Christopher MacNeil schools Donald Trump on his terms.
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The Washington Post in an Aug. 10 article accurately framed Donald Trump’s ideology of political campaigning with refreshing simplicity. He incites “outrage,” makes headlines and then seeks refuge in a defense of last resort – denial.
Pretty much the modus operandi that Trump used to get out from under the avalanche of disdain for his assertion that the sitting president and his former secretary of state – who happens to be Trump’s election rival – were “founders of ISIS.” Cornered and unable to invoke his usual blanket denial in the face of irrefutable evidence, Trump went a step farther and criticized critics apparently for not understanding sarcasm.
It is doubtful that Trump himself knows what sarcasm is much less understands it. Sarcasm is not ignorance, and potential voters may be wondering if Trump is as ignorant of world and domestic politics that many critics even in his own party have said, or if he simply expects people to accept everything he says as fact.
It is also doubtful that Trump understands or even knows what has become accepted fact fairly recently about the evolution of ISIS – from contained Iraqi rebel group to Mideast and now European terrorist cell. In 2003, with Republican President George W. Bush in charge, the United States led a multinational invasion of Iraq to unseat its president, Saddam Hussein, and uncover weapons of mass destruction.
The problem with the latter is that there were no WMD’s and the so-called intelligence on which their existence was based was fatally flawed. In the ensuring war that Bush declared, nearly 4,500 U.S. soldiers had been killed as of November 2014. The number of Iraqi casualties, military and civilian, is believed to be more than a half million, many of them victims of an Iraqi insurgency in 2011 that set off civil war.
The problem with the invasion itself is that it and the removal of Hussein destabilized the region sufficiently that it loosened ISIS from the short leash Hussein kept on it and its rebel activities to come back as a stronger group but with terrorist tactics. ISIS has since expanded its terror network beyond the Mideast into Europe and now is fighting efforts to prevent it from going global.
Another product of the Iraqi war has been the crisis of Islamic refugees fleeing the violence and displacement in their homeland. They are among the same people Trump and other conservatives want to prevent from entering the United States and deporting those who already have arrived. It is both offensive and hypocritical that ineffective and failed Republican leadership helped to create the very people whom Republicans now want to turn away.
Trump retreated first into total denial of his ISIS remark before settling for being sarcastic after his running mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, tried to shame the media for turning the matter into a story. But amid that controversy, some observers noted an emerging and disquieting pattern, namely that Trump’s statements seem to be more threatening and dangerous.
His previous major gaffe before his ISIS comment was the notorious “2nd Amendment’ remark in a speech at a rally in Florida. There Trump, addressing the potential of a liberal Supreme Court if Mrs. Clinton is elected, alluded to her assassination to be carried out by “2nd Amendment people.” In the ensuing fallout, Trump denied that he suggested someone shoot Mrs. Clinton, but his denial seems to have been wholly ignored. Denunciation of Trump’s remark was widespread with perhaps the most influential coming from two members of the Kennedy family and daughter of Martin Luther King Jr. Each wrote that the “2nd Amendment” comment alone is enough to deem Trump unfit for the presidency.
Before that one, however, Trump again ignited outrage with his statement that Russian cyber hackers ought to hand over his opponent’s missing emails if they had them. Spun by the media as an invitation by Trump to Russia to hack U.S. government security networks, the Trump campaign defended its candidate by stressing the “if” in the statement, or not the same as planting the idea of breaking into national security systems.
One of Trump’s many problems is that he clearly does not understand the power of the spoken word and that what some people hear is not always what is intended. More likely, however, Trump is either shrewd enough to know and understand exactly what he wants to be heard, or he is communication-challenged and unable to say what he means.
Either way, his fitness to be president has to be seriously and heavily weighted. Diplomatic or trade negotiations with a foreign leader, especially an antagonistic one, could turn tragic and even deadly consequents if a president says something he cannot later deny or uses “sarcasm’ in talks.
There are certainly other factors to weigh in deciding the country’s next chief executive. Many of those, however, have been stacking against Trump since even before the primary season. From the refusal even high-ranking Republicans to endorse Trump, former administration and cabinet officials have come forth to warn against a Trump administration. And, as recently as early August, 70 Republicans planned to sign a letter to the RNC suggesting that party funds be cut off to the Trump campaign and redirected to House and Senate candidates. The implication is clear: some Republicans have written off the White House as a lost cause and fear the very real possibility they could lose majority control of both chambers of the Congress.
Perhaps more telling is that countless election polls have become less contradictory and have a common finding, namely that Trump is sinking rapidly and his opportunities to regain lost ground on Mrs. Clinton are dwindling. For him, the news is especially ominous in pivotal swing states that Republicans deem must-win: in no fewer than four battleground states, Mrs. Clinton has opened leads of between 4 and 13 percentage points.
Media coverage of the Trump campaign may also hint at what to expect from editorial endorsements. With unprecedented timing and a sense of urgency, Houston’s Chronicle newspaper came out on the last day of the Democratic National Convention with its endorsement of Mrs. Clinton while warning against a Trump administration. Other major city newspapers are unlikely to endorse Trump based on their reporting of Trump’s campaign.
Trump may be holding onto a desperate but slim hope that voters have short memories when they cast their ballots. Indeed, the Washington Post recently published a graph that shows how quickly any of Trump’s major news uproars fades from the headlines – usually within four days, the Post found.
But headlines do not and cannot measure human memory. There is clear evidence of that in a Bloomberg pool in early August of more than 1,000 “likely” voters. One question asked which of Trump’s many public displays of offensiveness was most offensive, if any. Fully 83 percent of respondents cited and found Trump’s mimicking of a physically disabled New York Times reporter to be his most offensive and cruelest of public outrages. That incident occurred last November.
If that statistic can be fairly interpreted to indicate that American voters include moral decency in their decisions – which Mr. Trump clearly lacks – the Republican hopeful may well find himself buried in one of history’s most lop-sided presidential election.
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Picture: Flickr/Gage Skidmore