Presidential Candidates Say the Darndest Things…

 

…and of course by ‘candidates’, I mean the Donald. Yes, step right up and witness the birth pangs of Trump’s four month main drag to November 8th. D-Day. Electo-Fest 2016. The How-Did-They-Let-It-Get-This-Far finale for the rest of the world.

As I summed up in the most recent post, the last year has been a rollercoaster ride for those with even a passing interest in American presidential politics. Albeit, it’s the kind of rollercoaster ride that starts as many thrill rides do: that wonderful stomach-churning drop at the top of a long climb; that adrenalin surge as you free fall, attached to a trustworthy track with steel and rope. At this stage though, deep in the lower colon of 2016, we’re beginning to wonder if this free fall is going to stop. The same analogy could be clumsily thrown at the situation if Trump wins in November.

Fear not. This ride seems to be levelling out. Since the conventions, the Donald has been on a free fall of his own. Although, it would be arrogant to assume whether he knows it. His people certainly do, as they scurry to the Twittosphere and in front of prime time cameras to ‘correct the narrative’ whenever their hapless lord unwittingly spews forth his latest ‘thought’ into a microphone. “That microphone was planted their by the liberal media! Audio technology has a well known liberal bias!” “You’ve misunderstood the context of his point!” Just over two weeks after the RNC and the DNC have wrapped on their quadrennial Mega Church affair, and the D is beginning to resemble that reveller at a party that’s had far too much to drink, a little bit to smoke and is now trying to pass themselves off as composed, in quiet conversation with a picture of your Dad on the mantel piece. The grim but genius finality to this image is when he laughs at a framed picture’s joke, thinking that they too agree that the immigrants took those jobs, and a good metric cup of vomit bursts forth. He never knew he had it in him, but he will be damned if he doesn’t spend the next 20 minutes trying to mop it off the picture’s glass. He’s not sorry though. He’s not politically correct.

***

Indeed, all seemed well in the wake of the RNC. The Republicans had swallowed their medicine and locked step behind their new God Emperor. Big players on the DC scene tipped the hat and kissed the ring, albeit with some gritted teeth. Now GOP Chairman Reince Priebus had to open the war chest and guide the highly volatile ship that was the Trump Campaign to somewhere stable. There was hope for the GOP establishment given that in mid-June 2016, just before the RNC went to post in Cleveland, Trump fired his highly volatile and highly suspect Campaign Manager Corey Lewandowski. After all,  Lewandowski proved even too much for the MAGA trail. On two separate occasions he had been accused of physically assaulting people at Trump rallies. A reporter for Breitbart News (itself a bastion of anti-PC policy), Michelle Fields even had a battery charge brought against him for which he had to turn himself in to the authorities.

The sacking of this loose cannon may have been an attempt to distance Trump from an even looser primary pastiche. Lewandowski had a concrete history working for ‘Americans for Prosperity’ from 2008 until January 2015. If you remember, this group was the flagship enterprise through which the Koch Brothers plied their Astroturfing game across the disenfranchised voters that looked to the Tea Party. Corey was instrumental in North Eastern support for Tea Party candidates, and so, who better to ramp up Trump’s campaign? Who better to pick the bones of the disenfranchised?

But he was gone. The establishment of the GOP saw a new light as they rallied around their king. Time to get serious. Time to get Real on a soft America.

It didn’t last long.

Lewandowski’s replacement, Jason Miller, a former Communications Advisor for Sen. Ted Cruz’s bid for the nomination, was caught slamming Trump across a series of Tweets from as early as April. While bashing one’s opponent is completely natural in the shit storm of American politics, hiring said basher is just a rookie move for a freshly minted national campaign.

Evidently, Mr Miller is not the best when it comes to advising his candidate of how best to conduct himself when faced with a tackle covered in fresh delicious bait. As we all know by now, the DNC wheeled out the Ghazala and Khizir Khan, the Gold Star parents of a slain Muslim American soldier. They called into question Trumps capability on a number of fronts. It was the perfect bait. They raised issues around Trumps Islamophobic rhetoric, around his position on those all important Troops, and by proxy, it hit his foreign policy record, or lack thereof. It was a cynical move by the Democrats, no doubt, but let’s not be too naive about the wheelhouse we’re playing in. The Democrats had already near Watergated their own convention with the financing leaks and the resignation of Chairperson Wasserman-Schultz.

Nevertheless, God Emperor and Trump couldn’t resist lashing back with some loaded and backward comments. To the New York Times he opined, “I’d like to hear his (Khan’s) wife say something.” Implying of course that Khan had lashed Ghazala with Sharia law tropes, handicapping her from speech. Wait. Did I say implying? “If you look at his wife, she was standing there… She had nothing to say. She probably, maybe she wasn’t allowed to have anything to say. You tell me.”

Yes, with the rhetorical cadence of a typewriter getting tuned up by a cinder block, Trump went full gormless. He took the Democrats bait, swallowed it and didn’t even realise he’s given himself political food poisoning. Sen. John McCain, among others, even expressed disgust at Trumps remarks. Subsequently, McCain’s office experienced a storm of concerned veterans demanding that the Senator remove his endorsement of Trump.

The weeks got worse. At a rally in Virginia on August 2, Trump used his podium to address the issue of a crying baby in the audience. “I love babies. I hear that baby cry, I like it,” he said. “What a baby. What a beautiful baby. Don’t worry, don’t worry. The mom’s running around, like, don’t worry about it, you know. It’s young and beautiful and healthy, and that’s what we want.” After a few more minutes of crying, Trump un-PC’d all over that shit. “Actually I was only kidding, you can get the baby out of here. I think she really believed me that I love having a baby crying while I’m speaking. That’s okay. People don’t understand. That’s okay.”

The staggering ineptitude of this candidate is fascinating. His army of Centipedes across the internet had to race to his defense, once again claiming that the Media has distorted what he was actually saying. No, you’ve misinterpreted his ass-banditry! Such a world it is when Politifact.com runs an article illustrating that Trump “accurately says media wrong that he kicked baby out of rally”, he just said some ignorant shit that would get your uncle kicked out of the house at Sunday lunch.

Not long after this, the George W. Bush administration officially announced its support of Hillary Clinton for President. This was preceded by the Harvard Republican Club, the oldest in America, refusing to endorse their Party’s candidate for the first time in 128 years. And yet the campaign’s worst nightmare has only arrived.

On the week of July 25, RealClearPolitics.com, a polling aggregator, had Trump nationally ahead, 45.7 points to Hillary’s 44.6. Then Khan spoke, but more importantly, Trump reacted. By July 31, Trump had dropped to 43.4. Astonishingly though, Hillary had actually lost 0.1 points at this stage, according to RCP. The day after the Virginia baby fiasco, Hillary cruised up to 47.3, while the Donald sank lower to 41.6. The ‘High Energy’ traction that Trump’s online Nimble Navigators prided themselves and their Emperor on was certainly waning. This slide continued as Trump unveiled an immensely contradictory economic plan on August 7.  Sunday’s hour-plus address at the Detroit Economic Club is seen as a rite of passage for candidates, but in it Trump laid out a plan that not only completely flip-flopped on his working-class-first campaign origins, but raised taxes on most American brackets, while giving an $800,000 break to the top half of the top one percent.

While this slip continued, even leveling at one point, August 9 2016 may go down as the day Trump put the nail in his campaign’s coffin. At a campaign rally in Wilmington, North Carolina on Tuesday, Trump seems to have insinuated that gun owners could attempt an assassination on either Hillary or her Supreme Court nominations:

“Hillary wants to abolish, essentially abolish the Second Amendment. By the way, if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do folks. Though the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know…”

The wire is officially on fire and the House of Trump is beginning to smoulder. His Nimble Navigators are rushing to claim that it was merely a call to metaphorical arms; for second amendment gun owners to rally together and get out the vote to stop ‘Crooked Hillary’. This being a spin that even Trump’s own campaign missed as they decided to spin it as a joke that the PC brigade didn’t or couldn’t get. It wasn’t until 3.21am this morning that Communication Advisor Miller got the spin out there as Trump tweeted about harnessing the influence of gun-rights activists.

Media desperate to distract from Clinton's anti-2A stance. I said pro-2A citizens must organize and get out vote to save our Constitution!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 10, 2016

If this was the case, and he was appealing to the 2A and NRA base, then it is just another rookie move etched into his already riddled political career. Why would the chosen Republican nominee waste time so badly with a far-right demographic that is already in the pocket of the GOP’s polling numbers? Why not court the female vote, a vote where the candidate is catastrophically dragging. What about 18-25? A demographic where numbers have slipped so poorly in recent weeks that he would do well to throw them a few rhetorical bones. After all, it is the most recently tapped demographic, with the Obama campaign unlocking this notoriously apathetic political market back in 2007/08.

In the case that this was a joke, then it’s a pretty dangerous one to play with. For a lot of voters, this is where they draw the line. They may have given a pass to all the Donald’s previous gaffes, but his off the cuff, un-PC nature is beginning to reveal itself to be the thoughtlessly thoughtless rambling of a withered, oral klutz. At what point will his defenders realise that they are no longer campaigning; they are explaining, spinning, defending. Factors of a campaign, no doubt, but when there is nothing left to praise, you’re essentially doing the political equivalent of going door to door in a new neighbourhood, letting the public know that you’re a registered sex offender.

Joke or not, former head of the CIA, retired Gen. Michael Hayden best summed up this oddity when he told CNN that, “If someone else had said that said outside the hall, he’d be in the back of a police wagon now with the Secret Service questioning him.” Moreover, Hayden poetically shut down any debate on the syntactic ambiguity of Trump’s statements when he commented, “You’re not just responsible for what you say. You are responsible for what people hear.” And as everyone but America knows, when it comes to gun-rights activists, such a statement could not be more painfully true.

***

While initially Donald Trump went up and down the polls like a High School dropout that’s just waiting for their big break, it looks like Trump’s days of dancing are coming to a grim and predictable end. And no, there was never going to be a modelling contract. After these latest missteps (to put it mildly), Hillary has soared to a +7.9 lead, sitting pretty, with her excitable soon-to-be First Husband, at 47.8. Meanwhile, Trump has slumped to 39.9.

It’s always easy to pass judgement on the young and naive stripper that’s just doing this to pay the bills until something else comes along. It’s a stereotype well versed in modern media. Yet just like the pimps and jackals that frequent the skin bars jammed with these crushed dreams, we love it really – hypocrisy and all. Poised in front of our news streams and polling data; wrapped up in the warm glow of imagery – feeding the Beast. Trump was always going to be a Hindenburg; a tragicomedy on an epic scale – a King Lear without redemption or death, just wandering in that forest, dangerously mumbling to himself.

And yet, some people and the Fools followed.

 

• J. O’Brien

Be Careful What You Protest For: Recapping Trump

 

Once upon a time in a country not so far away, a much lampooned political system began a draft season to select its 45th President. Indeed, back in July 2015, the grand ol’ U.S. of A. ramped into the primary season with a bombshell that would only really befit a reality television show…

Donald Trump announced his candidacy (with more than a dozen non-sequitur candidates) to run for President. With effortless classlessness and a cornucopia of super-id, the real estate mogul threw his dreadful red hat in the Republican ring. He was going to have to take on pint sized bigots such as Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), and the orphan of charm himself, Gov. John Kaisch (R-OH). First, of course, he would have to beat back pitiful onslaughts from former neurosurgeon Ben Carson of Michigan; a man so hopelessly lost at a podium that he might have begun a commencement address at any moment.

As sure as Trump is slightly radioactive, his announcement became a talking point of celebration across the world. Comedians, pundits and high-horse Europeans glanced at America with bit-lip amusement and anticipation. As Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert lamented in 2008 that George W. Bush, their golden goose of comedy and satire had left the Oval, so now did they rejoice: the Primary season is nearly a year long! Trump’s arrogance would totally carry him through ’til at least Super Tuesday! He’s going to make a global fool of himself, the process, the Grand Old Party etc. etc.

Yet something odd started happening around mid-July 2015. Strange movements in the bowels of the GOP’s SuperPAC establishment led to Trump’s first successful shot across the bow. The infamous Koch Brothers, billionaire energy tycoons Charles and David, allowed cameras into their fundraising event for the Republican Primary candiates for the first time ever. Of course, the footage and its editing was strictly controlled by their people, but nonetheless, the public got a firsthand curtain twitch into the weekend long blowjob that this event is. As Jeb, Cruz and Rubio took to the stage, mediated by one Koch or another, the event began to resemble a mismanaged festival of reacharounds. Thirty minutes or more on-stage to solicit big bucks from the Kochs’ 400+ assembled multi-millionaire friends. Give your stump speech. Know your audience. Hint at cabinet and committee positions. Stump once more. Drop the mike. Wipe your lower lip. Kiss the ring.

Yes, this was a bleak look inside the factory of half of the two party system. The killing floor was ripe with big money, side-stepping donors that want influence through the Kochs’ cabal. A Czech harem to blow billionaires for power. A sweet but salty irony.

And yet, where was our class-clown contestant at this historic event? Where was the horse you support just to keep him in the race to watch him perpetually fall? He wasn’t there. He refused to entertain an emblem of a broken system. He was saying all of this from a small podium a few state lines to the west.

He was going to lower taxes on the poor. Raise taxes on the top. Defend the small business owner. He wasn’t going to be ‘politically correct’. He was going to kick the immigrants out. He was going to build a wall. He sure as shit wasn’t going to use big words. And he wasn’t going to show up to the Kochs’ opaque brothel.

Not many people noticed it, but this is where Trump became dangerous. This is where the ringmaster of an empty tent became Real. While everyone else was laughing at him from the present, there were many who were left in the past that heard him loud and clear. Not so long ago, the Tea Party promised a grassroots campaign to bring America back to south of the Mason-Dixon and the mid-west. With their flags and their slogan (‘Don’t Tread On Me!’), they drove big busses and campaigned wildly across the country. Between 2008 and 2012, the Tea Party picked up huge support utilising the celebrity status of professional question mark Sarah Palin and simple, incalculable promises. They were going to get white, lower-income, blue-collar families their manufacturing/mining/drilling jobs back. They were going to stand up for the little (white) guy. They were going to fix that broken Washington System and take back Congress. Most importantly for them though, they were going to dismantle Obamacare and stop all this nonsense about Global Warming.

The Tea Party were very successful. At one point they backed and received the support of Sen. Mitch McConnell and then-Speaker of the House Rep. John Boehner. Across the 2010 and 2012 Congressional elections the Party racked up victories in both Houses by backing candidates that took their money or subscribed to their beliefs. Denial-ist extraordinaire, Michele Bachman even went as far as to establish a Tea Party Caucus in the House. However, while the Tea Party still exists, it has lost significant support. This is due, in part, to the idea of Astroturfing.

Astroturfing is the polar opposite of a grassroots movement. It is set up to create the illusion of an organisation that has come from the people and therefore will best serve the peoples’ needs. There was one big campaign promise that just did not work for the ‘little guy’ or ‘Joe the Plumber’. They wanted rid of universal healthcare. From here, some very astute journalists and researchers discovered that a large amount of the Tea Party’s affiliates, such as ‘Americans for Prosperity’, were created and paid for by hugely wealthy special interest groups that had a rather large vested interest in calling global warming a hoax and shutting down Obamacare. Of course then it would come as no surprise to anyone that these groups were in the business of fracking, oil-drilling, coal mining, car manufacturing and insurance finance. Chief among these groups was Koch Industries. Remember those guys?

Slowly and quietly, as the Tea Party-backed candidates made obstructionist fools of themselves in the Senate and Congress, various reports and documentaries surfaced illustrating just how much of a illusion the Tea Party actually was. It had very little interest in protecting the rights and well-being of American workers, but had huge interest in shutting down any part of responsible governance that may stand in its industries way. Fronted by the Kochs, these special interest groups created a fake grassroots (astroturf) movement to double penetrate the American political system: hit them from K Street with lobbyists and influence directly, and hit them from the polling stations with a fever pitch demographic of pissed off voters. It was beyond a John Le Carre plot in scope, and just brazen enough to fail.

***

Nearly 3 years later and Donald Trump aims a sleazy smile across a podium in July 2015. He makes damn sure that everyone hears him when he says that he will only take small donations to his Primary campaign. He makes sure everyone is paying attention when he illustrates his vast personal wealth, with which he will make a donation too his own campaign, but fuck it. It’s his money right? And he makes sure everyone is on Twitter to watch his wild political zigzagging from left to right…

Dip left. Lower taxes on the poor.

Bank right. Make the Mexicans pay for the US’s border wall.

Dive left. Raise taxes on the rich.

Swing right. No more Islamic immigrants.

Glance left. No special interest group’s money here.

Settle way right. No more political correctness.

If this drunken dance across the debate stage didn’t make you dizzy with apathy, then you either sat in shock or gradually pledged allegiance to the God Emperor. Trump harnessed something that the Tea Party left behind mixed in with the sand on their astroturf. His haphazard campaign picked up that dissenting voice across the mid-west and the south. His was to be a campaign of one man against the system that lied to the people with the Tea Party. These people got tread on by the very people that said they wouldn’t.

Of course, mixed in with this frayed sack of bruised egos was the burgeoning anti-PC culture; themselves a blind and pitiless reaction to the rise of social justice and political correctness. We all know the type: as one group strives for equality, the other sees it as an affront on their agency, whatever they think it is. Just as the KKK reinvented themselves as ‘protectors of white culture’, not racists, so too do blatant misogynists relabel themselves as purveyors off Men’s Rights.

Across this Primary campaign and through the conventions one year on from Trump’s announcement in 2015, these Nimble Navigators (as they refer to themselves on the headline making subreddit, r/the_donald) have brigaded around their God Emperor, latched on to the loose idea that he will Make America Great Again. They have chosen the self-titled ‘Based Faggot’ and British ‘journalist’ Milo Yiannopoulos as the God Emperor’s heir apparent; a man who prides himself on ‘triggering’ SJWs (Social Justice Warriors) by saying intentionally horrendous and offensive statements. By way of example one need only look to his recent fracas on Twitter with actor and Ghostbusters (2016) star Leslie Jones. Milo managed to get himself banned from the social networking platform for launching racist slurs from behind his phone’s screen. A brave knight in the political spectrum? A man worth existing at all? Or just an asshat with a data plan?

***

Much like the Rio Olympics, we know most of the bullet points around Trump’s live controversy. He bragged about his penis size during a presidential primary debate to defend the size of his hands. Naturally. He claimed that Parisians in the Bataclan massacre would have been better off had they been armed. Of course. More recently, at the convention his wife Melania vocally plagiarized Michelle Obama’s 2008 Democrat Convention Address while not being able to produce her college transcripts in Design and Architecture from the University of Ljubljana. Of course, the Trumps cannot produce them as they do not exist. She left after less than one year to pursue modelling. Nothing to be ashamed of, but why claim otherwise? And should we play Donald’s game from 2008 and kick up a childlike tantrum looking for the documents (re. Obama’s birth cert)?

We know that the Drumpf tried to kick a crying baby and mother out of one of his rallies in Virginia recently for making too much noise. Bold move considering how important mothers and little babies are to American Presidential politics. We know that there was an alleged meeting between members of Trump’s campaign and members of Kaisch’s former campaign to see if he would like to be the most powerful vice president ever, taking on domestic and foreign policy to leave the God Emperor to just Make America Great Again from the Oval. And we know that our gloriously hilarious failure of a human being took the bait from the DNC as he retorted to the Khan family’s blistering attack on his sacrificial and constitutional credibility.

We know all this. Everyone can know all of this. And yet he remains as nominee.

After his Gold Star fuck up, former Presidential candidate Sen. John McCain vocalised his distaste for Trump (although he still has yet to retract his endorsement). Moreover, as of 8 August 2016, the George W. Bush Administration has officially announced that it will be supporting Hillary Clinton for President. Much like his initial political zigzag, Trump’s polling numbers are beginning to follow a similarly wild pattern. But that’s a story for another day…

***

We guffawed and chortled and cried with laughter last year when Trump claimed he would be President, but the grim reality of the ill-informed protest vote was seen in the cold, dead and virulently ignorant eyes of the Brexit result. Brian Cox recently wrote about the devastating effect that this anti-expert protest vote could have on a society, but you have to wonder whether Britain voting to leave the safety net of the EU is comparable to electing an openly ignorant Oompa Loompa that’s past its sell-by date into an office that holds probably the most powerful position in the world? If America wants to allow itself to elect this fool, does it deserve him? And if they have gone to war in the past to oust leaders that they view as unfit, should they not expect similar treatment, even from their own, gun-raging population? America has long bemoaned its dysfunctional two party system that’s lathered in corporate money, gerrymandering and special interests. It has demanded change and the Democrats almost chose Bernie, their protest vote. But the other side chose the Donald.

Now let’s see how he’ll fair in the big leagues of a national presidential election.

 

-J. O’Brien