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| Trump: "Disgusted" |
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| "Sorry" |
Trump spoke to some 9000 people at a rally yesterday and referred to Hillary's delay returning from the bathroom at the Democratic debate:
"I know where she went. It's disgusting. (AUDIENCE CHEERS) I don't want to talk about it. It's too disgusting."
Disgusting.
What's up with that? Doesn't Trump pee? Didn't--don't--the women in Trump's life use a bathroom? Trump finds it "disgusting."
What's going on here????
Jonathan Haidt's book The Righteous Mind examines a fundamental difference between certain sets of voters nicely divided between Hillary's base and Trump's. Hillary's base voters have a moral sense that is centered on one key idea: fairness. Something is moral if it treats people fairly, equally. Public policy grows out of that idea: it is fair for women to be paid the same as men if they are doing the same job. It is fair for blacks or Muslims or Hispanics to be treated the same way as whites in housing or public accommodation or in police profiling. It is fair for people who work full time not to be in poverty and therefore need a minimum wage because somehow the allocation of benefits need to accommodate their problem.
Fair: That is Hillary. And Trump's audience thinks Hillary is so crazy and politically correct about fair that Hillary wants to be fair to germs!!!
Trump's base is more than half the American population. These are politically more conservative or traditional in orientation and, yes, they agree with the notion of the morality of fairness but they also have additional notions of morality on top of fairness:
*** the integrity of the tribe,
*** respect for strong legitimate leaders
*** disgust over impurity.
Those three items are the key to Trump's message. Trump speaks to those values, and Hillary does not. She ignores them--to her peril. Trump understands that those values are at at least as important as being "fair". And when there is danger--i.e. terror--these values come first.
That is why Trump and Hillary are missing each other's point, and why Trump is getting huge crowds of people who think Trump "gets" them.
***Trump wants to keep immigrant interlopers out unless they are really, really part of the American tribe--integrity of the tribe value.
***Trump respects strong leadership (Putin, himself, cunning Chinese) and is contemptuous of weak or flawed leadership (Obama, Jeb!, and the media)--respect for authority value.
***Trump is disgusted by impurity or outside pathogens in the form of immigrant rapists, "foreign-born" illegitimate president Obama, World Trade Center destruction celebrants, or the thought of Hillary using a bathroom--disgust over impurity value.
The Trump audiences want someone who speaks to those three elements of morality and correctness. And Trump does exactly that.
Hillary is all about "fair", i.e. political correctness, which means she wants to be "fair" to Muslims while Trump sees Muslims as a pathogen to be avoided or at least highly scrubbed. Trump and Trump supporters think this is crazy.
It is as if Hillary is being fair to "germs" destroying America. Crazy!!
Trump adds the other elements of morality, and combines them in himself: A strong leader fighting for the interests of real Americans who are angry and grossed out by the pathogens of rapist Mexicans, Trojan Horse Muslims, and whatever disgusting things Hillary might be doing in a bathroom.
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Donald Trump is the undisputed king of “Simon Says”. A fetish to play that childhood game is one of the few common grounds of conservative and liberal media. Wikipedia explains that, “It is the ability to distinguish between ugly and pretty commands, rather than physical ability, that usually matters in the game; in most cases, the action just needs to be attempted***, for example, ‘Simon says, jump in the air’. “ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Says. More contemporary examples in which Trump commands the press, and then the press commands an eager public, are:
Simon Says talk about Megan Kelly’s menstrual cycle.
Simon Says say the word “schlong”.
Simon Says jump up and down about Hillary peeing.
Simon Says repeat after me: “Rosie O’Donnell is a fat pig”.
Simon Says pantomime Ben Carson’s knife deflecting off his friend’s belt.
Simon Says everybody talk about my hair all at once.
Wikipedia concludes: “The object for the player acting as Simon is to get all the other players out as quickly as possible”, egs. staying in the round by complying with the command “Simon says jump in the air”; or be ejected from the round by obeying the command but when it was not prefaced with “Simon says”. Trump either gets attribution for every pronouncement he utters, and ridicules the plagiarists of his bombast. Applying the rules here, players are ejected from a round for failing to obey Trump’s command to speak his agenda, or because they spoke his agenda without crediting him as the author.
Never before has a firmly-established cultural icon seized the body politic in such a forceful way and ordered the “free press” and its constituents to humiliate themselves. Opinion makers quickly relapse in their entreaties to peers in the mainstream media to stop publishing everything that Simon says. The media outlets themselves express a journalistic ethic that it is wrong to repeat every mocking banality that Trump utters, but that ethic fails in the face of lost market share. He who repeats what Trump commands is rewarded. He who does not publish what Trump says becomes boring and irrelevant.
The most recent Democratic debate signaled the official entry of the Democratic party into the Trump Says marathon. Hillary and Bernie have now bowed and obliged, for fear of becoming irrelevant, or of being dismissed as stodgy political oldsters too snobbish to play. And so cruel is this game that a pitiful old man wanting the eulogy “he was a brave socialist” chiseled on his headstone has succumbed to a hypocrisy he is too blinded or feeble to see:
“Now I’ve got to be honest with you. I’ve got to be honest with you,” Sanders said, speaking in a mocking tone. “I also went to the bathroom. I know, I have to admit it. … This is the pathology. This is the guy who is leading in the Republican polls.”
(Washington Post 12/22/15). So it is and so it shall be that potty talk begets potty talk, as Trump Twitters insults to pandering rivals on the right and on the left, and delegitimizes any dissent from their “dishonest media”. All are punished.
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