Donald Trump has cooties- and their bite spreads insanity
But as Congressman Tim Ryan, one of the more obscure of the myriad Democrats running for president, said on Fox News this morning, "The white supremacists think that Donald Trump is a white supremacist." And that in itself is a pretty damning indictment.
It's also, in a nutshell, why the guy must be not only repudiated at the polls next year, but repudiated so decisively as to discredit him and everything he stands for- not simply for the same of America as a whole, but for the sake of the Republican party and all those decent conservative people who are also not white supremacists but who cast themselves in that light by supporting him.
This is the thing Republicans and conservatives don't seem to get: by embracing Donald Trump, they are also embracing his baggage. More than that, they are not only giving credence to the oft-repeated lie that conservatives are racists and all other sorts of bigots simply by identifying themselves with a guy whom white supremacists can be convinced is one of them.
Make no mistake: if he can convince them of that, he has already convinced not only African-Americans and other minorities but the bulk of the American people. That is now the public personna of the Republican party: the party of white supremacy. It doesn't matter that it isn't true. It doesn't matter that it isn't fair. As the saying goes, when you lie down with dogs, you're going to get fleas. And when you allow yourself to be credibly associated with the Richard Spencers and his ilk, you're gonna get their cooties.
Republicans and conservatives generally don't seem to realize that. They don't seem to have grasped that by becoming Donald Trump's Republican party, they have acquiesced in the hijacking of their brand by the people who hijacked the Republican party in 2016: the alt-right, the racists, the conspiracy theorists, the people Hillary Clinton described notoriously but quite accurately as the "deplorables-" the marginal folks who came together in a year the Republican presidential field was divided among too many qualified candidates to build a plurality of somewhere between a quarter and a third of the Republican primary and caucus voters for a candidate who was not qualified, and who was wholly unrepresentative of the party as a whole.
Or was. At this point, the party as a whole has adopted his personna. The Republican party has been changed into something ugly which stains not just Donald Trump and the marginal types who made him the Republican nominee, but every conservative and Republican who has embraced him. And they don't seem to realize that the stain isn't going to wash off even after Donald Trump leaves office, whenever that is.
Their embrace of Donald Trump has granted a degree of credibility to the slanders of racism and plutocracy and elitism Democrats and liberals hurl and Republicans and conservatives every two years to a degree the right just doesn't seem to recognize, and from here on out will cause their protestations of innocence to fall on deaf ears. They have not only laid down with Donald Trump; they've embraced him. And now they, too, have his white supremacist and alt-right cooties, whether they want them or not and even whether they, personally, deserve them or not. And they won't go away for a long time.
But there is a flip side: after their embrace of Donald Trump, how much credibility will they, themselves, have left?
This article in The Atlantic is exactly right. Donald Trump has done permanent damage to the presidency, to the prestige of the United States, to the already fraught relationship between the races- and yes, to the Republican party and the cause of conservatism. The more rational Republicans simply try to ignore the man. But it's hard to do. He insists on loyalty and support. And it's very difficult to support the clownish utterances of a buffoon without turning into a buffoon yourself.
And if you are a political leader or a journalist or a member of any other profession which requires credibility when you do so, you do permanent damage to yourself and to your reputation.
Monarchs wear crowns; Mr. Trump is so fond of ridiculous conspiracy theories that perhaps he should wear a ceremonial tinfoil hat. This morning, POTUS retweeted a silly suggestion by a comedian, implying that the Clintons were involved in some sort of conspiracy to murder sex trafficker and all-around creep, Jeffrey Epstein, who committed suicide yesterday while in the custody of Mr. Trump's own Federal prison system.
By the way, Epstein was not on suicide watch when he committed suicide. Why he wasn't is a perfectly valid question, of course. The people who have the answer are accountable, not to Bill Clinton, but to Donald Trump. But Mr. Trump has never been one to let logic or facts stand in the way of a good conspiracy theory. Tinfoil hatters seldom are.
And the president is a tinfoil hatter of long-standing, embracing the absurd "birther" narrative that his predecessor, Barack Obama, was actually born in Kenya and standing his ground long after Mr. Obama produced documentation proving that he was born in the State of Hawaii. Not that there was ever any reason to doubt it, actually, But Donald Trump has never needed rational grounds for going off the deep end. He finds it by instinct.
Yes, Bill Clinton was an intimate of Jeffrey Epstein. But so was Donald Trump, and it wasn't Bill Clinton to whom the Federal prison system answered on the night that Jeffrey Epstein died. Nor is the incumbent president's administration free from other compromising involvement with the slimy prisoner who died on Donald Trump's watch, and not on Bill Clinton's.
This would be a good incident for Donald Trump to leave strictly alone. But the Mad Tweeter of Pennsylvania Avenue, whose finger is on the nuclear button and who has every secret our nation has, has never been one to hesitate before rushing in where angels fear to tread.
This president is a loose cannon, an erratic soul who is apt to say almost anything, however absurd or damaging, at any given moment. That in itself is reason enough why he ought not to hold the office he occupies, and why he is a danger to the well-being of the Republic every moment he occupies it. He holds up the entire nation to the ridicule of the world o a daily basis, and that's bad enough.
But the cooties are biting and infecting hitherto sane and reasonable people with whatever contagion our manchild of a president harbors in his bloodstream. Yes, the far-right kooks are picking up the president's silly insinuation.
And Lou Dobbs of Fox News really has far too little credibility left to squander on tweets like this:
A kind of libelous, evidence-free, baseless rumor-mongering that once was confined to the silliest, most extreme and most irresponsible corners of both the American right and the American left has been embraced and legitimized by the President of the United States, and people like D'Sousa and Dobbs- devoid of credibility as they have become as a result of being bitten by the alt-right cooties which infest a Commander-in-Chief so irresponsible that he never tires of embracing ridiculous, paranoid conspiracy theories without a shred of evidence or logic to recommend them- are spreading the contagion.
I'll be watching with great interest in the coming hours to see what conservative politicians and commentators disgrace themselves by joining in. Interest, but no pleasure. Whether they realize it or not, when they get involved in this sort of thing, they forfeit their credibility as political leaders and as journalists, and it's not going to come back because Donald Trump leaves the presidency.
When you support an irresponsible, loudmouthed, emotionally immature child-president, you sort of have to end up identifying yourself with his insanity. It's unavoidable. While it will be interesting to see who tries to avoid the absurd rhetoric and behavior that are symptoms of the bite of the Trump cootie when it comes to this Epstein nonsense, and how hard, the fact of the matter is that the politicians and journalists who have embraced Donald Trump cannot help getting bitten.
And it's not just that they've ruined their reputation by associating themselves with insanity. They, themselves, have been changed. To a greater or a lesser extent, they have become what they have embraced. They, themselves, have been diminished. By embracing the dog, they've acquired the fleas, and they have nobody but themselves to blame for the fact that they've been infected by paranoia and irresponsibility spread by their bite. And there will be no way for them to rescue their credibility and reputations thereafter.
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