Princess complains of elitism
First there was this:
Steve Krakauer is (or, rather, pretends to be) disgusted at the “elitism” and “arrogance” of three guys (two of whom are black, you might notice) mocking the ignorance of Trump and the evil of Pompeo, as if that’s more shocking and reprehensible than Trump’s ignorance and malevolence and Pompeo’s bullying and evil.
Then there was Act Two, when Princess Ivanka seconded the fake outrage of Steve Krakauer.
The president’s daughter said: “The arrogance, mocking accents and smug ridicule of this nation’s ‘real elites’ is disgusting.”
Amid backlash to the CNN clip and Ivanka’s Tuesday morning tweet, one of the CNN guests, Rick Wilson, a Republican consultant turned Trump critic and author, responded with characteristic force.
Wilson said in a message to the Guardian: “Her hypocrisy is breathtaking. She went to Chapin and never worked for anyone not called Daddy.”
She’s filthy rich. She’s filthy rich via her father’s corrupt practices; she’s filthy rich via profiteering from her father’s horrific destructive presidency; she’s filthy rich via fraud (see: Trump Soho). You don’t see her hanging out with poor people or doing anything to make poor people not so poor. She is every inch a princess.
Chapin is an exclusive all-girls school in Manhattan, which the first daughter attended before boarding at Choate Rosemary Hall in Connecticut. She joined the Trump Organization from college, appeared with her billionaire father on TV in The Apprentice and is now a senior White House adviser.
It’s all been handed to her on a gold plate, and she thinks somehow that makes her talented and important.
Donald Trump, a president who has by one count made more than 16,000 false or misleading claims since entering office, has excoriated CNN as a bastion of supposed “Fake News” media. On Monday night he retweeted the clip and criticized Lemon in familiar fashion, calling him “the dumbest man on television (with terrible ratings!)”.
Amid predictable furore, Wilson and Ali responded in kind.
“I believe we have ‘triggered’ the ‘snowflakes’ just by doing a short segment on TV with some levity,” Ali wrote. “Did I use the terminology correctly?”
Things took a more serious turn in Ali’s penultimate tweet of the night, however, when he wrote: “Trump tweeted our CNN clip from [two] days ago. Friends are now concerned about my safety. I refuse to be intimidated [and] bullied by bad faith actors who cry fake victimhood, whining about a harmless, silly 30-second clip while endorsing Trump, a cruel vulgarian who debases everyone.”
Princess Ivanka, meanwhile, was busy counting her money.
Scrooge McDuck had a money bin of volume 3 ‘cubic acres’; or was it 4?
Poverty is certainly no fun. (Been there; done that.) But houses and homes tend to a certain optimum size: large enough to be easy for one, two or more to live in, but not so large as to be impossible to maintain without live-in assistance. (And it’s so hard to find good servants these days, would you not agree?)
Princess Ivanka appears to live the life of a serial occupant of palaces. She also appears to be an airhead; which is handy. Because it is so easy to get so distracted when flitting from palace to palace, that it becomes easy to lose sight of the main game, which is accumulation of more and more money and palaces.
I mean, if Ivanka was not a serious airhead, she might become a serious thinker, writer, poet, film-maker, actor, historian, artist, architect, inventor, scientist… need I go on?
And that could complicate her life no end.
Trumpers are really big on shouting “fuck your feelings!” The key word there, of course, is “your.” THEIR feelings are very, very important and must be protected from injury.
Trump supports sneer at half the country. They call their political opponents traitors and communists and pedophiles and concoct elaborate fantasies about jailing and/or shooting them. But don’t you dare mock them!
This is all so much phony posturing, as Rick Wilson has pointed out, for the purpose of making more money from the rubes. There is not a single actual voter who was on the fence about Trump and then made up his or her mind based on this.
I watched the clip and went “Uh oh.” They weren’t just making fun of Trump and Pompeo. They were mocking the “credulous boomer rube demo that backs Donald Trump,” complete with Southern accents and bad grammar. That’s a problem, on par with Clinton’s reference to the “basket of deplorables.”
If you’re hoping that the more moderate people who voted for Trump will decide he’s simply too corrupt or incompetent to vote for again, the last thing you ought to do is treat his supporters with disdain. Krakauer and Ivanka are shrewd to jump on this. When they made lists of mistakes which may have cost the 2016 election, a lot of them contained that part of a debate where Clinton heaped scorn not on the other candidate, but on his supporters. Surveys showed it pushed over some who were wavering.
After four years of this shit are they still wavering?
Sastra, I have heard that over and over, and yes, I get that. But…too many entitled assholes that voted for Trump, and they need to be called out…over and over.
And Hillary GOT MORE VOTES. Let’s please not lose sight of that. And…she was definitely leading strongly until the Comey thing. So was it really her “basket of deplorables” comment? And if so, how is it that no one calls out the Donald for the godawful things he says about the other side? Or is only one side entitled to that sort of consideration, from the candidate, from the press, from the pundits, etc, etc, etc?
You don’t need to answer. I know the answer to that, and it is, yes, the Democrats have to play nice. The Republicans can play nasty, because…well, because. Because the Dems believe the bullshit spewed about how downtrodden the Trump supporters are, about how Trump is speaking to a REAL NEED, about how these voters are the “forgotten middle” (Forgotten, my foot. Nearly every policy in my lifetime has been made with these people in mind, except a handful of Civil Rights legislation that they largely ignore unless forced to do otherwise, and Title IX, ditto, neither of which hurt them, only made them upset that people they considered their inferiors were entitled to the same rights they had).
I never heard a single one of my acquaintances who voted for Trump because of the deplorables comment. They all said “her emails” or “she is ambitious”. I think the impact of that comment has been overstated, overanalyzed, and overhyped. But, yeah, by all means, let’s smile and play nice while the schoolyard bully steals our lunch money – and the lunch money from the poorest and hardest working among us – all while we sadly say “but they really do need that money for their lunch, and we have to understand that it isn’t nice to call them bullies, so we’ll just say how much we care about them, really really care about them, and maybe they’ll learn to be nice”.
Sastra,
I call bullshit on any such surveys.
People lie about their reasons for voting the way they do. Right now you can check out Rick Wilson’s Twitter feed and see people whose timelines and bios reveal them to be clear longtime Trump supporters (including one woman who writes for The Federalist), all playing the “well gosh, I was an undecided voter until NOW” routine.
Similarly, approximately 0% of voters will tell a pollster that they voted for Trump because they hate women, but that doesn’t prove that misogyny wasn’t a factor.
And if you’re right — well, start planning Trump’s second inauguration already. Because if all it takes to throw undecided voters into Trump’s arms is for a conservative political pundit/strategist with no affiliation with the Democratic party or any Democratic candidate to say something mean about Trump’s supporters, then it’s all over. You’re not getting ~50% of the country to agree to shut up because some people think it’s bad strategy.
People can and should mock the credulous boomer rube demographic, absolutely. I’m just not sure CNN anchors should do so. They’re trying to hang on to their credibility in the face of outrageous assaults.
The poll I thought most interesting was the one done by Diane Hesson from the Clinton campaign, which was unusual.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/doubling-down-on-deplorable-1481303167
People may lie in polls, but the way this particular study was set up I think it unlikely. Clinton won the popular vote, but there was a very thin margin by which she she lost the Electoral College. For this election, swing voters are again going to be crucial. This sort of mockery likely sets them off.
Of course, it’s only CNN and not the Democratic candidate, and it’s far before the election. I’m probably being over cautious. I’m worried.
Are there ‘undecided’ voters who would be swayed by rudeness from the left? Seems a bit hard for me to grok since Trump is incapable of being anything other than a hateful demonizing ass anytime he opens his mouth.
At this point I’ll be honest – I’ve completely disengaged from talking to the other side. It’s been fruitless for me (and the behavior of the Repubs during the impeachment farce has pretty much convinced me that the rule of law is dead in this country).
One CNN anchor and two guests, one of whom is a Republican, make fun of the rube demographic for 90 seconds or so. I don’t think that counts as an “uh oh.” Yes sleazes like Princess Vonky and her fans will try to make it one, but sleazes gonna sleaze.
That “I was undecided but” lie reminds me of Wally “I agree with PollyO!” Smith. He did that a lot on his second attempt, which is one reason I started suspecting he was Wally Smith in disguise, while everyone else was gobbling up his bullshit.
I keep thinking about this article in the Onion.
https://politics.theonion.com/trump-makes-powerful-pro-life-case-by-speaking-about-th-1841205766
I suppose turning your offspring into sycophants is not against the law, but it doesn’t make it right. If he was my father, I’d tell him to keep his money and F off. But I suppose they didn’t learn about courage or independence either. Kinda sad really, and hollow.
twiliter,
Well, they weren’t likely to learn those things from either parent, were they? The women who married Trump aren’t exactly role models of courage and independence and choosing values over money.
Actually, I vaguely recall something about Donald Jr. refusing to speak with his father for a year or so after his parents’ divorce, out of solidarity with his mother, but that didn’t last.
When he says “I had my thoughts about terminating them all”, it’s basically saying they were potentially unwanted. Like he gave in or something, and now he’s happy with these people he “hardly knows”. It’s psychopathic.
Um, you know what the Onion is, right? That’s not a real quote. It is, quite literally, fake news.
Thanks for telling me! haha
Is it sane, reasonable, or logical to refer to someone as “filthy rich” when every penny they spend is leveraged multiple times over to various foreign “banks”?
Even if they’ve managed to syphon some of the money they’ve extracted from the U.S. Treasury to offshore accounts, once the house of cards collapses, those “banks” will be foreclosing, and it won’t be a local bailiff, or even a U.S. Marshall that will be locking the access to the golf-courses and seedy condos.
Buddy, his offspring, and his offsprings in-laws owe an awful lot of cash[flow] to the wrong people – the sorts of people who stop at nothing to learn passcodes they don’t already know . . .
The video has been uploaded to the GOP YouTube channel, under the title “They think you’re a joke”.
Hilary’s “deplorables comment” may not have been the decisive factor in 2016, but it certainly didn’t help – just like this won’t help (even if it doesn’t end up.being as memorable a “thing” as “deplorables”).
Shooting oneself in the foot never helps.
NOT THE GOP YOUTUBE CHANNEL!!!!!!!!
Oh, shit, the election’s over now. Thanks for telling us.
If only the DNC had ordered Republican Rick Wilson not to make jokes on CNN. Those fools! Well, that’ll teach us all.
Seriously, people, get a fucking grip. These idiots whine about EVERYTHING. They just finished whining about Adam Schiff quoting Trump’s threat to put GOP heads on pikes if they didn’t vote to acquit him. Next week they’ll be whining about something else. If you actually think that the only way to beat Trump is for NOBODY, ever, to say anything that the GOP pretends to be offended at, then you should just resign yourself to perpetual defeat, because that’s impossible. The rest of the world is not going to shut up because you wish they would. And the GOP is never, ever, ever going to stop playing the grievance game.
THANK YOU.
And to add to Screechy Monkey’s brilliant analysis, this tendency not to call deplorables deplorables has enabled the punditry to continue to pretend this is a normal administration, that Trump voters are the forgotten, disenfranchised, oppressed (white, male) voters of the forgotten, honest, hardworking, decent (white, male) Midwest.
Yes, the Republicans will try to use it against the Democrats. The reason this is a problem is BECAUSE THE DEMOCRATS LET THEM. The Democrats are so weak in the spine they can’t stand to have the ugly truth exposed about those who might be their friends, family, casual acquaintances, or who might possibly, in some subset, contain some element of an oppressed minority, the Democrats who insist on believing things that have been repeatedly demonstrated to be untrue – that people want polite politicians, that people want moderate politics, that people will always vote in their own best interests, and that everyone would be as nice as they are if they just had the information available (but for some reason, only want that information to be sugar-coated, sweet, fattening, and comforting).
I’ve probably said too much already in this thread, but I’ll add one clarification. My comments are not about whether or not it was wise or politically helpful or hurtful for Clinton to make her comment about “deplorables” in 2016. Reasonable minds can differ on that. There are certainly things that (however true they might be) a presidential candidate shouldn’t say, for tactical considerations. There’s a smaller universe of things that a candidate’s campaign team shouldn’t say (because the candidate has plausible deniability, and can fire the staffer if needed). Etc.
But you can’t stretch that principle far enough to cover “anybody who appears on television or has any social media reach, whether affiliated with the candidate or even a member of her political party.” And it’s pointless if you do, because you can’t hope to control that broad a universe of people.