Medal of Freedom winner Rush Limbaugh went full gay-basher yesterday:
They are sitting there and looking at Mayor Pete. 37-year-old gay guy, Mayor of South Bend. Loves to kiss his husband on the debate stage. And they are saying, okay, how is this going to look? 37-year-old gay guy kissing his husband on stage next to Mr. Man, Donald Trump. What’s going to happen there?
And they got to be looking at that, and they’ve got to be saying, that despite all the great progress and despite all the great wokeness and despite all the great ground that’s been covered, America still not ready to elect a gay guy kissing his husband on the debate stage president. They have to be saying this, don’t they?
Now, there may be some Democrats who think that is the ticket. There may be some Democrats who think that’s exactly what we need to do, Rush. Get a gay guy kissing his husband on stage, to ram it down Trump’s throat and beat him in the general election. Really. Having fun envisioning that.
As Karoli Kuns at Crooks and Liars points out, “this is all part and parcel of the Manly Men mantra that is the steel holding together Trump’s campaign.” This is true. Republicans have done that for decades now. That’s why they call the Democrats “the Mommy party.” I have probably written a hundred thousand words on that over the years.
But Trump is on a whole other level. Under him, the party is not a band of manly warriors fighting side by said to save the nation from the barbarians at the gate. It’s about him and him alone.
I was reminded of something I wrote just about four years ago:
A blond-tufted silverback gorilla
Published by digby on February 26, 2016
Poor Marco Rubio. He still doesn’t know what he’s up against. I wrote about it for Salon today:
Marco Rubio, the putative runner-up for the Republican nomination, told the press yesterday that he would not win the race by being mean. When the “Today” show’s Willie Geist asked him why he still didn’t need to attack Donald Trump, he said, “That is a media narrative… I’m not in this race to attack anyone… I didn’t run for office to tear up other Republicans.”
He’s such a nice young man, isn’t he? So well-mannered. But you have to wonder just what race he thinks he’s running in because whether he likes it or not he’s about to be deluged with a flood of toxic insults which may leave him permanently scarred. As a headline at The Week put it: “Donald Trump is about to do terrible things to Marco Rubio.”
That article was written by Paul Waldman, who astutely observed: As bullies go, Donald Trump is unusually skilled. When Trump decides to go after you, he considers carefully both your weak points and the audience for his attack. So when he decided to pummel Jeb Bush — apparently for his own amusement, as much as out of any real political concerns — he hit upon the idea that Bush was “low energy,” something Bush had a hard time countering without sounding like a whiny grade-schooler saying, “Am not!”
More than anything else it was a dominance display, a way of showing voters he could push Jeb around and there was nothing Jeb could do about it. With a primary electorate primed by years of watching their candidates fetishize manliness and aggression, the attack touched a nerve. Donald Trump may be the best bully American politics has ever seen. He’s a blond-tufted silverback gorilla who’s laid waste to each rival, one by one.
He’s still got Cruz and Rubio circling warily but his blood is up and he’s ready to dispatch them both. Over the course of the last few weeks, he’s whittled away at Cruz’s reputation (with Rubio’s wide-eyed assistance) and managed to turn him into the mentally unstable ghost of Lee Atwater. Now it’s Rubio’s turn. And poor Rubio doesn’t seem to be aware of what’s about to hit him.
t’s not easy to defend against Trump. As Waldman points out, Trump throws a bunch of insults at the wall to see what will stick. Once he finds what works, and he’s very good at recognizing a person’s weak points, he never lets up. Rubio is going to find that being the “nice guy” is unlikely to shield him from the onslaught.
How did this happen? Trump is a circus clown, a WWE sideshow of a candidate who has no idea about policy and apparently no knowledge of how the U.S. Government actually functions. He seems to think the president’s job is to order police agencies and the leaders of foreign countries to do his bidding. He apparently believes the job is Emperor of the World. So, perhaps it’s understandable that none of his rivals or the rest of the Party thought he could possibly last. He would step on his own tongue one too many times and that would be that.
However, it’s been obvious for some months now that this guy was the definition of a Teflon Don. And that’s because whenever he insults someone, whether it’s war hero John McCain or Fox news anchor Megyn Kelly even the Pope, it’s all about that “display of dominance.” (On one of the cable networks they asked Nevada Trump voters about the pope dust-up and one of them simply said, “The pope started it” which is exactly how a schoolyard bully’s posse would respond.)
The piece went on to quote various aghast Republican consultant types who were begging them the take off the gloves against Trump and fight fire with fire.
I think we’ve learned that doesn’t really work any better, haven’t we? Republican voters and their elected officials are immune to insults toward Donald Trump. And they love it when he does it to others.
But I think the observation of the dynamic remains correct. Everything he does is a dominance play, like a big gorilla roaring and pounding his chest to scare off any competition. It works with his band of timorous Republicans very well. Democrats seem impotent to do anything about it. It works.
We will have to see if enough voters are impressed with this behavior to eke out another victory next November.