He speaks for them
Classic. A NY Times piece on feverish “militia” types in the rural South, hoping Trump wins and practicing their shooting skills in case he doesn’t.
During two days of conversations, grievances poured forth from the group as effortlessly as bullets from a gun barrel. On armed excursions through sun-dappled forests, they spoke of a vague but looming tyranny — an amalgam of sinister forces to be held at bay only with a firearm and the willingness to use it.
They are machinists and retirees, roofers and factory line workers, all steeped in the culture of the rural South. They say Mr. Trump, a Manhattan billionaire and real estate tycoon, speaks for them.
Nicely done. Trump the New York billionaire real estate tycoon who cheats workers and contractors – they say he speaks for them. Clearly Marx had it all wrong. Class has nothing to do with anything. The important thing is being a belligerent asshole. That’s what unites people under the banner of…erm…being belligerent assholes.
Solidarity forever!
Heavily armed men with a tenuous grasp on reality. What could possibly go wrong?
I believe it was in the trailer for “Michael Moore in Trumpland” where a Trump supporter says something like, “At least Trump didn’t get everything handed to him by his parents the way Hillary did!” Which is, of course, completely backward.
Trump could start a new civil war: between armed-to-the-limit Middle Americans and everyone else. America is split more or less 50-50 between Trump and Clinton, so on the battlefields of the new civil war, I suppose much the same would apply. Except that Trump, if recent behaviour (allowing himself to be rushed off a stage because there was a heckler in the audience) is anything to go by, would be commanding his troops very much from the rear: say about 1,000 miles from the rear.
And the guy wasn’t a heckler, really. He was holding a sign reading “Republicans against Trump.” The crowd started beating him up, and security grabbed/rescued him, checked him out, and let him go.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/06/trump-protester-i-was-beaten-for-holding-a-republicans-against-trump-sign
I’m sure the story has already morphed into “Armed Hillary-loving Goon Takes Shot at Trump.”
As nauseated as it makes me to defend Trump, I don’t think we can blame him or read too much into his “allowing himself” to be hustled off the stage. I’m sure all these candidates and officials have this drilled into them: when your security detail tells you to move, you move.
Actually they don’t even tell you, they grab you and run. It’s very forceful.
Let’s hope they had tic-tacs then…
Violent, fascist-style movements, no matter how smugly triumphalist they are, ALWAYS operate from a base of deep grievance and fear.
Old Nazi propaganda (e.g. the magazine ‘Signal’) was self-caricaturing this way. They would run pictures of the ruins of Warsaw and Rotterdam with smug headlines about ‘paying the price for defying German might.’ And not long after, there’d be pictures of bombed German cities with ‘who could dream of such savagery?’
There is a deep paralysis of mind demonstrated here. Bad Things are going to happen on Tuesday, and afterward.
Oh, good. I was right.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/emaoconnor/trump-camp-assasssination-spin