So, yesterday the Supreme Court holds a session to decide whether Trump can be a Presidential candidate because maybe he led an insurrection back on January 6th, and meanwhile Trump lets loose a verbal barrage about how Nancy Pelosi was leading the insurrection that day.
This is a guy, I’m talking about Trump, who has absolutely no ‘rachmones’ (read: shame) at all.
Not only does Trump shoot his mouth off every chance he gets, but he’s not afraid to say things that no other politician is willing to say in public, with the exception of a couple of other members of his MAGA clique like Elise Stefanik or Marjorie Taylor Greene.
You would think that female politicians would be a little bit worried about lining up behind Trump after a New York jury found him guilty of sexually assaulting a woman in the changing room of a department store, notwithstanding his so-called ‘locker room talk’ with Billy Bush which came out back in 2016.
So, Bush gets fired but Trump gets elected President. Figure that one, okay?
What seems to be overlooked by the Fake News is the fact that Trump has managed, all by his lonesome, to create an entirely new style of public discourse, which not only helped get him elected President but is now SOP for the way that many politicians talk.
Remember when Barack Obama almost saw his primary campaign collapse in 2008 because he made that comment about the people in the back woods who cling to their ‘religion and guns?’ Or how about what happened to the Romney Presidential campaign after his comment about people ‘taking’ rather than ‘giving’ began to make the rounds?
But the best example of how there used to be things you could say and things you couldn’t say until Trump came along was what happened to George Allen, the Virginia Senator, whose re-election campaign collapsed after he called some kid ‘macaca’ who was wearing a turban at one of Allen’s public campaign stops.
That incident, which not only threw Allen off his attempt to return to the Senate but also foreclosed any thoughts he had about running for President later on, happened less than nine years before Trump announced his first run for President by injecting racism and anti-immigrant rhetoric into his political campaign.
And not only did Trump get away with such insidious and incendiary language in the public domain, but his style is now being copied by other Presidential wannabees who believe their true role as so-called public servants is to be as loud and offensive in public as they can be.
If the definition of insurrection means that you attempt to prevent the government from carrying out its lawful procedures, couldn’t I be charged with a violation of the 14th Amendment when I cheat on how much I claim for business deductions when I pay my income tax? After all, by shortchanging the U. S Treasury on the amount of money the feds collect, I’m preventing the government from conducting some of its lawful business, correct?
The difference, of course, between what I just said about paying my taxes and what Trump said about the poor guy in California whom Trump referred to as ‘my African American’ is that I can’t get up and blurt out such racist remarks to an adoring public because other than my wife and my three kids and their children, nobody knows who I am.
But maybe next time around I’ll stand in front of Stop & Shop collecting enough signatures to get my name on the ballot and then lay out the ten grand or so to buy lawn signs for my first political campaign. Then I can go out there and say whatever offensive or racist comments pop out of my mouth because thanks to Trump, every politician will now be judged based primarily on the stupidity and hatefulness of their public remarks.