Trump’s MO is to savage the front runner until they are mortally wounded. Once they are out, he turns to the next front runner. One by one, he picks off the competition. It worked like a charm in the GOP primaries. He doesn’t get to vote in ours.
Trump is a one trick pony. He does what works and keeps doing it. Truth has no meaning to him. He will smear anyone with any innuendo, belittle with schoolyard taunts and keep throwing dirt until it seems like something sticks. We have seen how this works with Biden. To this day, even if he wasn’t a walking gaffe machine, Biden would be fielding questions about Hunter and paying the price for a whispering campaign of conspiracies that have been totally and repeatedly debunked.
Now that Biden is clearly out of the lead, Trump is turning his sights on Sanders. If you are not a Sanders supporter AND naive enough to think your candidate is going to benefit from this, you’re kidding yourself. If you think you can sit on your hands and let them duke it out so your candidate can swoop in and pick up the pieces, you are not paying attention. When Trump’s forces are done with Sanders, your candidate will be next.
The operating philosophy here should not be a variation on Harry Truman’s “bloodletting” strategy:
"If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible."
--Harry Truman (June 24, 1941)
The operating philosophy here should be a variation on the insight revealed in Martin Niemöller’s famous confession:
First they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me
— Martin Niemöller
Right now, Sanders is the target. The link is to a Trump front organization. The smear is Bernie is a commie. Going to the USSR and saying things like “The problem with capitalism is it’s made in Hong Kong” is hardly revolutionary. But let the Mighty Wurlitzer run this a few times and you can imagine how this will start to have an impact.
Fact is Bernie was there not just for a honeymoon. He was also, as mayor of Burlington, promoting the Sister Cities program he was a part of. This program has been around since the 1950s. Today it has over 12,000 member cities. Here is a list of the hundreds of US cities that participate. Burlington still participates. In addition to the relationship with the Russian city of Yaroslavl, Burlington has Sister City relationships with cities in Israel, Japan, Nicaragua, Palestine, and Poland. If your city is on the list, you need to share that with folks when this talking point surfaces.
The latest smear campaign has an interesting origin story.
Travis Justin, a Navy veteran and leader of “Draft Beto 2020,” a group that is urging Texas representative Beto O’Rourke to seek presidential election, apparently first posted the video to Twitter.
Beto needs to stand up and disavow this ratfucking bullshit. Not because Beto is involved, but because the ratfucker is using Beto by proxy. This newly hatched coordinated campaign needs to be smothered in its cradle.
“Recently discovered footage from 1988 reveals a shirtless Bernie Sanders with his wife, Jane, on their honeymoon in the USSR, drunkenly singing ‘This Land Is Your Land’ with a group of presumed Soviets,” Justin captioned the clip, which was surfaced by another Sanders detractor on Twitter.
It’s more than ironic that the song they want to focus on is not some Soviet-era anthem, but a classic American folk song written by Woody Guthrie, the same guy who wrote a song about Fred Trump, exposing him as a racist piece of shit. The apple really doesn’t fall far from the tree, color me shocked.
Whether you support Sanders or not, every Democrat has to be crystal clear that this sort of shit won’t work. On any candidate. Trump has enough dirty laundry and penthouses full of skeletons that need to be exposed constantly and repeatedly. Answering his bullshit as if it had merit only validates his tactic. That is the road to ruin. Ask Jeb.