Trump the moderate
by digby
I’m hearing disturbing rumblings coming from people who should know better saying that Trump is a socially moderate populist who might be able to shake things up in Washington in a way that wouldn’t be so bad. He’ll put tariffs on Chinese goods! He said something nice about Planned Parenthood! He once said he was for single payer health care! Why he’s practically Bernie Sanders.
Not really. If anyone is deluding themselves that his “moderate” position that we should only outlaw abortion but let Planned Parenthood do pap smears is the reason his followers like him they need to reassess. There is no doubt that he’s appealing to a lot of people and he probably hasn’t hit his ceiling yet. But it’s in spite of his populist-liberalish apostasies not because of them.
Last night in Oklahoma, he was confronted by a cheeky protester who was wearing a t-shirt that said “endorsed by the KKK” (which is true!) He stalked around the stage like the wrestling villain he has played in the WWE, and then walked over to him and stared then flicked his wrist as if her were Emperor Caligula instructing security to take him out. The audience roared, and chanted USA, USA, USA!
Then he came back to the podium and talked about the good old days:
In the good old days, law enforcement acted a lot quicker than this. In the good old days they’d rip him out of that seat so fast … But today, everybody’s politically correct. This country is going to hell with being politically correct. Going to hell.
You know, it is a shame when you think … when you see things like that …we had somebody the other day, punching, swinging, people want to take it nice and easy, they don’t want to do anything. They want to take them out, when he’s walking out he’s waving to everybody, smiling, the place is booing. In all fairness I love the police, I think they’re the greatest. But they’re afraid to move. They want to keep their jobs, they don’t want to lose their pensions and I understand. We are really becoming a frightened country and I think it’s very sad. Remember what I said.
You know during the debate, the last one, we were asked a question about waterboarding and they asked Senator Ted Cruz ,and he didn’t want to get involved with the question, he was sort of a basket case. He didn’t want to get involved with it, didn’t want to talk about it,and then they looked at me because he didn’t know exactly… and I didn’t even blame him. But then they looked over at me … oh we have another one folks, … two people, two people. (boos)
So they talked about water boarding. We have in the middle east people who cut off your head. We have people who are cutting of heads of Christians and lots of others. Right? We have people that are drowning other people in cages. They’re drowning them in heavy steel cages. And what do we do? They’re asking Ted about waterboard. And he doesn’t want to .. and then they come to me. “What do you think about waterboarding? ” meaning “isn’t it terrible?” I said, “I think it’s just fine, I think it’s just fine.” [Huge roar from the crowd] And frankly, if you want to go a step above or two or three steps above that’s ok too, and I said that.
And you know, I didn’t vet that with the political experts, I just said it. Got a standing ovation.
Our country is starving for doing the right thing.
Note how his mind works. In the good old days the police could crack some heads. Now they’re too scared because of political correctness. We’ve becoming a frightened country afraid to “do the right thing” — like torture people.
He flows very smoothly from police “taking care” of protesters to waterboarding in one long stream of consciousness rant. What do you suppose that means? And what do you suppose it means that his audience cheers wildly for it?
This is what they love about him, don’t kid yourself. They don’t know from “deals” with Mexico, they just thing they’ve been screwed and they think this guy will kick some foreigners’ asses, inside this country and out. (And his paeans to police indicate that they wouldn’t mind if he kicked some darker hued American asses either.) He’s articulating their rage at all those people — and promising to act on it.
When has Trump said he’d go after Wall Street? He promises to get rid of all environmental laws the way the hated Chinese do. (They come up with the idea and then start digging the next day! No environmental impact statements!) This is a guy who said that wages were going to have to go down. (He’s since said he wants them to go up, but his first utterances are usually the real ones …) On who’s behalf is he arguing? Workers? Citizens? No, I’m going to guess it’s corporations and business.
You can watch the passage starting at about 58:30 in this video: