I want to take you back a couple of years. An NFL running back named Ray Rice was accused of hitting his then-fiance in an elevator of an Atlantic City casino. The first reports called it a minor incident in which both people “hit each other with their hands.” Later, additional information emerged. There wasn’t a video yet, but reports suggested that Rice had “knocked out” his fiance. There was a little more outrage, but at that point the biggest question centered on whether the NFL would suspend Rice.
Then came the video. Grainy as it was, you could see Rice pop his fiance like a boxer. You could see her fall, hitting her head along the way. It was a nasty, authentic look at the imagery of “Strong Athlete Knocks Out Woman.” And the outrage poured from the mountaintops in a way it hadn’t before. Suddenly, there came protests and calls for Rice’s job. He should be jailed, fired, kept from playing in the NFL ever again.
Of course I didn’t care for what Ray Rice did. But I had another observation.
What did you expect the video to look like?
I was perplexed that it took the video to bring the onslaught of attention. I’ve been around a bit. I’ve seen people get hit by really strong dudes. I’ve seen people get “knocked out,” that little colloquialism to describe what happens when you brain wraps so hard against your skull that you lose consciousness for a bit. I knew it was violent. Little slap fights don’t cause that sort of damage. I wanted a genuine answer to why the video changed anything, and why the outrage didn’t flow before the video? The video was precisely the sort of video I expected to see given that I’d been told a 230-pound NFL running back had knocked his girlfriend unconscious. In fact, I almost expected it to look worse. I’ve yet to see a knockout video that’s anything other than brutally, unequivocally violent to such a level that I feel some aversion to watching it.
There’s an easy answer to why it took the video, even though the video just confirmed what we should have already known. That is, when you finally see the truth without filter, your conscious mind finally processes the horror. My incredulity with the response was misplaced. Seeing the trainwreck is more visceral than reading about it. Even if you know what happened anyway.
What Donald Trump’s been doing with the Republican primary is a lot like that Ray Rice video. He’s revealing their positions for what they are, cutting through the dog-whistles and empty rhetoric that’s been carefully cultivated over decades, and boxing in the Republican Party in a way it hasn’t been boxed in quite some time.
For decades, the Republican Party has depended upon a careful communications calculus. Its political survival has depended on the ability to stir poor white resentment without being nasty enough to lose the votes of “nice,” wealthy whites who would much prefer to quietly benefit from systemic racism while not being associated with something openly bigoted.
On almost every issue that matters, Republicans have developed clever messaging to serve these goals. If you’re Rick Santorum, and you come out talking about problems with “blah-ck” people in inner cities, you’re exiled. You can’t give away the game, Rick. You have to be Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, discussing “the culture of dependency” in our “inner cities.” The blithering racists deep in their holes get the message. They know you’re on their team. Meanwhile, the “nice” Republicans get to feel like they’re not supporting the re-fighting of the Civil War.
It goes on and on with other issues, as moderate and radical Republicans alike have learned to sound the dog whistles on Muslims, on immigration, on the economy, on healthcare, and pretty much everything else. And it’s worked. It truly has.
That’s why they don’t like Donald Trump. If you read enough, you’ll come across a handful of opinions that go, “Well, look at this! Republicans and Democrats alike are united in trying to stop Trump!” And it’s true. But those opinions assume that the Republican Party has had some sort of moral renaissance in which they don’t want an anti-immigrant, fearmongering racist leading the party. It’s simply not true. Their chief complaints about Trump have come from two areas—that he’s not reliably conservative, and that he’s bad for perception. Put in layman’s terms, “We believe Ted Cruz is more likely than Donald Trump to do all of the things Donald Trump has been yelling about, and at any rate, to do it with more undercover savvy.”
When Donald Trump talked about abortion this week, he didn’t misstep. And surely, he probably has not been briefed on the modern Republican messaging on this issue as he should have been prior to this interview. But he wasn’t wrong.
Something is illegal only if there’s a sanction for doing that thing. And the modern Republican position on abortion posits that the fetus is due the rights of human beings. In no rational world would a person be able to collude with a doctor to kill a human being and then walk away from that with no criminal sanction. The entire notion is absurd. And the Republican middle ground on this reveals the deep contradiction.
Nowhere in the discussion on crime will you ever hear a Republican discuss giving a person a pass on illegal activity because “they are in a desperate situation.” In fact, if you accepted that people should be excused from crime because they were desperate, you’ll see the conviction rate drop by 90-percent or more. Public defenders know that the average person accused of drug possession, drug dealing, burglary, and other forms of crime are often desperate. They’re often boxed into an economic corner. They get no passes. In fact, they get the snarls of conservatives who chide them for believing that a tough circumstance gives them the right to break the law.
It underscores the absurdity of declaring a fetus a human being and then excusing murder because of just how hard life was on the pregnant mother. But Republicans have to take this position, because punishing women who have abortions sounds really bad to the public. Which is really an easier way of saying that the natural consequence of the pro-life position is so revolting to the public that the Republican Party has packaged its core existential social issue in less than honest terms. Again, giving just information to serve as red meat for the followers they need, while not giving enough information to push away the moderates that they must trick if they want to win presidential elections.
Trump’s a gift in some ways. He’s prompted us to think about and discuss the actual implications of the Republican pro-life position. Think, for a moment, about what would actually happen in a world where abortion was illegal. Every single pregnancy that did not come to term would be occasion for a police investigation. Imagine a world in which women who’ve had miscarriages are forced to answer questions of police officers who are investigating the incident as they’d investigate finding a dead body in a warehouse. That’s what it means for abortion to be illegal.
And it is the criminal justice system, so it will inevitably get a few of those investigations wrong. Imagine what a wrongful conviction looks like under this law. Think about the headlines from 2036: Innocence Project of New York Proud to Announce Exoneration of Woman Who Actually Just Had a Miscarriage. That’s a real, actual consequence of the Republican position that a fetus is a human life with human rights. I don’t want to live in that country, in that world. Neither do most Americans.
We can thank Donald Trump for being the Ray Rice video of this election cycle. He’s revealed with remarkable clarity that when Republicans say “we hate PC culture,” what they’re really saying is, “We liked it better when we could deride immutable groups without consequence.” And he’s shone a light on policies that were just as revolting when they weren’t under this intense scrutiny. It’s just easier to notice when someone like Trump rips from Republicans the coded language that’s long allowed them to tow an uneasy coalition between open bigots and bigots who’d never admit to hanging out with open bigots.