Trump cannot change, nor will he
“Are we in La La Land?” asks Colbert I. King in the Washington Post.
“He’s on our side,” Donald Trump told a rally crowd on Friday as police hauled off a supporter for attempting to assault reporters.
JOHNSTOWN, Pa. (AP) — A man at Donald Trump’s rally in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, stormed into the press area as the former president spoke Friday but was surrounded by police and sheriff’s deputies and was eventually subdued with a Taser.
The altercation came moments after Trump criticized major media outlets for what he said was unfavorable coverage and dismissed CNN as fawning for its interview Thursday with his Democratic rival Kamala Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz.
The man made it over a bicycle rack ringing the media area, and began climbing the back side of a riser where television reporters and cameras were stationed, according to a video of the incident posted to social media by a reporter for CBS News. People near him tried to pull him off the riser and were quickly joined by police officers.
The crowd cheered as a pack of police led the man away, prompting Trump to declare, “Is there anywhere that’s more fun to be than a Trump rally?”
Yes, at Harris-Walz victory party, numbnuts.
Clearly “on our side,” Trump said approvingly.
It’s a measure of the gangrenous rot Trump has spread across the country that even after the January 6 insurrection he fomented, after his attempts to overthrow the 2020 election, after the threats he’s inspired against election workers, after his repeated dishonoring of veterans, and after 34 felony convictions, Trump glibly keeps inspiring followers to violence and his cultish followers keep being inspired to act out on his behalf. It’s who he is. He will not change. He has no conscience. He never had a moral compass. Whether he has a soul is beyond my discernment.
King continues:
If I didn’t know better, I might conclude that the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, in which rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol to prevent the certification of the 2020 presidential election, was merely the act of exuberant “patriots” voicing their displeasure with Joe Biden’s victory — and that Donald Trump had nothing to do with it. What else to think, based on the media’s treatment of the twice-impeached former president and felon and his campaign to return to the White House?
Trump is being covered by the press as if Jan. 6 were old news.
A fifth grand jury indicted Trump this week in the stolen government documents case against Trump. Special counsel Jack Smith filed the charges even as a large fraction of addled people in this country seem torn between which party’s presidential ticket to choose in November. La La Land, indeed.
King goes on:
Imagine a president singling out his own vice president for the scorn of a bloodthirsty mob and sitting back as Secret Service agents scrambled to protect him and his family. Imagine a president receiving reports of members of Congress fleeing the Capitol for their lives and not immediately sending reinforcements to the Hill. Imagine a president leaving it to a D.C. mayor and her police force to rescue U.S. Capitol Police.
We don’t have to imagine it. We watched it. We’ve lived it. Trump’s voters don’t have to imagine it either. It’s what they voted for in 2016 and in 2020. It’s what people like the man arrested in Johnstown, and those convicted and jailed over Jan. 6, and those still awaiting trial and sentencing for it will vote for in 2024. All the while calling themselves American patriots.
We want our leaders to be inspiring. But this is not what we imagined getting.
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