The Hypocritic Oath: Trump Campaign Can’t Stop Insulting Voter Intelligence
Well good. Thank you, Hillary Clinton, for using your high-profile perch as the Democratic nominee for President of the United States to share the nation’s worst-kept secret. The Trump campaign has been overrun by white supremacists. Excuse me, I mean the alt-right. Clinton spoke to a crowd in Reno, Nevada this week, declaring in part:
“From the start, Donald Trump has built his campaign on prejudice and paranoia. He’s taking hate groups mainstream and helping a radical fringe take over the Republican Party…This is what I want to make clear today: A man with a long history of racial discrimination, who traffics in dark conspiracy theories drawn from the pages of supermarket tabloids and the far reaches of the Internet, should never run our government or command our military.”
Yes, ma’am. Not only is Trump an outrageous purveyor of hate, he’s also a ginormous hypocrite. While spewing racist rhetoric from every corner of his campaign, he has the unmitigated gall to label Hillary Clinton a “bigot.” Just what kind of fools does Trump’s team take American voters to be?
Don’t answer before considering the other ridiculous attempts the worst candidate in history made this week to pull the wool over our collective eyes.
So Trump wants a special prosecutor to investigate the Clinton Foundation, does he? As NPR’s Scott Detrow reports, “The Clintons don’t directly profit from the foundation, despite Trump’s accusation. Neither Bill nor Hillary Clinton draws a salary from it, according to tax documents.”
Moreover, “The foundation also didn’t used to be so polarizing. Plenty of Republicans have spoken at the Clinton Global Initiative, including Mitt Romney just 42 days before the 2012 election.” Trump himself donated to the organization and former President George W. Bush has worked in close collaboration with it since leaving office in 2008. Why the eff are we talking about this non-controversy again? Oh right, Trump’s sinking poll numbers.
Another conspiracy theory from the Trump campaign worthy of a tin foil hat is that Hillary Clinton is medically unfit to be President. Former New York City Mayor and partisan hack Rudy Giuliani has really run with this one. We’re supposed to believe that a woman who traveled nearly 100,000 miles during her time as Secretary of State is too feeble to lead the nation? And here’s the specious argument in favor of this crap: “Go online and put down Hillary Clinton illness and take a look at the videos for yourself.”
Ah, how compelling sir. Yes the World Wide Web is famous for its general factual accuracy. As a wise and humorous colleague recently said, “There’s a reason you can’t cite Wikipedia pages or news sources that haven’t been vetted in a research paper. People can write anything they want on the Internet. I could start a page right now dedicated to the ‘fact’ that my farts smell like roses and no one could stop me.”
The fart argument is certainly more persuasive than anything coming from Team Trump. But no matter, they are actually demanding that Clinton release her medical records. The same charlatans that won’t release Trump’s tax returns, a national election convention that dates back to the 1970s. Ok. And as for the Donald’s own health, The Daily Beast nailed it with a piece entitled Trump’s Medical Report Is More Insane Than His Campaign Somehow. Writer Russel Saunders notes:
“Donald Trump’s doctor appears to be just as bombastic as he is.
It’s the only conclusion to be drawn from a hilariously bizarre letter that the mogul’s doctor—Harold Bornstein—wrote about his yuuuugely terrific health. And the letter raises as many questions as it answers.”
The insults this campaign heaps upon the basic intelligence of the American people are endless. I can’t even with his recent, last ditch pandering toward African American and Latino voters, so I’ll just let New York Times columnist Charles Blow say it with his essay, Why Blacks Loathe Trump. In short, “Trump has demonstrated through a lifetime of words and actions that he is no friend of the black community.” In a season of hyperbole, hubris and flat-out lies, this is a refreshing bit of understatement.
As the cynical, jaded and exhausted among us are well aware, the historical field of politics is littered with hypocrisy. Just to show I’m capable of bi-partisan heckling, allow me to quote from disgraced former Governor Eliot Spitzer back in 2007: “We must transform our government so that it is as ethical and wise as all of New York.”
Yet like so many other words and actions that have come from Donald Trump’s 2016 run, this shit is on another level. What a week.
