I think we can stop wondering about Trump's temperament.
If Trump's latest isn't an automatic disqualification for the Office of the President, if this isn't enough to make him a pariah in the party he now owns, how much farther down can he go? The only useful thing about this is that anyone who still openly remains a Trump supporter tells you all you need to know about them.
Donald Trump is the end of a long, dark road. What Trump says openly now rests on a foundation the Republican party has been building for decades. It has been engaging in dog-whistle politics, the dark art of using coded language to appeal to the darker side of America, the Southern Strategy. The late Lee Atwater explained how it works.
...how Republicans can win the vote of racists without sounding racist themselves:
You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”
It’s all about using language to say that which can not be said openly (at least, it couldn’t once upon a time) — but is heard and understood by its intended audience. Honest debate is bypassed; agendas can be hidden in plain sight. Newt Gingrich took it farther by making language into a key mechanism of control.
As you know, one of the key points in the GOPAC tapes is that "language matters." In the video "We are a Majority," Language is listed as a key mechanism of control used by a majority party, along with Agenda, Rules, Attitude and Learning. As the tapes have been used in training sessions across the country and mailed to candidates we have heard a plaintive plea: "I wish I could speak like Newt."
…These words can help give extra power to your message. In addition, these words help develop the positive side of the contrast you should create with your opponent, giving your community something to vote for!
...Often we search hard for words to define our opponents. Sometimes we are hesitant to use contrast. Remember that creating a difference helps you. These are powerful words that can create a clear and easily understood contrast. Apply these to the opponent, their record, proposals and their party.
See the list of words at the link — and then reflect on how often you hear them from Republicans, FOX News, etc. If you’re wondering why the country seems so divided, one big factor is the way Americans no longer share a common political language, why people have a hard time sorting out the differences between the two parties, why they use the same words — but hear different things.
But, all of these word games have come with a price. The Republican Party has become post-policy. They’ve spent so much time constructing their own language, they can no longer use it to describe the real world — only the world of their fever dreams. Making language into a mechanism of control makes it less and less useful as a means of communication. Obfuscation becomes a reflex; comprehension difficult.
In this, they have been aided and abetted by a media that has deliberately blurred the differences between the two parties, with false equivalence, he said-she said reporting, and so on. Only now are they having problems with what they’ve been enabling for years. Trump is finally a bridge too far for them. But then, the news media hasn’t been about informing people for a long time; it’s become a form of entertainment where it was once supposed to provide enlightenment.
Donald Trump cuts through the surface of things to the rotten core underneath it — because he can’t be bothered to keep up the pretense, His ego can’t deal with the concept that there are things even he can’t say without consequences. There’s a lot of people out there who are tired of talking around what they believe, what they want — and they were ready for Trump when he came right out with it with no apologies.
And now Trump has come out with remarks that are hard to see as anything except a call to violence against a President Clinton and/or the Judges she would nominate. It’s not that far a step from his campaign all along. He’s talked tough at his rallies, complained that protesters needed to get taught a lesson, threatened ethnic groups, religions, nations... He’s complained the election has already been stolen. If there’s a line he hasn’t crossed, it’s hard to imagine what it might be.
And the pavement on this road to Hell has been laid down in polished stone by the GOP. If they don’t like where they are today, well it was a road no one forced them to walk. They enjoyed the power and wealth they found along the way; now the bill is coming due and they’re looking around hoping someone else will pick up the check.
Monty Python has a sketch showing what happens when one person is dog-whistling at someone who doesn’t have the code to understand it. It’s amusing in this context, not so much when it’s about choosing our next president.
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