Trump fired up the loudspeakers well ahead of time Tuesday! Tuesday! Tuesday! Instead of a traditional victory speech, Trump promised he would fire back against Hillary Clinton with his own bare-knuckle, knuckle-dragging, knuckle-head response. So last night Trump flipped on the dreaded TelePrompter (that would be telepromter in Trumpland), and delivered his blistering rhetoric.
“Some people say I’m too much of a fighter,” Trump said. “My goal is always, again, to bring people together. But if I’m forced to fight for something I really care about, I will never back down and our country will never back down.”
Something he really cares about. Like the right to bring people together by dividing them along lines of race, religion, or gender.
“To all those Bernie Sanders supporters left out in the cold by a rigged system of superdelegates, we welcome you with open arms,” Trump said.
Everyone who was in the Sanders campaign only because you like to hate minorities and punch people, please exit stage right. No one? Okay then.
By any measure, this was definitely a more restrained Trump.
On Tuesday night, Donald Trump managed to make it a whole news cycle without insulting any ethnic groups or making any of his endorsers embarrassed to associate with him.
What’s really amazing is that this is actually news. But there’s a reason Trump was biting his orange tongue all night.
Trump’s Tuesday night was all about staying calm because Trump’s Tuesday was all about Republicans running from Trump.
The Republican Party devolved into chaos on Tuesday as its presumptive presidential nominee, celebrity entertainer Donald Trump, defended his overtly racist tirade against a federal judge of Mexican descent, endangering the GOP’s already shaky standing with minorities and marking the most tumultuous launch of a general election campaign in modern political history.
The Trump Problem went far beyond the top-tier Republicans and their inability to resolve the “why are you supporting a racist” issue. Trump’s realio, trulio very bad day went all the way down to the state level.
Further down the ballot, in yet another sign of the turmoil, an Iowa state senator became the first elected official to leave the GOP over Trump. He likened Trump’s rhetoric and candidacy to Adolf Hitler, citing his racist remarks and “judicial jihad” as the final straw.
The result was a Trump who followed his own predictions of what it means to be “presidential.” He was wooden. He occassionally worked his way carefully through a word with more than two syllables. His attacks on Clinton were limited to less energetic versions of the same charges he has leveled in the past. In short, he was completely defanged.
This morning, Trump is back on his Twitter feed. The straight jacket has been removed from his ego and it’s rampaging in all its insane glory against anyone who participated in condemning Trump’s racist tirades.
Just what is he watching now? Paint dry? The direct feed from Loompaland? Flies being de-winged by his own tiny fingers?
One thing he’s not watching: Donald Trump’s speech. Not only was it a snoozer, it was roundly ignored by the media.
Now there’s a Trump theme we could use more often.
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