For those who may have missed it, the new Priorities USA ad against Republican presidential nominee and dedicated lifelong cretin, Donald Trump, pulls no punches. It uses footage of Trump mocking the gestures of a disabled reporter on the campaign trail, paired with commentary from the parents of a disabled child about how that's a real sack-o’-crap move, even for the campaign trail's resident crap sack.
The spot is another sign that Democrats think they can render Trump unacceptably toxic before a general election audience by relentlessly spotlighting his profound cruelty — as displayed by Trump himself. This strain runs through much of the evolving Democratic critique of Trump and, more broadly, of Trumpism.
Well, yes. Yes it does. But it’s worth questioning the premise that "Democrats think," or the supposition that this is a backroom strategy that those of us who do not like Donald Trump have all somehow settled upon. Instead, maybe this is a “come to Jesus” moment for anyone in America who is not personally a rancid crap-sack. Flailing your arms around in an attempt to portray "disabled" is Not Goddamn Presidential. This is not even something that morning radio shock jocks can get away with without repercussions—is there some argument to be had, then, that it is not yet another in a series of actions which ought to disqualify someone for the nation's presidency?
This is a genuine question. We've got a man up at the podium who says a judge hearing cases against him ought not to because "he's a Mexican." He's proposed everything from a mass deportation program to a muzzling of critical press to a moratorium on anyone who belongs to one of the world's major religions entering the country—whether they be American or not. And he stands up in front of his admirers and twitches his arms around because a disabled reporter on the campaign trail asked a question Donald Trump didn't like, and that's all it took for Donald Trump, America's most self-promoting crap sack, to make him a target.
Any one of those sociopathies might reasonably disqualify someone from the presidency. We have taken to almost completely ignoring the bits about snipping pieces out of the Constitution, or the casual mention of committing atrocities—but the more personalized attacks from Trump against his victims of the moment still manage to repulse. The personal vendetta against a judge for having the audacity to rule against him is turned into a one-man proxy for Trump's open racism against every other American of Latino descent. His twitching impression of what a disabled person might look like is a proxy for his open contempt for the non-Aryan ideal.
You must be "beautiful," in Donald Trump's eyes and speeches and pageants, or you are worth nothing. If you are not wealthy, it is because you are stupid. If you are not powerful, it is because you do not deserve to be. When he points to the one black American in his crowd of seething white faces and demands everyone else look at him too, it is to validate Donald Trump and nothing else. When he mutters that supporters who have attacked fellow Americans are showing their “passion” for his cause, it is because that “passion” for his cause is the only notable detail of each violent incident.
We keep waiting for that at long last moment to come in this campaign, and it keeps coming and then going again as Trump's new peers, the senators and congressmen and campaign funders and chafing pundits tasked with either defending him or doing something, anything else, look inside themselves and find that a general sense of decency is in short supply. They mutter. They distance. Then, a few sentences later, they confirm their endorsement.
But that's not sufficient reason for supposing that the rest of America needs to be equally indecent, just to maintain the cultivated faux-balance that keeps the gears of cable television oiled and turning. We are, out here in the hinterlands, still allowed to be horrified by the man flailing his arms to make fun of a disabled man. It doesn't have to be considered a Democratic plot to make people outraged—any decent person will react as such on their own, because it is fundamentally indecent to elect a dishonorable man our leader. Or at least it used to be, back when we were dismissing radio shock-jocks and county commissioners and everyday run of the mill Burger King employees for doing the same.
At long last, punditry and press. At long last, Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell and anyone else who sought office claiming to be, if not the best of America, at least something a little above an itchy rash of a human. At long last, we cannot debase our entire nation in a hacked political attempt to make this worst man fit in as if there was absolutely nothing wrong with any of it. There has got to be a limit here. Surely, at long last, there has got to be a lower bound.