If you want to understand how Donald Trump “gets away with it,” look no further than the outrage sparked by his comments about former Representative and Trump bête noire du jour Liz Cheney.
Just in case you’ve spent the last day floating in a sensory deprivation chamber …. Trump targeted Cheney with an epic verbal fusillade during a campaign event in Glendale, Arizona. He was chit-chatting with Tucker “Demon Scratch Fever” Carlson about Cheney’s support for Kamala Harris and, after suggesting Cheney’s endorsement would hurt Harris and calling Cheney a “very dumb person,” Trump commandeered the newscycle:
“She’s a radical war hawk — let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? And let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face.”
Although it happened late in evening (I think it was around 9pm Pacific Time when I saw it live on C-SPAN 2), it quickly spread through the media like a gasoline-stoked brush fire.
By the time I began the RUNDOWN at 4am, the story had evolved into Trump “calling for violence” and threatening to “point nine barrels” at Cheney’s face. At a morning tarmac presser, Harris accused Trump of using “violent rhetoric.” And all of that hoo-ha sparked a predictably forceful response by Trump’s allies who accused Democrats and the media of “wildly distorting” Trump’s words to create a “hoax” about their chronically mischaracterized candidate.
By the afternoon, CNN commentator Jonah Goldberg had to “take back” his claim that Trump called for putting Cheney in front of a “firing squad,” the NY Post had shot down both the Drudge Report and the Harris campaign for “falsely accusing” Trump of calling for Cheney’s execution … and then there was Trump in Michigan, freely doubling-down on his criticism of Cheney as a “war hawk”:
“She wants to go kill people unnecessarily and if she had to do it herself and she had to face the consequences of battle she wouldn't be doing it. So it's easy for her to talk, but she wouldn't be doing it. She's actually a disgrace."
So, not only did Trump make a strong argument about the folly of the Global War On Terror and, at the same time, delivered that message by hijacking the newscycle … he also baited both the media and his political foes into reaffirming a “fake news” narrative that inoculates his supporters from being persuaded by the truth if and when it penetrates their increasingly impenetrable bubbles. And those bubbles are made a little harder with each passing outrage.
This feedback loop is akin to a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more controversy he stirs-up, the more the media and his political foes reinforce the belief that they are not only blowing his blather out of proportion, but it translates into the ever-more steadfast belief that they (the media) are lying about the world’s most profuse liar.
And I don’t think any of that is by accident.
Trump has been playing the media ever since he posed as “John Barron,” a phony-baloney press agent who’d call New York’s tabloids in the ‘80s to “surreptitiously leak” out “secrets” about “his boss’s” sex life. Yeah, the reporters knew Trump was John Barron and some snickered at the absurdity of it, but that didn’t stop them from using John Barron’s information.
Trump knows how to bait the media.
He did it earlier in the week after Biden’s “garbage” gaffe.
That turned into a much-ridiculed photo-op with a Trump-branded garbage truck and Trump in a bright-orange safety vest. He kept that vest on throughout the day, including when he took the stage in Green Bay, Wisconsin. The crowd loved it. But his crowds love everything he says and does, right? Yes, but the next morning I was listening to a nationally-aired radio show and I was struck by a caller from Sacramento who claimed to have voted for Biden in 2020. He said he was a blue collar worker who also wore an orange vest … and he was changing his vote to Trump based solely on the feeling of solidary he got from seeing Trump in that vest. “At least he’s trying,” said the caller.
And he’s not alone.
In fact, he’s emblematic of what could very well be Trump’s lasting legacy—the wholesale reconfiguration of the electorate. The GOP is no longer the party of educated, white collar, middle and upper middle class voters. Country club Republicans motivated by national security and economics are becoming a vestigial presence in the party. Now the GOP is propelled by non-college educated, working class, blue collar voters motivated by culture war issues and, most fascinatingly, by an aversion to foreign entanglements and foreign wars.
In fact, this dust-up about Cheney harkens back to Trump’s initial success in knocking out then-ostensible frontrunner Jeb Bush during the GOP primaries in 2015. Trump attacked Jeb for his brother’s “stupid wars” in the Middle East. It was devastating, despite the fact that Jeb wasn’t responsible for starting ‘em. But the guilt-by-association worked. And he’s doing the same thing today. Liz Cheney had no role in starting or prosecuting her father’s wars. That doesn’t matter, though, in part because she is a hawk. But Trump also has his finger on the pulse of the antiwar anger that was never slaked in the wake of the debacle in Iraq. His willingness to attack Jeb then and Liz now is why he’s attracted Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr. and a host of young podcast-bros who, as it happens, would be most likely to be put in harm’s way should the US bumble or lie its way into another “stupid war.”
Yes, the GOP still has its share of bloodthirsty warmongers. Sens. Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton seem perpetually locked and loaded. But last night I also watched a Senate debate in Maine and was struck by Republican Senatorial candidate Demi Kouzounas’s response to a question on funding for Ukraine. After criticizing incumbent Senator Angus King’s financial connection to defense contractors, Kouzounas expressed concern about the profuse spending on the war. She said, "We're enriching a lot of the war machine that's going on in the United States."
By contrast, Kamala Harris often recites her acceptance speech line affirming her commitment to maintaining the world’s “most lethal fighting force” and, not for nothing, she’s embraced Darth Vader’s daughter. The short-term wisdom of that is about to be tested in the suburbs of Pennsylvania and Michigan and Arizona, where increasingly homeless national security Republicans who’d voted for Nikki Haley may deliver the presidency to Harris. In the longer term, the Democrats have some soul-searching ahead of them as they grapple with their part of this tectonic reconfiguration … one that has turned them from a home for critics of the Global War On Terror into the safe-space for the torture-promoting Neocons who lied the US into that shattering imperial enterprise.
Great piece!