2 weeks Ago By [email protected] (Bruce Arthur)
As we get older, we become more ourselves: more entrenched in our habits, our essence distilled. Are you fundamentally cheerful? Selfish? Resentful? Your strongest qualities often become dominant as you age, especially if you are lonely. Nobody moderates you when you’re alone.
With that, we come to the closing argument for the campaign to elect Donald Trump as president of the United States. It’s been a long, exhausting trip since he descended that escalator in 2015 and talked about how Mexican immigrants were criminals and rapists. (“And some, I assume, are good people,” he added.
) Like Trump on the escalator, things went largely downhill from there. Now, with another presidential election that feels like the edge of a cliff, Trump’s strongest closing argument is the purest, least complicated part of the Make America Great Again movement. Beyond the extensive airing of Trump’s various lunatic grievances, and the stated policy goals of , , , there is the core promise: you get to be as bad a person as you want to be, and I will make the people you don’t like suffer.
This isn’t new: Adam Serwer described that stance in a 2018 piece for The Atlantic entitled ” .” It’s just deepened. Earlier this year, Republican vice-presidential nominee J.
D. Vance for “Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them)” by conservative activist Jack Posobiec, a book which literally called left-wingers unhuman and praised the murderous right-wing regimes of Augusto Pinochet in Chile and Spain’s Francisco Franco. And now it’s seeping everywhere.
At Trump’s triumphal rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City on Sunday, one speaker called for the slaughter of Trump’s opponents; one referred to Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris’s “pimp handlers”; one called Harris the Antichrist; Tucker Carlson called Harris a “Samoan Malaysian low-I.Q. former California prosecutor.
” And Trump, of course, railed against his opponents as “the enemy within.” Comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who was over racist Asian jokes, summed up the movement. He made a joke about a Black person carving a watermelon for Halloween.
He said of Latinos, “These Latinos, they love making babies too. There’s no pulling out, they don’t do that, they come inside, just like they did to our country.” He made an Islamophobic joke that doubled as a joke about Jews being cheap.
He said Travis Kelce, who is dating Taylor Swift, might be He called Puerto Rico “a floating island of garbage.” That one is resonating. There was even a report that Hinchcliffe , but that was struck by the Trump campaign.
Which, if true, implies everything else he said was approved, along with everything else at the rally. It’s a movement steeped in the sneering, frothing, right-wing trolling of internet message boards. The Elon Musk-funded America PAC ran that repeatedly called Harris “the C-word” before revealing the word it was actually referencing was ” .
” A close Trump adviser called for . On social media, Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez criticized the rally, and Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor-Greene , “Have a baby. Choose life this time.
You’ll be happier.” Taylor-Greene was referring to the fact that AOC has spoken before about having an abortion when she was 23 or 24, after she was raped. Some cruelty can still take your breath away.
It is simply vile. How unburdened do you want to be by any form of grace? Of all the ways Trump has corroded the public discourse in America and beyond, that is probably — almost hopefully, given the stakes if he wins again — his most wide-ranging legacy. It’s a huge, siloed, lonely movement whose greatest joy seems to be the unhappiness of others, which is why Trump’s immigration argument is more about deporting legal Haitian immigrants over imaginary stories than actual conversations.
And it’s all the more dispiriting because the polls are whisper-close, and some of the putative guardrails for truth or democracy are cowering before the prospect that Trump could win again. The Los Angeles Times killed an editorial endorsement of Harris on billionaire owner Patrick Soon-Shiong’s orders. The Washington Post did the same on orders from , who damaged trust in media .
As of Wednesday, , or a stunning 10 per cent of its subscriber base, while , between four and five per cent, both amid resignations and outraged staff. USA Today, with 200 papers in its stable, joined those papers over two separate markets that can’t be bridged. Meanwhile, Musk has clearly turned what used to be Twitter into a propaganda tool, and .
And at the core of all the lies is the rejection of decency that Trump embodies, and which his crew of vacant sycophants and vicious henchmen and remora-like hangers-on embrace. Harris’s closing argument evokes themes of , and Trump’s is dark and angry, and it’s more complicated than that, but it’s that simple, too. Above all, this election will determine the soul of America, or the absence of one.
.
