I thought I had heard it all but I’d never heard this before today. It’s from 2015:
As JV Last pointed out in the Bulwark a couple of days ago, this is what Trump means when he says he “negotiates.”
Trump simply demands what he wants, over and over, in different venues, and offers nothing in return except that if you give him what he wants, he’ll let you have peace. For a time.
It’s the tactic of a spoiled child. Which is what he is. And he has another spoiled bully-boy tactic that works for him very well: “I know you are but what am I.” It’s a maddening form of gas lighting that he’s deployed forever but uses pretty adroitly in his political life, mainly because the media just throws up its hands and retreats to “both sides” coverage because it’s easier.
But here’s Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan in the NY Times today actually talking about this tactic:
[A]dvisers say he believes the court appearances dramatize what is fast becoming a central theme of his campaign: that President Biden — who is describing the likely Republican nominee as a peril to the country — is the true threat to American democracy.
Mr. Trump’s claim is the most outlandish and baseless version of a tactic he has used throughout his life in business and politics. Whenever he is accused of something — no matter what that something is — he responds by accusing his opponent of that exact thing. The idea is less to argue that Mr. Trump is clean than to suggest that everyone else is dirty.
It is an impulse more than a strategy. But in Mr. Trump’s campaigns, that impulse has sometimes aligned with his political interests. By this way of thinking, the more cynical voters become, the more likely they are to throw their hands in the air, declare, “They’re all the same” and start comparing the two candidates on issues the campaign sees as favorable to Mr. Trump, like the economy and immigration.
His flattening moral relativism has undergirded his approach to nearly every facet of American public life, including democracy.
[…]
Now, Mr. Trump is repurposing his favored tool to neutralize what many see as his worst offense in public life and greatest political vulnerability in the 2024 campaign: his efforts, after he lost the 2020 election, to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power and remain in office.
Now he’s doing “I know you are but what am I” on Biden:
And his campaign apparatus has kicked into gear along with him, as he baselessly claims Mr. Biden is stage-managing the investigations and legal action against him. Mr. Trump’s advisers have coined a slogan: “Biden Against Democracy.” The acronym: BAD.
Steve Bannon, Mr. Trump’s former chief strategist, said he thought his onetime client was on to something. Mr. Trump is now fighting Mr. Biden over an issue that many Republican consultants and elected officials had hoped he would avoid. They had good reason, given that candidates promoting election denial and conspiracy theories about the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol cost their party winnable races in the 2022 midterm elections.
Mr. Bannon sees it differently.
“If you can fight Biden almost to a draw on this, which I think you can, it’s over,” Mr. Bannon said in an interview, referring to the imperiling of American democracy. “He’s got nothing else he can pitch. This is his main thing.”
Mr. Bannon added, “If Biden wants to fight there, about democracy and all this kind of ephemeral stuff, Trump will go there in a second.”
It does make some MAGA sense in that Trump has been saying the electoral system is rigged since 2016, even after he won. That’s just taken as a given by Republicans. In fact, “voter fraud” has been a rallying cry for decades, long before Trump came along. Just last night Nikki Haley fatuously proclaimed that all ballots should be counted and the election decided onj election night, which is one of the stupidest ideas Trump has ever had.
So now, he’s saying that it’s Biden who’s attacking democracy. But he’s emphasizing the alleged “weaponization” of the Justice Department against him, which is not something that most Americans are buying into. Unfortunately, the “democracy” thing has worked to some extent, at least up until now:
Voter attitudes related to Mr. Biden have shifted as Mr. Trump has tried to suggest that efforts to hold Mr. Trump accountable for his actions are a threat to democracy. In an October 2022 New York Times/Siena College poll, among voters who said democracy was under threat, 45 percent saw Mr. Trump as a major threat to democracy, compared with 38 percent who said the same about Mr. Biden. The gap was even wider among independent voters, who were 14 percentage points more likely to see Mr. Trump as such a threat.
But Mr. Trump’s rhetoric seems to have already altered public opinion, even before the campaign deployed his new slogan. In another more recent survey, 57 percent of Americans said Mr. Trump’s re-election would pose a threat to democracy, and 53 percent said the same of Mr. Biden, according to an August 2023 poll by the Public Religion Research Institute. Among independent voters, nearly identical shares thought either candidate would be a threat to democracy.
The repetition that Mr. Trump has used consistently in his public speeches is a core part of his approach.
“If people think he’s inconsistent on message, he ain’t inconsistent on this message,” Mr. Bannon said of Mr. Trump’s effort to brand Mr. Biden as the real threat to democracy. “Go back and just look at how he pounds it. Wash, rinse, repeat. Wash, rinse, repeat. It’s very powerful.”
Obama adviser David Axelrod told the Times that once the people see Trump in and out of courtrooms facing justice for his crimes, people will feel differently. I hope he’s right. I will say that unless the mainstream media stops this high minded refusal to allow their audience to see how nuts he is, I’m not sure anyone will really understand the depth of his depravity.