To walk something back is a recent expression to the
American lexicon which refers to the quibbling and prevaricating political
candidates or elected officials do to show that they didn’t really mean to make
a controversial remark that has sunk them into deep doo-doo.
Supporters of Donald Trump will need a “Million Man March”
effort to walk back his explicit suggestion that some identified group of gun
owners attempt to assassinate a President Hillary Clinton as a means to prevent
her appointing Supreme Court justices who would support the 90% of all
Americans who want to toughen gun control laws.
I know readers have seen and heard his exact words a number
of times, but they really do capture everything that is dangerous about the
Donald, so here goes: “If she gets to
pick her judges, nothing you can do folks. Although the Second Amendment
people, maybe there is, I don’t know…”
There can be no doubt what he is taking about—assassinating
Hillary Clinton. The explanation he and his factotums are giving for this vile
statement is that Trump is referring to the collective activity of voting, but,
clearly his statement refers to a time after Clinton has assumed the
presidency. Judging from the reaction by the news media and both Democrats and
Republicans, this walk back was a complete and utter failure.
Assassinating the winner of an election is an American
tradition, but we usually do it in foreign countries. Many of the same
hardliners who approved or would have approved of our complicity in disposing
of the elected leaders of Iran, Chile, South Viet Nam and elsewhere are now
scared out of their minds that a major political candidate in the United States
has floated the notion that the assassination of his opponent might be
acceptable.
Trump’s intemperate comments mark the second time since the
end of the major party conventions that he has tried to throw into question the
legitimacy of the American political process.
Days earlier he started suggesting that the fall elections could be
rigged. He didn’t explain how or why, but in his distorted world in which he is
the Sun King, the only way he could possible lose anything would be through
nefarious means. Just as after his assassination call, after Trump cast shadows
on the honesty of the electoral process, a large number of prominent people distanced
themselves from his remarks. Many wrote or said rigging a national election
wasn’t possible, since the fifty states control the ballots.
There have been at least three rigged elections in my
lifetime, all engineered by Republicans: 1) Nixon got the South Vietnamese to
agree not to start peace negotiations until after the 1968 elections, depriving
Humphrey of the foreign affairs victory he needed to win the election; 2)
Reagan got the Iranians to postpone releasing the American hostages until after
the election in return for Reagan supplying Iran with advanced weaponry; 3)
Illegal purging of voter rolls in Florida gave the 2000 election to George W.
Bush. The first two are examples of
rigging by influence, as opposed to our more common understanding of rigging as
involving the actual manipulation of votes.
While accusing others of rigging, Trump tried to do it
himself. When Trump called on Russia to hack the Democratic National Committee
offices and reveal any unsavory emails, he was really asking that a foreign
power intervene and help him rig an election.
Historically, however, most rigging has come before an
election through denial of the ballot or making it harder for certain groups to
vote. The dozens of new voter law to pass in Republican-dominated states over
the past six years collectively have one purpose: to prevent minorities, the
poor and the young from voting and thereby swing the election to Republicans. Thus,
the assault on our democratic process and the desire to delegitimize it does
not begin with Donald Trump, but is a long-time strategy of the Republican
Party.
In fact, most of the really obnoxious statements the Donald
has made over the past year are firmly rooted in the standard post-Reagan
Republican playbook. As many have pointed out, he merely speaks with greater
crudeness and explicitness than other Republicans. He was not the first or only politician to
express admiration for Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin as a means to denigrate
our own President. Every Republican
candidate called for building a wall between the United States and Mexico, and
all of them like to conflate terrorism with Islam. Every Republican wants to
lower taxes on the wealthy.
Even when he goes too far for his fellow Republicans—as when
he went after Ghazala Khan, referred to a television news personality’s
menstruation or suggested that women who broke anti-abortion laws should go to
jail—he is reflecting the underlying sentiment of the GOP and its core voters.
The reference to assassination is different in that it
probably does not reflect the thoughts of any but a handful of deranged people.
But in another very important way, Trump’s suggestion that someone assassinate
Hillary Clinton is very typical, because when Trump says something really sick
and icky, it almost always involves women. A woman should quit a job when
facing sexual discrimination or harassment. A woman is too ugly to serve as
President. Ivanka is so hot I would sleep with her if she weren’t my daughter.
The real reason Ghazala Khan said nothing is that she is oppressed by Islam.
Let’s assassinate the first woman president of the United States.
When Donald goes so far over the line that even his
supporters distance themselves from his comments, his victim is almost always a
woman, which is without a doubt part and parcel of both of his underlying
mental illness and his undiminished appeal to uneducated white males.
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