Imagine Where We'd Be If Trump Didn't Go Bananas Every Night
(Mandatory Musical Accompaniment To This Post)
Not that it much matters any more, and much less is it news any more, but the Republican candidate rolled into Green Bay, Wisconsin, on Monday night and pretty much went bananas again. He raved about elections being rigged all the way back to 2008, delegitimizing the current president as well as the person who's odds-on to be the next one. He lit Paul Ryan on fire, again, and while I'm not against this in principle, it's an interesting insight into how determined El Caudillo del Mar-A-Lago is to bring the temple down on his own head. He scared a young girl half to death. He also proposed an "ethics plan" and his tongue did not burn with fire.
Meanwhile, his wife appeared with Anderson Cooper on CNN and essentially called him a teenage boy. Naturally, this whole rolling ball of electrified nonsense got rave reviews from the people who have immersed themselves in the great sea of distilled crazy. Tell us about it, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.
"We are having a backlash like nobody has ever seen before," Trump added. Trump rolled out a five-point policy of ethics reforms, including a requirement that members of Congress and White House officials wait five years before becoming lobbyists. He weighed in on Monday's disclosure of documents between the State Department and the FBI that showed disagreements over whether some of Clinton's emails should be considered classified. The FBI and State Department denied any deal had been struck or offered, but Trump claimed that there was a "criminal conspiracy," calling it "worse than Watergate." Trump also blasted Clinton on purported disclosures about her campaign that have appeared on WikiLeaks. "We're competing in a rigged election," Trump told the crowd.
It's impossible to overstate the danger of the game with which Trump intends to play out this election. There is a wildness in the land that pre-dates his candidacy, but that also is its primary raison d'etre. He spotted what already was out there and played to an audience that surprised most people with its size and nihilistic vehemence.
(And, yes, I've watched the latest from James O'Keefe, and I know the guy on the tape got fired today. But I've been to more Trump rallies than most people have, and they have been on the thin edge of violence since long before he was the nominee. Plus, really, James O'Keefe? Even Fox didn't bite for this one.)
People who are confused as to how the party of moral values and Jesus militants came to this have forgotten their William James. "Piety is the mask," James wrote. "The inner force is tribal instinct."
O'Keefe's video may have gotten one anonymous staffer fired, but the Clinton campaign is not ratfckers all the way down. (This, by the way, is essentially the argument that Parson Meacham used to hand-wave away the importance of Lee Atwater to the election of that model of civility, Poppy Bush.) The campaign of El Caudillo del Mar-A-Lago is run by a Breitbartian mudgroveler and a guy whose dirty-tricks career goes back to Nixon, and one of its crucial advisors is Alex Freaking Jones. Put the entire upper echelon of the Trump campaign in a barrel, roll the barrel down a hill, and there always will be an unhinged omadhaun on top.
And this campaign fits perfectly into a pre-existing underground infrastructure of unofficial conservativism that extends from the studios of talk radio stations to the Bundy Ranch to the Malheur Wildlife Refuge and, sadly, beyond.
The Malheur trial is going on right now and, on Monday, it was revealed that the people in that refuge may have been planning to take hostages from among the law-enforcement officers on the scene. And Malheur was a direct consequence of the armed sedition at the Bundy Ranch, an action that was actively abetted and encouraged by some of the stars of Fox News (Sean Hannity), as well as by some of the "conservative activists" who are in heavy rotation on CNN (Dana Loesch). There's no distinction between the fringe and the mainstream any more. It's fanatics all the way down.
Trump had an animal instinct for the main chance here. Now, though, he's caught between what the Republican party is and what it pretends to be. That's why you see conservative pundits and various radio spittle-bags running for the hills. They have to re-establish in the public mind what the Republican Party pretends to be-the long con that's worked for them for almost 40 years. That's also why you see so many members of the elite political press grasping for any opportunity to ignore or minimize what is plainly in front of their face. The problem is that, every day and every night, the Republican candidate for president goes bananas again.
But, more importantly, what he is doing now is running a presidential campaign as nothing less than an incitement to riot. The people to whom he's pitching this noxious swill will believe it. Hell, they'll believe anything. Every event has several luckless reporters who have to go out and talk to Trump supporters and, now, at almost every rally, there are at least two people willing to talk about taking up arms if the election doesn't turn out the way they want it to turn out.
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This gets out into the public, day after day, because the Trump campaign wants it to get out, day after day. The campaign's charges are getting angrier and wilder. Shiny new Jim Crow laws are in place, and even where they're being struck down, local officials are slow-playing court orders or ignoring them altogether. Racism and economic disenfranchisement are all balled up together in a way they haven't been since Reconstruction, when, as Alexander Keyssar points out in his magisterial work on voting rights, "The resistance to black voting was rooted in class conflict as well as racial antagonism."
The tactic of setting the economically alienated against each other is the oldest and longest con in the playbook of American oligarchy. It would be even more virulent today if the Republican nominee weren't so transparently off his trolley. But it is still there in everything he says, and especially when he tries to delegitimize the election it looks very much like he's going to lose, pinning the blame on the poor and the immigrants for the purpose of inflaming white voters who have more in common with the poor and the immigrants than with a vulgar talking yam who craps in a solid-gold commode.
So the Republican nominee went to Green Bay on Monday and pretty much went bananas again. A good portion of the country, God help us, seems willing to meet him halfway.
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