The question answers itself
by Tom Sullivan
Interesting headline in the Washington Post:
Trump’s vulgarity: Overt racism or a president who says what many think?
Yes.
The Post’s team writes:
“With one word,” wrote the New Yorker’s Robin Wright, Trump “has demolished his ability to be taken seriously on the global stage.”
But did he, really? Is Trump’s latest comment a showstopper — or just another scene in a long-running production that wins audiences through pugnacious behavior, profane language and all manner of provocation?
“This is par for the course,” said former House speaker Newt Gingrich, a supporter of the president who is writing a book about Trump’s America. “Trump relies on the fact that his opponents are so nihilistic and elitist that they’ll react hysterically to something like this. And his base isn’t remotely corroded by this. Almost anything he does that is outside the establishment resonates in the end with people who say, well, at least he’s sticking it to the powerful.”
No doubt the powerful in Haiti, El Salvador and nihilist elitists across Africa feel properly stuck.
The author of “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control” is still following his own advice. “Nihilistic and elitist” is a non sequitur in that statement. What relationship those terms have to moral outrage at the president’s overt racism is unclear. But clarity was never the point for Gingrich, as his famous pamphlet demonstrated. Dominating one’s opponents by smearing them as reprobates is the goal.
With three wives and one or more affairs, Gingrich knows whereof he speaks. He must feel a special kinship with the sitting president. How nice the Washington Post felt the need to give him space to vent.
[Attending the first-annual Democratic Candidates Conference outside Washington for the next couple of days. May first-timers trying to learn the ropes. They will need your support.]
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