TRUMP USES RAGE TOWARD MEDIA, CONSTITUTION
It’s official. Donald Trump says he’s looking at rewriting the U.S. Constitution — with an executive order.
He would start — and, yes, don’t kid yourself, it would be just a start — with an order to end the right to U.S. citizenship for children born in the United States to non-citizens.
Here’s what the Constitution says now: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
It’s another ploy; another raging dog whistle, like his order to deploy 5,200 U.S. troops along our Southern border just in time for photo opportunities before midterm elections — but still long before a maybe equal number of Central American migrants on foot can reach the Rio Grande. It’s another of our sad president’s “look-over-here” efforts to rile conservatives into fearing anyone and anything that’s remotely dark or foreign.
Never mind those 15 or so home-made pipe bombs from a Trump-supporting domestic terrorist sent to Democratic politicians and media that Trump regularly vilifies. The first of those bombs was sent to billionaire Democratic donor George Soros, whom the fever swamp falsely suggested had funded the migrant caravan.
Never mind the horrifying attack on a Pittsburgh synagogue by a middle-aged man who believed that Jews were behind the caravan of migrants Trump keeps hyping as an existential threat to American safety.
Those attacks were, as The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake put it Tuesday, interfering with Trump’s campaign message of choice: immigration and the “invasion” of the migrant caravan. Trump bemoaned the fact that it was taking the focus away from politics when Republicans were supposedly ascendant.
“Republicans are doing so well in early voting, and at the polls, and now this “Bomb” stuff happens and the momentum greatly slows — news not talking politics. Very unfortunate, what is going on. Republicans, go out and vote!” Trump tweeted.
Thus, he keeps working to manufacture a border crisis. He has talked about declaring a national security emergency “to completely close down the southern border” to Central American asylum seekers fleeing poverty and gang violence.
The idea that the migrant “caravan” represents an emergency for the U.S. is ridiculous, of course.
Mexican authorities indicate that the caravan, which is still more than 900 miles away from our border, has dramatically dwindled in size, and is made up mostly of destitute families who are traveling with children and living off of food supplied by people along the way.
Trump, in turn, has tweeted, with no proof, that: “Criminals and unknown Middle Easterners are mixed in.”
What? Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and his gang of journalist-killing “rogues” are there?
Speaking of journalists, Trump also has taken his war on the media up a notch with White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders holding the first news briefing in about a month. She ended the briefing with this message:
“You guys [media] have a huge responsibility to play in the divisive nature of this country, when 90 percent of the coverage of everything this president does is negative, despite the fact that the country is doing extremely well, despite the fact that the president is delivering on exactly what he said he was going to do if elected. And he got elected by an overwhelming majority of 63 million Americans who came out and supported him, and wanted to see his policies enacted.”
Vox termed it the “perfect” statement:
“It combined an outrageously timed attack on the media with a complaint that Trump just can’t get fair coverage and wrapped it in the kind of easily proven lie the press can’t resist covering (far from being elected by an ‘overwhelming majority,’ Trump lost the popular vote).”
Trump needs an enemy, and he dubs it “the media.” Legendary journalist Bob Woodward of Watergate fame recalled later Monday with CNN’s Jake Tapper that when Trump was still a candidate in 2016 he told Woodward: “I do bring rage out. I really do.”
Tapper asked if Woodward thought Trump purposely manifests the rage, channels it and incites it among supporters.
“Well, he says so,” Woodward responded, noting that he suggested to Trump that he had to “tame” that. But Trump said, ‘Oh no. I bring it out.’ And then, astonishingly, he said, ‘I don’t know if that’s an asset or a liability.’”
That has played out, Woodward notes. Trump goes to rallies, dials up the rage designed to raise his listeners’ boiling point, and then blames the media.
The spectacle rightly worries Woodward: “The idea that a political candidate, or a president, would enjoy that, like it, think it’s possible that it’s an asset? To summarize: We’re being had. … He’s doing things to distract us from the policy decisions that’s he’s gambling on.”
Is that dangerous for our country? Of course it is. As Woodward says, “we have to look at what he does in plain sight and lets not kid ourselves. He’s stoking the fires, and that serves his political purposes. … His approach is ‘let’s use rage.’ Of course it’s dangerous.”