Media coverage of Donald ‘Hitler’ Trump rife with hypocrisy.
The thing about the social media campaign to encourage the assassination of Donald Trump is this: if someone kills or disables him, it will probably work out. The Trump apparatus depends on having an established celebrity with Trump’s particular qualities at the centre; without him to serve as the focus, there is nothing.
George Wallace’s 1972 candidacy, interrupted by gunfire from a schizoid loner, was much the same kind of thing. When Wallace was shot, there was a moment of dread for those in elite political circles; what were the assassin’s motives? Was he tied to some political group or foreign country? No need for worry. Arthur Bremer, now cashing Social Security cheques as a ( conditionally) free man, turned out to be a garden- variety loony who had stalked president Richard Nixon before opting for easier game.
The pressure was off. No one asked who would replace Wallace; conveniently, he was left alive but unable to travel and orate. The issues and tensions he had thrust to the forefront of the news dwindled. There was to be no complicated, ugly reprise of 1968.
The Pim Fortuyn movement in the Netherlands was dissipated by the same means. Fortuyn, like Trump, was a charismatic, politically unclassifiable celebrity who liked raising awkward nationhood issues. He was gunned down by a left- wing zany in the midst of a national election. The killer testified that he shot Fortuyn — a stylish, witty, gay sociologist — to protect Muslims and to prevent the rise of a Dutch Hitler.
He acknowledged the irrationality of the act, even its wrongness. But someone had to do something. And, again, it worked: if Fortuyn was Hitler, his killer certainly stopped Hitler. Fortuyn’s political party dissipated hastily without its leader, leaving no legacy — just an example.
I spoke above of a “campaign” to make Trump vulnerable to assassination. Of course there is nothing of the kind, just an ecosystem operating according to its own logic. Presumably few writers and talking heads intend to encourage physical harm to Trump. They merely intend to push him beyond the social pale — to make him the latest nouveau Hitler, lest they be caught unawares and blamed later. It is a matter of pride for us self-styled custodians of liberal democracy to overreact. And it’s good copy.
The pattern begins with endless twisting of comments that are, in all justice, none too articulate to begin with. When Trump accuses the Mexican government of using Mariel boat-lift tactics to pawn incorrigible criminals off onto the U. S., commentators forget that anything of this nature has ever actually happened; Trump’s words, after a few news cycles, are boiled down to “Mexicans are rapists.”
When Trump says, accurately, that disruptive antics at his rallies would at one time have got protesters “carried out on a stretcher,” or he sighs that he’d “like to punch” a gyrating heckler “in the face,” he is said to be summoning dark forces of atavistic violence. ( The clue to brooding psychopathic loners is clear.)
After dozens of rallies, which must have been attended by at least 100,000 people, the proof of Trump’s lust for gore amounts to one sucker- punch by a Trump supporter, and one female reporter’s bruised arm, suffered in an incident of postspeech jostling that 100 camera- phones unluckily failed to document. The original fascists were more effective than this at beer- hall affrays, and, like them, Trump is popular with veterans. It is hard to explain why Hitler XXVI, given many months, cannot muster as much work for an emergency room as does a weekend rave on a hot dance floor.
No one feels the need to explain. Instead we all but taunt the news consumer: Trump is unleashing, effectively perpetrating, inchoate violence. He is inviting terrible, unpredictable consequences. We columnists are allowed to issue these warnings. But when Trump observes, in much the same spirit, that the people disrupting his rallies seem to belong to the clientele of Bernie Sanders, and he warns that maybe voters who dislike socialism can learn the trick of disrupting political rallies too — well, it is just another fascist thug threat. If interrupting political speech is a valid form of protest, then Trump’s “threat” must itself be valid; surely the “sauce for the goose” principle applies.
But sauce is out of fashion in America just now. Only disaffected anarchist youths under 25 are quasi- officially licensed to beset political rallies and scream down speakers. ( On Wednesday Trump mused on hypothetical “riots” at the Republican convention, and this provoked a whole new round of the screaming- meemies, because rioting has never, ever before been a tactical presence in clean, beautiful American politics.)
The media’s application of an untenable double standard reached a peak on Saturday when a male “protester,” Thomas Dimassimo, 22, broke through a cordon at a Trump rally in Dayton, Ohio, and raced toward the candidate, getting tackled by the Secret Service. It goes without saying that if Dimassimo had tried this at a Hillary Clinton rally, the Secret Service would have given him some new piercings to show off to his buddies. And if this sort of thing becomes at all typical, female participation in American politics by anyone smaller and less mean than Hope Solo is over.
But the characterization of this incident as a physical attack on Trump is meeting with resistance, even scorn. Perhaps the young chap who tussled with the feds like Jadeveon Clowney trying to pulverize a quarterback just wanted equal time? The implication is that perhaps the Secret Service should have let him pass through and have his say — an implication not discouraged by CNN, who gave Dimassimo airtime to explain his assault. He wanted to “stand up against Donald Trump and against this new wave he’s ushering in of truly just violent white supremacist ideas.”
Even someone this stupid is careful about raising the emotional temperature by tiny gradations. Trump has not actually articulated a philosophy of “violent white supremacy” — he’s “ushering in a wave.” What a Trumpian touch! One imagines a little fellow in a movie theatre with a flashlight.
We can cancel this movie now, the idea goes, if we resist Trump with just the right increment of hooliganism: we’ll rush the podium, we’ ll intimidate him into cancelling his rallies, we’re not responsible for what follows. If someone on either side goes too far, the press and the broadcast media, which released themselves from any duty of fairness to Donald Trump ages ago, will know which way to point the accusing finger. Not at themselves, to be sure: fingers don’t work that way.
IF ANYTHING HORRIBLE HAPPENS TO TRUMP, WILL THE MEDIA ADMIT THEIR ROLE IN
‘USHERING IN THE WAVE’?