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If Donald Trump said road apples tasted better than sweet red ones, Republican leaders would hustle out and sink their teeth into the nearest dairy dropping.
Ted Cruz would roast his at the end of an AK.
Being one who wants Trump, Cruz and party to lose and lose big, when I heard the stupid things Trump told an audience of black journalists — most offensively that Kamala Harris “turned black” for political purposes — I punched the air in pleasure.
I knew that Republicans would trundle out en masse to dine on a meadow muffin and exclaim, “You know,” munch, munch, “Trump’s right,” regardless of the political damage.
It took J.D. Vance no time at all. He reached into his bag of witty metaphors to call Harris a color-changing “chameleon” — quite a claim from a guy who changed his name multiple times and who kisses the loafers of a man he not long ago called an “idiot” and compared to Hitler.
Well, an idiot is as an idiot does.
Something so ignorant-sounding, so unconscionable, so crass. What Trump said about Harris, and what Republicans continue to parrot, is pure political foolery for a party that knows it needs to broaden its appeal.
“The discord and division in our society must be healed,” Trump pontificated at the Republican National Convention.
“I am running to be president for all of America, not half of America.”
That’s what you call bovine effluvium.
Trump’s whole political being is devoted to two acts: inflaming and dividing. Prove me wrong.
The title of Peter Baker and Susan Glasser’s 2022 book on Trump says it all: “The Divider.”
Baker is chief New York Times White House correspondent. Glasser, his spouse, is a staffer for The New Yorker.
Trump, they write, made divisiveness “the calling card of his presidency.”
As president: “Trump pitted Americans against Americans, the United States against its allies. He threw matches on the dry kindling of race relations and escalated a culture war over competing visions of national identity.”
Yes, a war between us: American vs. American. By design. For political gain. That’s leadership.
The thing about this divisiveness: It’s not just words.
In another revealing book, “This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden and the Battle for America’s Future,” authors Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns describe “protection-racket antics” by which President Trump carried out vendettas against whole states and constituencies.
Former Maryland governor Larry Hogan, a Republican who nonetheless was highly critical of Trump, said Trump was blithely open about his reasoning when states with Trump-friendly governors like Texas and Florida got disproportionate shares of COVID response funds. It was about partisan favors, not serving states equitably.
During the pandemic, Democratic Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont contacted the White House for help in his state’s competing with Canada for a vaccine plant.
To that, Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro uttered a pitch-perfect Trumpian reply:
“I don’t want to get involved with blue-state politics,” he said.
And then there were so many – so many! – examples of Team Trump’s raw animus, or at last lack of sensitivity, toward people of color and diverse urban locales.
Don’t kid yourself. Race was the subtext to Trump’s statement that Milwaukee is a “horrible” city, that urban centers like Philadelphia or Atlanta can’t administer elections fairly, or that certain nations are “shithole countries.”
And this:
When advisers suggested that Juneteenth, celebrated nationally to recognize the end of slavery in the United States, wouldn’t be a good day for a Trump rally in Tulsa, Okla., the site of America’s worst race riot, Trump not only appeared to know nothing about the date’s significance but showed he couldn’t care less.
Change the day “to accommodate these people?” Trump retorted. “Have you ever heard of such a ridiculous thing?”
Martin and Burns called it “another sign that Donald Trump did not see himself as president for everyone.”
Incorrigible, unrepentant, racist to the core: the Great Divider.
Longtime newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.
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