The Best Defense

OK, so there isn't a whole lot more to say about Donald Trump either fantasizing about or admitting to using his position as a celebrity to sexually assault women with nepotist homunculus Billy Bush. Anything else I'd have to add on top of the exhaustive* coverage would be less for anyone's further edification (I'm certain there are no or virtually no new nooks left to cranny) and more purely a diarist's impulse to record the inanity and insanity of the past six days as future reference. I'm certain there will be a point in the nearer-than-we-think future where we are no longer capable of believing a full-fledged cultural spasm of madness and rage was possible. All we'll have left are the 80 billion hours of digital video and sideways-8 number of words we had the presence of mind enough to stop and vomit into the public space made both ubiquitous and limitless by the interwebs.

Oh, and all the podcasts.

And regular television.

And what few print resources still get dyed onto dead tree pulp.

And one forehead tattoo.

But that is it.

Today what's fresh (well, fresh-ish. It's been around if you've been willing to wade through the rivers of other shit to get to it) is, ironically, the old fashioned anti-semitism. See, Donald Trump understands politics better than anyone else ever has or ever could. He understands it on a deep level that transcends the modern American political epoch, specifically by reaching back to a time before the Enlightenment idea of religious freedom muddied everything up, back to pre-medieval Europe when everyone knew all the bad stuff came from Jews.

I don't mention this because I'm bored by or indifferent to the news of the abuse of women, both at the (literal) hands of Donald Trump and by a misogynist social structure as a whole. I'm thinking about this because it's going to be drowned out by a rising tide of abuse victims who deserve to have their stories not only told, but considered with the benefit of the doubt firmly in their favor.

I think the anti-semitism part is important though because it tells us who Trump is (a credulous, pathetic, opportunistic asshole) and gives us a glimpse below the waterline to see the scope of the rest of the iceberg that is the Trump campaign. Specifically, this is the first result of what he meant when he said his shackles had been taken off. Apparently his abandonment my the Republican establishment means he's free to go full Breitbart without anyone in his ear trying to remind him that he's sharing a ticket for lower offices with Republicans who live in places where the idea that all Jews have horns is a decidedly minority position.

What's interesting about this to me is that it's part of an obviously coordinated and vetted campaign strategy by de facto political professionals. And I think by that I mean people who happen to be paid to work in politics, with zero other qualifications.

So a campaign that had already been built on a platform of racial revanchism, specifically focused on invasions of the United States both literal (you remember the Mexican rapist underground railroad bringing brown people for your daughters) and cultural. This of course only works if you equate "American" with "white person" which, to be fair-ish to Donald Trump and his supporters, our Constitution and society as a whole kind of did for way more of our history than not.

But the anti-semitism, oy... A lot of us on the left have spent a lot of time trying to decode Trump speeches looking for racist dog whistles, but now he's given even those up for raw meat and a full-throated "here, boy!"

There can only be one of two answers:

1) The Trump campaign leaders are so monumentally stupid and cosmically incompetent that they think this is an effective counterbalance and distraction to the fact that (and I think this is still the central issue here) Trump has participated in two debates where he came out looking unprepared, intellectually incurious, unlettered and hormonally unbalanced. This is the more generous interpretation because it assumes they know something about the idea of suppressing turnout by making the election as unpalatable as possible. This option is still malpractice, but driven by cynicism and nihilism which, meager though they are, still constitute an ideological underpinning of some (any) kind.

2) The Trump campaign seriously and actually believes that within the United States there exists a silent majority of people who have been standing by for perhaps as many as 150 years as some kind of redneck sleeper cell 50-states wide for a candidate to speak the words: "Get the Jews!" And of course here I mean "Jews" as a stand-in for all non-white non-Protestant Christians, including blacks, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, gays, lesbians, transgender, welfare recipients, abortion-havers, secretaries of state, Asians, South Aisans and pretty much all women. Oh, and literally also Jews. Because this is America 2016, which means if you're going to invoke the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, by extension you also automatically mean The Turner Diaries, the American race-war aryan masturbation fantasy. I know this position doesn't seem likely to cause any actual violence or damage. But man, they sure talk like it might. And oh, it's not like it hasn't already in the past.

It's getting late and maybe I'm starting to get a little paranoid. That can happen any time you read any of the suppurating infection that is white nationalist post-apocalyptic science-fantasy.** After all, Donald Trump knows some Jews. Heck, his daughter is one. And you know she's morally OK because she's hot as fuck.


---

*emphasis on "exhaust"

**to the extent that phrenology and eugenics are still in any way "science."