It may be hard to believe this, but I was a card-carrying Republican in high school and early college days. My first vote was for Bob Dole(!). So in early 1998, as the Lewinsky affair came to light, a buddy (who shall remain nameless) and I decided to have some purile fun with the whole thing.
So we grabbed a few poster boards at Hechinger, a Sharpie, and made some provocative (if uncouth) signs. One of mine said, "Honk if you like Cigars." I think his said, "Pick a cuter intern." We parked ourselves in front of the White House on E Street, and solicited repeated honks from passersby. We may also have been simultaneously sipping Pepsi and vodka, as the brilliant 20-year-olds that we were.
It turned out that the National Right-to-Life march was taking place a few blocks away, so we decided to crash the party with our tasteless messages. Amazingly, we were high-fived as heroes by people carrying crucifixes and pictures of aborted fetuses. If selfies were a thing then, we'd have taken a ton with those folks.
On our way home, we walked up Penn. Ave. carrying our signs, getting more honks from various drivers, as well as many chuckles. Out of the window of a Ford Bronco at a stoplight came a loud, "Hell yes, boys!" The raspy voice sounded vaguely familiar. It was "B-1" Bob Dornan--a Republican Congressman who occasionally subbed for Rush Limbaugh. B-1 Bob even signed my poster, "G.B.U. Boys, Bob." He explained that it meant "God Bless You Boys," because we were doing a great service for America.
And that's the lesson. Even nearly two decades ago, these sort of tasteless messages were considered acceptable among Clinton haters. We were just a couple college kids getting ripped and having some idiotic fun. But many of the people cheering us weren't. They were serious. They were willing to embrace that sort of unacceptable message if it meant denigrating political opponents.
In contrast to the 90’s and even 00’s, Trump’s campaign has simply given the green light to this sort of attack by the candidate’s own voice. At least Dubya himself never called John Kerry a brie-eating, yellow-bellied, un-patriotic Socialist in public, though some of his surrogates did. Now, the very candidate himself is calling his opponents “Lyin’,” “Crooked,” “Corrupt,” the “founders of ISIS,” and calling for the “Second Amendment people” to take matters into their own hands. These are all the sorts of things that have been said in private by many of his supporters. But these messages take on a whole new legitimacy when the candidate actively promotes them.
It's okay to make jokes about political figures, poking fun at their hand size, fashion choices, email habits, etc. But when you conflate that with real factual political discourse, you're walking a dangerous road. That's the road we've been on for some time now. We're merely getting further down that path than we'd like to admit.