T
Harold
Meyerson
Let’s
face it: Trump is looking progressively weirder as the campaign drags on. Up
until now, his affect has been more Mussolini than anyone else: upraised chin
(so as to obscure any senior sag), sneering mouth, increasingly rigid facial
and body motion. But last night, as he stalked around the stage, his face a
scowling rectangle, his hair a horizontal blob, his motions stiff, his sense of
direction shaky, his form looming suddenly and menacingly over the shorter
Clinton—he bore a distinct resemblance to Karloff’s monster.
Would
the monstrosities were only visual. In vowing to prosecute and jail Hillary
Clinton should he win, Trump’s assault on the way that democracies conduct
their business plumbed new depths. It was also, however, just the latest
iteration of the right’s nearly 25-year habit of criminalizing Democrats for
the crime of winning elections. The frantic and well-funded search for some
scandal to bring down Bill Clinton after he had the temerity to be elected
president went on for years until the right finally impeached him for getting a
blowjob in the Oval Office. The public’s response was to hand congressional
Republicans a resounding defeat in the 1998 elections and to boost Clinton’s
polling to an all-time high.
Confronted
with the even greater gall that Barack Obama exhibited by being elected
president while black, the right in general and Trump in particular peddled the
story that he’d actually been born in Kenya. And now that Hillary Clinton
appears to be just a month away from her own presidential victory, Trump is
falling back on the stories of Bill’s sexual predations (and this time around,
Hillary’s not readily apparent role in them) that the right’s handpicked
special prosecutor, Kenneth Starr, believed so insubstantial he refused to
include them in his 1998 bill of particulars. He still brings up Benghazi, even
though eight Republican congressional investigations found nothing to suggest
any Hillary misconduct, and her emails, even though the FBI also found nothing
to suggest anything remotely criminal.
And just to make sure the right wouldn’t waver at a moment when
his campaign is falling apart, Trump provided the topper last night:
Threatening Clinton with jail should he win.
And
just to make sure the right wouldn’t waver at a moment when his campaign is
falling apart, Trump provided the topper last night: Threatening Clinton with
jail should he win. For what, exactly, she’d be prosecuted, convicted, and
thrown in the clink, Trump failed to specify, nor did he need to: This is just
what the deplorables—the term, while imprecise, is not inaccurate—who get their
news from Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Breitbart and their ilk,
needed to hear to pledge their fealty, yet again, to the Donald.
Did
this, or anything else Trump said, convince any swing voters to swing his way
after last night’s debate? There’s no evidence that it did. By leveling
over-the-top attacks that only resonate if viewers subscribe to Breitbart’s
fictitious reality, Trump wasn’t even really attempting to persuade the
undecideds. Rather, he was sounding a mating call to the yahoos who constituted
a large enough slice of Republican ranks to win him the nomination, and who
constitute a large enough slice of Republican ranks to give second thoughts to
any more GOP elected officials who are contemplating un-endorsing Trump, as so
many did over the weekend. But as for actually persuading voters more anchored
in reality than the Breitbartians to come his way—didn’t happen.
Then there’s all that onstage
stalking and lurking. After the airing of the pussy-grabbing tape, the image of
a Frankensteinian hulk looming over Clinton doesn’t seem likely to assure women
voters, on a subliminal level and some not-so-subliminal, that Trump is a safe
guy to be around—much less a safe guy to vest with state power. Besides, not
even the Monster went after his political enemies.
The American Prospect.
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