“Proud Boys, stand back and stand by. But I’ll tell you what, somebody’s got to do something about antifa and the left.”
It could have been worse.
He could have said there were “very fine people” in the right-wing group that calls itself the Proud Boys.
Yes, it could have been worse.
But not much.
I generally don’t watch or listen to news these days. I get what I need from reading, and I don’t have to get the sick feeling in my stomach that I do when I hear Donald Trump’s voice.
Why do I get a sick feeling? Well, I’m old and thus more susceptible to stuff like that, but there’s more to it. I can remember presidents all the way back to Dwight Eisenhower, and until recently we never had a president who I though was both evil and un-American.
No, not even Nixon.
We have had exactly one president in nearly 2 1/2 centuries who never had a job in government or in the military. I suppose I always realized it could happen, but I figured if it did, it would probably be a religious figure who had a large following to get him started.
Instead we got Trump, who for most of the ’80s and ’90s was a sort of clown prince of the rich, whose greatest joy was appearing on Page Six of the New York Post with some starlet saying Donnie was great in bed. He had more than 3,000 lawsuits filed against him for cheating people he hired, and he declared bankruptcy at least four times.
Then everything changed in 2004.
Mark Burnett, the godfather of reality television, came to Trump with an idea for what would become “The Apprentice.” Not only was it a hit show, it also created the image of Donald Trump as a wildly successful businessman. Within a few years, he was getting into right-wing politics in the form of conspiracy theories.
There has always been a racist undertone in Trump’s life, His father Fred was involved with the Ku Klux Klan in 1927, and in later years, he and Donald were charged with racial discrimination in renting out their residential properties.
And the main thing that brought Donald to political prominence was his embrace of the racist “birther” movement that insisted President Obama was not born in this country. The most bizarre part of it all was that birthers totally ignored the one fact that completely destroyed their argument — the birth announcement in the Honolulu newspapers at the time of Obama’s birth in 1961. To believe that was somehow faked means believing that somehow, someone was able to time-travel back to 1961 and plant that announcement.
Oh, well. I think it was Paul Simon who said “a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.”
More than anything, the rise of Trump shows the incredible power of television to shape our national consensus. My brilliant wife, who has two doctoral degrees and is one of the top people in the world in her discipline, started watching “The Apprentice” back when it first came on.
She wasn’t familiar with Trump at the time, and she became very impressed with him as a businessman.
Of course, the more she learned about him, the less impressed she was.
Television has changed our society in so many ways, but one of the worst is what it has done to our attention span. It’s shocking to watch a tape of the first presidential debate ever, the first debate in 1960 between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon. Compare the civility level from that debate to what we saw the other night and it looks like two different planets.
I was stunned to realize that each candidate had eight uninterrupted minutes for his opening statement.
Eight minutes.
If Joe Biden or Trump spoke for eight uninterrupted minutes, half the audience would have switched over to “America’s Funniest Farts” before they were done.
Note: America’s Funniest Farts is not a real TV show – yet.
In 1960, Nixon and Kennedy made the point that they both agreed for the most part and that their only disagreement was on what methods should used to get there.
Both candidates had held public office since 1947, and both were seen as young men. Nixon was 47 and Kennedy 43. It was still a country basically ruled by old men. President Eisenhower was 70 at the end of his eight years in office.
If either of the two 1960 debaters had done half the things Trump did Tuesday night, they would have left the stage in a strait jacket and would never have been heard from again.
Our standards have gotten so much lower that the only way Trump’s supporters might have deserted him is if he dropped trou and deposited a great steaming heap of feces on the stage or if he barbecued and ate a small child.
As for the Proud Boys, it may be a misnomer to call them white supremacists. They do have members who aren’t white. But it probably wouldn’t be far wrong to call the neo-Nazis. As for the president’s statement, we’ve heard many times now that “stand back and stand by” is hardly a repudiation.
Be that as it may, “somebody’s got to do something about antifa and the left” negates everything else.
Maybe the nicest thing I can say about Richard Nixon … or Ronald Reagan … or George W. Bush … is that I cannot imagine any of them doing that.
If we tolerate this kind of talk from Trump, we have met the enemy and it is us.