Before using this as evidence that Donald Trump's presidential campaign is completely unhinged (though it is, of course), let's take a moment to remember that this particular brand of contrafactual hokum is a staple of the current Republican Party, period, and that any of its various practitioners from the aggressively stupid Louie Gohmert to the professionally paranoid Ted Cruz to that most dignified practitioner of bullshit-as-high-art, Mitch McConnell—any of them could have sent the identical fundraising letter with the identical sweaty language and it would have barely rated more than the usual raised eyebrow.
Yes, we’re talking about Donald Trump's fundraising email in which he asks voters for a $5, $10, $20, or $50 donation to "INDICT HILLARY CLINTON."
[O]n November 8th, the American people will finally have the chance to do what the authorities have been too afraid to do over these last 2 decades: INDICT HILLARY CLINTON AND FIND HER GUILTY OF ALL CHARGES.
Finally, a truly Republican approach to our criminal justice system: indictments via Kickstarter. Don't like the music your neighbor plays on weekends? Just raise money to have them jailed, we’ll worry about the reason later. Did the management team of your friendly neighborhood chemical plant redirect a pipe and turn your town's only water reservoir into a shallow mire of unidentifiable orange slurry? Whoops, it doesn't look like we've raised enough funds to indict anyone for that one. Next time you might consider using more bold underlined capital letters. Fund-worthy indictments usually contain lots of bold, underlined capital letters.
Alas, in the snippets of the email that are neither bold or underlined nor IN ALL CAPS a dutiful reader will learn that the indictment we're speaking of is only a metaphorical indictment at the ballot box. Or, more specifically, into the nearest Republican wallet. Underneath the red-bordered
CHIP IN $5 TO INDICT
there are breathless mentions of Whitewater, and Monica Lewinsky, and of course Benghazi!, but since nobody will be indicting Hillary Clinton for any of those words regardless of how much money is raised, the net effect is that you can click a bright red button to pretend anyone involved, from you to Donald Trump to whichever Republican backroom functionary scribbled up this particular ode de froth, gives a sincere damn about any of it.
Again, though: Is fundraising off a sketchily worded implication that you will "INDICT HILLARY CLINTON" a uniquely Donald Trump thing? Not even close. This may be the most Republican email he's ever sent, and is probably a result of the "professional" Republicans now scuttling into his campaign to bring the usual Republican faux-outrages and Fox-cribbed conspiracy theories to a campaign whose previous winning message never rose above "Trump good, everyone else stupid."
The poor sap who actually wrote this for the Trump campaign probably had originally written it for the Ben Carson, or Mike Huckabee, or Ted Cruz, or Marco Rubio campaigns before all those tanked and he needed to get a new job on Team Trump. Luckily for that person, Conservative Outrage Gibberish is universal and interchangeable. Swap out the logo, swap out the candidate name, and done. In each and every campaign, it really is all just the same crap.