Donald Trump, Bull Connor with a spray tan, has turned the American electoral process into a bumfight.
His violence-stoking rhetoric is being condemned even by fellow GOP hopefuls, including the rudderless Marco Rubio. Of course, the Florida Senator simultaneously tried to lay blame for the Trump campaign fracases on the divisiveness of Barack Obama, when the President’s chief sin seems to be that he’s black. It was never Obama’s tan suit that outraged those on the right but his tan skin.
Watching Trump yesterday, sweaty and frightened, ducking from a protestor who charged the stage, reminds that he trolled the President relentlessly with his Birther garbage, charging him with the phantom crime of occupying the White House illegally, which could have easily incited some unstable person into a reckless act. Trump clearly didn’t care nor has he been worried about encouraging his supporters to inflict violence on peaceful protesters during his disgusting campaign. Shaun King of the NYDN was the first to point out that someone is going to get killed at one of the rallies, and now John Marshall of the Talking Points Memo has published similar sentiments. An excerpt:
Today we appear to be going further and further into uncharted territory. After the cancellation of Trump’s event yesterday in Chicago, we had the incident at the rally in Dayton, Ohio in which a protestor, Thomas Dimassimo, jumped the security perimeter surrounding Trump and tried to rush the speaking platform. Dimassimo was charged with disorderly conduct and inducing panic and later released on bail. At a subsequent event and on Twitter, Trump claimed that Dimassimo was tied to ISIS, apparently on the basis of a hoax video his staff found on Youtube. At yet another event this evening Trump called for the mass arrest of protestors, noting that arrest records would leave an “arrest mark” and “ruin the rest of their lives.” Trump also repeatedly blamed “communist” Bernie Sanders for what now appear to be the almost constant protests and disruptions at his rallies.
This evening at an event in Kansas City there were numerous protest interruptions inside the rally and a chaotic scene outside in which, according to a report on MSNBC, police used pepper spray on at least one group of protestors.
For all the talk about Mussolini, let alone Hitler, George Wallace is the best analog in the last century of American politics – the mix of class politics and racist incitement, the same sort of orchestrated ratcheting up of conflict between supporters and protestors. As all of this has unfolded over the course of the day there have been numerous instances of Trump supporters calling for protestors to “go back to Africa” and another on video calling on them to “go to fucking Auschwitz.”
Is the man invoking Nazi concentration camps in that video an anti-Semite or just a ramped hater in a frenzy of provocation? I’m not sure we know. And as I’ll argue in a moment, in a climate of incitement and crowd action, it doesn’t necessarily matter.
It may sound like hyperbole. But this is the kind of climate of agitation and violence where someone will end up getting severely injured or killed. I do not say that lightly.•