in a piece at the Washington Post’s Plumline Blog titled Donald Trump just summed up his entire despicable campaign in 30 seconds (and I thank my spouse Leaves on the Current for pointing out this piece to me).
Here’s one part, which summarizes what happened yesterday:
Almost everything Trump is about and what he represents could be seen in his brief statement and what led up to it. To put it simply:
* He skillfully manipulated the media to maximize attention to himself.
* He told an obvious, indisputable lie about Hillary Clinton.
* He falsely took credit for something he didn’t do.
* He tried to evade responsibility for his successful efforts to foment and exploit racism.
And all in 30 seconds. It’s hard to imagine a more succinct summary of the Trump campaign than that.
Before going on, I want to provide some context to the notion of the impact of 30 seconds. One of the most psychologically important military actions of World War II was Jimmy Doolittle’s early bombing raid on Tokyo and a few other places in April of 1942. It demonstrated to the Japanese that they were not immune from American attacks, even at the peak of their power and the maximum expanse of their control. There was a book, and a movie, about that raid, both titled Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo. Thirty seconds can be a lifetime, half a minute can represent something that absolutely crystalizes what is otherwise still vague and unclear. This half minute was so blunt, and in the overall context of the event yesterday and what we have seen of the press’s reaction, this may be a crucial if however brief moment in this campaign season.
There are two somewhat longish paragraphs that I think are the heart of the piece:
We can’t mince words about this. Trump’s entire birther effort was racist in its intent and racist in its execution. He didn’t keep pounding this myth because he’s so stupid he actually believed there was some question about where Obama was born. He didn’t have his doubts raised by the investigators he claimed to have sent to Hawaii to ferret out the truth — indeed, there’s no evidence he actually ever sent anyone there, even though he said, “They cannot believe what they are finding.” He didn’t have doubts about Obama’s birthplace when he expressed them in 2011, or 2012, or 2013, or 2014, or 2015, or 2016. He kept up the birtherism all this time because he saw that he could use racism to his advantage.
If you’re wondering why Trump gets zero percent in some polls among African American voters, this is the reason. The entire birther crusade, but particularly Trump’s leading part in it, isn’t just about Barack Obama in particular. It’s an unfathomably cruel and dispiriting message to send to African Americans. It says to them, no matter how smart and hard-working you are, no matter how much you achieve, no matter how carefully you make yourself unthreatening to the white majority, no matter how deftly you manage to move through the most elite institutions in America and dazzle everyone with your talents, you will still not be accepted as a genuine citizen of this country. You could become president of the United States and they will literally demand to see your papers, and even when you give in to this vile demand they will still deny that you are American.
Waldman concludes by reminding us again how long Trump has peddling his garbage, and is blunt is saying Trump is now trying to lie his way out of it. There is that word again in the media: lie
He concludes with a question, that seems to be increasingly on the minds of many journalists, not just those on the left, which I will quote by putting into bold
What does it say about us if he succeeds?
I would suggest that the “us” is not merely the American people, but the media which has enabled this by how they have covered this campaign.