Friday, October 14, 2016

Looking through the windows opened by Trump's Thursday conspiracy speech

People are understandably weighing in on Trump's the-Clintons-are-leading-the-worldwide-Jewish-conspiracy-against-me speech.

Digby Parton holds up Trump's speech against Michele Obama's yesterday, using them as paradigmatic speeches for the political-cultural divide so vividly on display in this Presidential election: Two speeches that defined a campaign: Donald Trump’s conspiratorial ranting and Michelle Obama’s inspiring call for decency Salon 10/14/2016.

Here is Michelle's speech Digby references, First Lady Michelle Obama complete speech in Manchester, NH C-Span 10/13/2016:



Molly Ball, who usually delivers informative but conventional evaluations of such things gave it a shot: Trump Goes to War Atlantic Politics 10/14/2016. The war metaphor isn't just in the title:

So the meteor barrels toward the earth. It's common to refer to a campaign in freefall as an "implosion," but really, this is an explosion, throwing shrapnel in all directions, immolating innocent bystanders. Trump has cast off the shackles of the bosses who tried to rein him in. He is determined to consume the ungrateful party that, having nominated him, now is having second thoughts. As an advertisement paid for by the campaign recently put it: "IT'S US AGAINST THE WORLD."
But the significance of the paranoid conspiracy passages seems to have sailed right by her.

Charlie Pierce gives his own distinctive view of the Trump speech in Michelle Obama vs. Donald Trump Esquire Politics Blog 10/14/2016: "In our major political parties, there are two people running for president now, but there is only one presidential campaign. There is one presidential campaign and one rampage."

And in more detail in yesterday's Have Faith: Society Will Survive What Trump Hath Wrought:

What comes next is the only real question. It is now assumed that disillusioned Trumpaloompas will go on some sort of rampage on Election Day and thereafter. But the real peril to the country lies in the possibility that, in the scramble to distance themselves from the stench of its 2016 nominee, the Republican Party will decide that the easiest way to reorganize itself would be to plot the destruction of yet another Clinton presidency. I certainly don't believe that the party will gather itself and abandon the essential political forces and ideas that worked for four decades to make the Trump campaign inevitable. I think that would shatter the party's fragile little mind.

The hunt for the Hildebeast is the fast, easy way to get The Base back howling in harmony and to raise money for the 2018 midterms, which will be here before we know it, God help us all.
Reuters reports basically on just the parts of Trump's speech that had to do with sex, or rather sexual abuse: Steve Holland, 'Absolutely false,' Trump says defiantly after women's groping allegations 10/13/2016.

Chauncey Devega says of Trump's speech (Frankenstein’s monster Salon 10/14/2016):

Trump’s speech is the paranoid style that has been common to movement conservatism since the 1950s, amplified by the rumor mongering and conspiracy theories that are presented as truth throughout the right-wing news media entertainment echo chamber. Trump’s speech at West Palm Beach, Florida, is also virulently anti-Semitic. His allusions to conspiracies and international banks are evocative of “Mein Kampf.” Given how he is championed by white supremacists and white nationalists, this should not be a surprise. In all, it would have been much more efficient if Trump simply yelled, “It’s the Jews; damn it!”
And he uses that speech as a starting point to point out that the Republican Party has been sticking with Trump through a variety of obscene demagogic moments. This conclusion seems immanently reasonable:

It appears that Donald Trump’s bigotry and racism against people of color and Muslims could be explained away by Republican leaders as a “gaffe” or the words of someone who is not a “professional politician” or he is an “outsider.” By comparison, when Trump was caught on video bragging about sexually harassing white women, an informal rule regarding propriety and behavior among conservatives had been breached. The Republican Party and its leaders care about the votes of white women; it does not care about how black and brown people are treated.
This is also an important observation recognizing the various but connected manifestations of political authoritarianism:

There are many lessons to be learned from Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, and hopefully, his defeat on Election Day in November. The most important of these is that racism, sexism, nativism, and bigotry are not usually separate and discrete things. A person like Donald Trump — and the basket of human deplorables who have rallied around him — usually possess most of those character defects and not just one or a few.

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