17.
“Donald
Trump’s Chicago scam”
We keep talking to ourselves.
Constantly. Trying to make order out of chaos and sense out of the surreal. And
this year, most doing the talking have gotten it wrong. Wrong about Trump.
Wrong about Rubio. Wrong about Sanders. And now wrong about the road ahead.
What are we talking to ourselves about
now on the Sunday shows, on cable news, in newspaper columns, in the
blogosphere, on Twitter, Snapchat and Facebook?
We are grimly warning the world that
following Friday night’s fracas in Chicago, America faces a deepening divide
that is tearing away at the fabric of this great land.
What mind-numbing nonsense.
Friday’s freak show was as prepackaged
as a rerun of “The Celebrity Apprentice.” The only difference was that Donald
Trump delivered his lines on the phone from a hotel room in the Windy City
instead of on the set of his made-for-TV boardroom.
It was all a scam.
Has anyone noticed that Trump’s
campaign now regularly stages media events designed to eclipse any negative coverage
that predictably follows Republican debates?
The Feb. 25 debate in Houston where
Marco Rubio delivered the campaign’s most withering critique of Trump was
followed the next morning with Chris Christie’s headline-grabbing endorsement.
That Friday press conference consumed all political coverage throughout the
weekend and limited any fallout from the Fox debate to a hardy band of Trump
deniers on Twitter.
[This new revelation should cripple
Donald Trump. But it won’t.]
Then last Thursday, Rubio delivered
the debate performance of his life in Miami. But with Florida and Ohio five
days away, the Trump campaign took no chances. It leaked the news of Ben
Carson’s coming endorsement before the debate even began and held another
Friday morning press conference to showcase it. But Carson was just the warm-up
act.
When news broke early Friday night
that the Chicago rally had been canceled because of safety fears, you didn’t
need to be a programming genius to predict what would be jamming America’s
airwaves for the rest of the night.
And for the next four hours, the
candidate who is promising to weaken libel laws spoke on cable news channels
about how his First Amendment rights were being violated. He was doing all of
this while reaching a far larger audience than he could have ever done while
actually speaking at a rally.
As has been the case throughout the
entire 2016 cycle, Trump thrives on the political chaos that he helps creates.
If it is true that opportunity and chaos are the same word in Mandarin,
Trump should stamp that word on a
poster and sell it at his next scheduled event. For the Manhattan billionaire,
manufactured chaos is just as profitable for his brand as Paris Hilton’s sex
tape was for hers.
But now important voices warn us that
America is on the brink of chaos despite the fact that Friday’s spectacle in
Chicago was more reality show than political revolt.
The rally was canceled, we were told,
because law enforcement officials consulted with the campaign and concluded
that scrubbing the event was in the best interest of public safety. One
problem: The Chicago Police Department said that never actually happened.
[Trump’s inexcusable thuggery]
And if you find that curious, perhaps
you will find it even more interesting that a political campaign whose security
has been so stifling as to draw angry comparisons to fascist regimes would plan
a key rally for Trump in the middle of a racially diverse urban campus.
The fact that this campus sits in the
middle of a city that is so Democratic that it has not elected a Republican
mayor since before Franklin Roosevelt was sworn in as president makes the venue’s
selection even more bizarre.
Following the rally’s cancellation,
Trump supporters expressed surprise at the number of protesters that were
filling the lines and streaming into the event on a campus that is 25 percent
Hispanic, 25 percent Asian and 8 percent black. William Daley, son of former
Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley, did not share that surprise.
“Whoever picked that location knew what they
were doing as far as poking that sleeping dog there,” Daley said, suggesting to
the New York Times that the venue was staged for the purpose of provoking
protests that would energize Trump’s own supporters.
It would also land Trump on cable news
channels throughout the night, talking nonstop over endless loops of skirmishes
that paled in comparison with rowdy celebrations that often explode in American
cities after sports championships.
Yet everyone got sucked into the
political sideshow. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio’s brief appearances on TV during
the rolling cable news coverage only made their own candidacies seem smaller
under the glare of Donald’s Big Tent Show.
It was all a far cry from the kind of
political riots that Americans saw during the 1968 Democratic convention. Those
riots flickered across Americans’ television screens while the nation was still
absorbing the shock waves of violent convulsions that had ripped across the
country during the first half of that horrifying year.
The Tet Offensive, launched in January, led to
February’s record number of Americans killed in Vietnam, more than 500 in one
week alone.
In March, Lyndon Johnson announced he would
not seek reelection after being shocked in New Hampshire’s primary by antiwar
crusader Eugene McCarthy. The next month, dozens of cities went up in flames
following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Eight weeks later, Bobby
Kennedy was gunned down in California after winning that state’s Democratic
primary.
As Mayor Daley’s city went under siege
on the night of Aug. 28, Americans were more divided politically, racially and
culturally than any time since the end of the Civil War a century earlier.
Serving as backdrops to the Chicago
riots were a bloody war, campus chaos, urban riots, murdered heroes and a
200-year-established order suddenly under siege.
America was at war with itself and for
good reason. But Friday night’s farce was a made-for-television event with a
handful of Trump supporters squaring off against protesters offended by Trump’s
presence on their campus.
Unfortunately for his opponents, most
of the protesters who appeared on camera during the night shouted profanities
at cameras, intimidated others being interviewed by networks and played
directly into the Republican front-runner’s hands. Fox News’s John Roberts kept
asking a stream of protesters why they were out in force against Trump, and none
could answer the question.
Perhaps they should have just used the
New York developer’s own words against him to explain why Friday’s event took
an ugly turn, like the time Trump said of a protester at a Las Vegas rally,
“I’d like to punch him in the face.”
Or when he declared that “in the good
old days,” protesters wouldn’t show up “because they used to treat them very,
very rough.”
Or when he told his audience to “Knock
the crap out of them, would you?”
There was so much that could have been
said but instead those protesting against Trump being interviewed on camera
seemed to be about as shallow as the reality-show routine of the man they love
to hate.
The difference, of course, is that Trump wants
to be the next president of the United States.
But that will never happen unless the
man who is about to lock down the GOP nomination drops his reality-show
routine, starts working on uniting his party and gets serious about the
daunting task before him.
Mark me down as skeptical.
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