their congressional majority in the House.įor the past couple of weeks, the president has been on a relentless publicity campaign, delivering an escalating list of outrageous falsehoods that have failed to persuade the television networks to return to their prior practice of airing his speeches unedited in prime time. But there is perhaps still more to the president’s endorsement of political violence than meets the eye.
#Trump in panic mode free#
It is in no way surprising that those who defend free speech while encouraging state punishment of political critics, or who champion due process while demanding Trump’s rivals be imprisoned, would evince a similarly insincere commitment to political nonviolence: One of the core principles of Trumpism is that the rules only apply to others. Any criticism of or opposition to Trump they see as illegitimate by definition. Jonathan Schanzer: The experts were wrong about the Middle EastĪt the same time, the president and his conservative allies are attempting to characterize their political opponents as a “violent mob.” Make no mistake: The only modes of communication the president accepts are obsequious praise and sniveling deference, a standard his legions of defenders have adopted as their own. The self-styled defenders of free speech on the right who excused Gianforte’s attack on Jacobs as the natural, hot-tempered reaction of a Western mountain man (Gianforte is originally from California) are now engaged in a whisper campaign to smear Khashoggi as a terrorist sympathizer, the better to justify a fundamentalist state silencing him for speaking out. Gianforte attacked Jacobs after the reporter asked Gianforte about a health-care bill that would have resulted in millions of Americans being denied insurance coverage. “Any guy who can do a body slam … he’s my guy,” Trump told rally goers in Montana. ally (and, for Trump, a valued source of business) in tamping down the outrage over the reported torture and dismemberment of a journalist for criticism of a repressive government, the president of the United States took some time to make clear to both his domestic opponents and would-be despots abroad that he approves of political violence against journalists. Having struggled to assist a longtime U.S.
Whether rocketing to victory in the Republican presidential primary by scapegoating religious and ethnic minorities who lacked sufficient representation in the GOP to impose a political price, attacking survivors of sexual assault, smearing refugees, separating immigrant children from their parents, or denying the suffering of disenfranchised Puerto Ricans killed or displaced by Hurricane Maria, Trump has always reveled in cruelty against the weak or vulnerable.Īt a rally in Montana on Thursday, Trump celebrated Representative Greg Gianforte’s 2017 assault on the Guardian journalist Ben Jacobs, even as the White House labored to arrive at a mutually agreeable fiction to cover up the murder of Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi Arabia. President Donald Trump is never more comfortable than when attacking those who cannot respond in kind.
0 kommentar(er)
