“I never believed what liberals said about us all along”
by digby
“It’s like we can’t be shocked by Donald Trump because we know who he is. We know what’s in his DNA. But the way people react, turn the lens to those crowds after this horrific shooting, this tragedy,” Charlie Sykes said. “They’re talking CNN sucks, chanting lock her up. The moral test to the Republican party that they have failed over and over again, the president has been a man who has stoked our divisions, has stoked the fear and the hostility, has created this toxic stew. and we’re being reminded the number of people out there who take him both literally and seriously.
“So at one level you have people who are willing to rationalize and defend his behavior, but also you have the folks out there, the haters who draw oxygen from what this president has done, from the whistles that he has sent. That’s what makes this such a dangerous time. the fact is the president of the United States is the arsonist in chief.”
“Rick Wilson, I’m naive,” Scarborough said.
“I never believed what liberals said about us all along. I never believed there was this undercurrent in the Republican party of racism, nativism, anti-semitism. We spent our entire lives telling people it wasn’t true. I’ll be damned, I’m 55 years old. Bingo, they had us exactly right. They had the party exactly right. What are we to do now?”
“Joe, this is emblematic of the entire problem of the Republican party being bought out by Trumpism. It revealed a segment of our demographic, a part of our party we wanted to pretend was in the closet, we kept them in the basement and hosed them off once a year on Election Day, and unfortunately we now have to face the fact that that element feels empowered and emboldened,” Rick Wilson said.
“They read tweets like today — I’m sure that tweet sounded better in the original German –and they’re not taking it as some sort of joking Trumpism. They take it as marching orders. And maybe it’s only a tiny fraction, but it only takes a tiny fraction to march into a synagogue and kill 11 people. It only takes a tiny fraction to send out 14 bombs It’s not a dog whistle, it’s an air raid siren.
“But Rick, the problem is, 90% of Republicans support him. You have people chanting in the crowd. I would have never, ever, ever over five decades predicted this would happen. After people were targets of bombs, that you actually still have the president of the United States still attacking those people and people in the crowd more disturbingly chanting attacks at CNN and Hillary Clinton ‘lock her up!’ Where were they raised? Not in my neighborhood.”
“They were raised in the post-2010 era. They repeated over and over again conspiracy theories and stoked the sense of inferiority,” Wilson said.
“The victim complex, ‘I’m a victim, Hollywood doesn’t like me, the media doesn’t like me,’ but hold on, I own the Supreme Court, I own the United States House of Representatives, I own the United States Senate, I open the United States presidency, I own the Justice Department, I own the DHS, I own everything but i’m still a little snowflake who gets their feelings hurt when Hollywood does a movie I don’t like. Please explain that to me. They own the world and they’re still victims?” Scarborough said.
“This is a sign of how fundamentally weak Donald Trump is. The guy is a quivering blob of man-baby goo,” Wilson said. “He’s a tantrum-throwing infant all the time, He knows his base loves that sense of alienation. They love being reminded that certain people can read and they don’t read so good. And they love that sense of somebody who’s going to be their champion and stoke their anger and tell them all their resentments are justified. That’s part of what you and I fought against and Charlie fought against and Peggy fought against for so long, is the acknowledgment that there are people who want to have their fears stoked.”
“Donald Trump is an arsonist, as Charlie said, and in a whole spectrum of areas that we have to acknowledge that his unique social media power makes that arsonist incredibly dangerous for this country and this republic.”
From Susie at Crooks and Liars.
I don’t recall Peggy and Charlie warning anyone. I do remember Peggy arguing in the days when New Orleans was underwater after Katrina that looters should be shot though.