Trump is Showing Us Who He Is--Again

 

Trump tells Black journalists that Kamala Harris "is of Indian heritage ... is she Indian or is she Black? ... she became a Black person." Note the audience laughing at him. pic.twitter.com/PAhmgr1yBS

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 31, 2024

Trump sat for 35 minutes for an interview with the National Association of Black Journalists that was supposed to last an hour, but his own team advised them to wrap it up.  Ending an interview halfway through is exactly what a campaign would do when their guy is "crushing it"--right?

Of course not. Trump put on a racist shitshow because he is a racist shitshow. That's not actually new. What is new is, I think, is the laughter. He is ridiculous beyond belief.

He's befuddled by the idea of someone being able to claim two cultures. (He does not know, I think, where to send her back to.) He projects his inability to grasp the concept on her--it's something she's doing, right? In so doing, he's trying to cast doubt on Kamala Harris' authenticity--where have we seen that before? 

Birtherism. He did the same thing to Barack Obama. And to be completely honest, that should have ended his political career right there. But here he is, running for president--again. Displaying his astonishing ignorance and arrogance--again. And his fellow Republicans and some of his little friends in the media will let him do this again. Maybe for an encore, Trump will request Harris' college transcripts.

Trump is a known quantity--so why did he even bother to show up in that room (and for that matter, why was his toxicity platformed)?

I can't speak for the NABJ, but my hunch is that Trump's campaign thought he could face a "hostile" crowd and come out boldly saying he faced the lion's den. And of course, some folks are saying that. They are just lying--he rambled clipped bits from his rally speech and demonstrated he doesn't have a grasp of the issues that mattered to that audience (although he did demonstrate the rhetoric that appealed to his intended audience).

Did this messy event, where he cast his patented "just asking questions" foolishness about race one day after agreeing that the vice-president's husband is a "horrible Jew" and hours before a rally in which he called Chuck Schumer a "Palestinian" and "a proud member of Hamas", win him a single vote outside of his deplorable base?

Chillingly, I don't think he or his campaign cares anymore. It's not that they don't want to win, it's that appealing to people in the democratic sense is not interesting to them, so much as division and bullying are. They are counting on the press to be incapable of directly expressing what Trump is showing us because they have never really been able to competently do so before, so why would they start now? 

The old man who rambled and was racist and conspiratorial and weird is still dangerous because he has a movement behind him, a constituency he speaks to. They don't care that he is ignorant--they appreciate that he is arrogant. They consider that his strength.

There is not both sides to this--Trump is a racist monster, appealing to racist monsters.  But he deserves laughter for his ridiculousness, and to be mocked because even though he should be feared, he should not be respected. He is contemptible. We see him for what he is.

(And for the love of all that's decent, Kamala Harris does not have to oversimplify her identity just to make white people comfortable.)