What Needs to Be Said About The Donald

              Donald Trump has said so many outrageous things since announcing his candidacy for president last year that MSNBC’s Chris Hayes has been keeping a top-ten list of the most recent outrages.  He often has to update it every week, and in the days following the Democrat’s convention last month, he even had to update it daily.

              Some of the Trump outrages are clearly intentional.  His antipathy for undocumented Mexican workers (“illegal immigrants” in his lingo) is unabashed, as is his anti-Muslim rhetoric.  Some is almost accidental, as when he gets off-script (an altogether common occurrence) and just “says it like it is” (or like he thinks it is at the time).  And then there is some of it that is carefully scripted but stated almost as an afterthought.

              These are moments when Trump displays his extreme malevolence (or even his absolute evil core).  His denigration of Ms. Khan (the wife of the eloquent speaker at the Democrat’s convention) was a good example of this “skill.”  “If you look at his wife,” he said, “she was standing there; she had nothing to say – maybe she wasn’t allowed to have anything to say; you tell me.” 

              It’s a deft ploy that scores a double hit (against the mother for standing mute and against her religion for presumably denying her the right to speak) and yet can be “excused” as just idle musing (“maybe she wasn’t allowed to have anything to say; you tell me”).  He’s used this mode of attack many times, always sounding like he’s just pondering an idea, not wholly embracing it, but he knows exactly what he’s doing.  He may not be a politician, but he has the playbook down.

              Anyway, he does what he does, says what he says, and his fans (that’s what they really are; calling them anything more gives them too much credit) lap it all up, while the rest of us shake our heads and try not to get too angry.  And since his standing in the polls has finally started to take a hit in the face of outrage after outrage, maybe he is proving to be his own worst enemy.  Yes, it sold well when he was just appealing to the disenchanted base of the Republican Party, who gave him plurality (not majority) wins in most of the primaries.  But now that he is being judged by the entire electorate, maybe his appeal isn’t as obvious.  Maybe, in fact, he is being perceived as just a little too outrageous, if not even a little bigoted (not to mention psychologically unfit) to justify a whole lot of adulation.

              Still, he is who he is, and when his handlers (amateurs though most of them are) succeed in getting him to actually deliver a scripted speech, he looks as uncomfortable as most politicians look when they aren’t reading carefully crafted remarks from a teleprompter.  Trump has really missed his calling.  He would be a good fit for a Lenny Bruce-styled stand-up comedian.  Then he could say anything he wanted and get laughs and applause from the same people who cheer him now, but no one else would care. 

              Instead, he’s running for president, and, as one of the two major party candidates, even with his poll numbers down at the moment, he has to be viewed as having a serious chance of winning.  And for that reason, he needs to be called out when he goes too far with his outrages.

              And Thomas Friedman did just that last week in an Op-Ed column in the New York Times.  Mr. Friedman is a regular columnist for the Times; foreign affairs is his specialty.  And he drew on his expertise last week in recalling the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, Israel’s Prime Minister and Nobel Prize winner.  Rabin was killed by an Israeli citizen who considered the Prime Minister a traitor for agreeing to the Oslo accords (the basis for his Nobel Peace Prize).  Benjamin Netanyahu played into that view of Rabin during a feverish right-wing rally that included shouts from the crowd calling for Rabin’s death.  (Netanyahu claimed not to have heard the shouts.)

              Friedman analogized that incident to Trump’s comments to his fans at a recent rally, when, using that same “deft ploy” he has used so frequently (“you tell me …,” “maybe, … I don’t know,” “lots of people are saying …,” “they tell me …”) he said the following: “Hillary wants to abolish, essentially abolish, the Second Amendment.  By the way, and if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks.  Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know.”

              In his column, Friedman slammed Trump for inciting, just as Rabin’s political opponents had incited, a violent response.  Trump, of course, claimed that he meant that the “Second Amendment people” should vote against Hillary, but anyone who parses his statement realizes that wasn’t what he was saying, because he was referring to what would happen after she got elected, not about stopping her from being elected.

              It was one of Trump’s many outrageous comments that crossed the line, but this one bordered on the criminal (as in encouraging murder).  To be sure, Trump would never be prosecuted for the statement, any more than the fomenters of hatred against Rabin would have been prosecuted.  But the comment can’t be ignored or sloughed off as mere campaign rhetoric.  If you run for the highest office in the land, you need to be held accountable for what you say.

              And that’s what Thomas Friedman did in his column last week.  He ended it with this paragraph:

              “People are playing with fire here, and there is no bigger flamethrower that Donald Trump.  Forget politics; he is a disgusting human being.  His children should be ashamed of him.  I only pray that he is not simply defeated, but that he loses all 50 states so that the message goes out across the land – unambiguously, loud and clear: The likes of you should never come this way again.”

              Wow.  I wish I had written that.  I should have, and from now on, I will.