Trump's media jiu jitsu
His attempt to disarm
I have been tied up with another project here at home, so I have been unable to comment on the corkscrew of a week in politics that has occurred. But, knowing that I will continue to be tied up for at least another week, I thought I’d take a short time out to briefly remark.
I have plans to really analyze what Donald Trump and J. D. Vance are doing with this atrocious story about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio. Here’s what I want to highlight at this time:
Trump’s team had highlighted the story before the debate. J.D. Vance had posted about the story on X.
The story itself seems to have been generated by white supremacists in Springfield called Blood Tribe.
Memes smearing the Haitian community were ready to go by the time Trump got onto the debate stage. So there seems to have been a coordinated effort in the GOP to propagate this unfounded racist rumor.
I don’t have a timeline sketched out yet, but it would appear that Trump did not fall into a trap laid by Kamala Harris in the debate. Yes, Harris got under Trump’s skin, with a dig about Trump’s crowds that she had clearly practiced beforehand. However, Trump too had this salacious story in his pocket, and he brought it out at just the time to deflect energy from Harris’s criticism.
So, as I see it, he already had planned to trot this story out.
Then, we see that the Trump team did not back down in the face of widespread condemnation of this rumor but doubled and tripled their defense of the right to tell the story (though Vance in particular had installed an escape hatch, inserting a caveat that the story might turn out not to be true). So the Trump campaign fully invested in the story, just as the rest of the media reported that Harris had won the debate hands-down. This split the media’s focus for the news cycle.
Then, as one could predict, the rumor, fueling racism, encouraged some extremist followers of Trump to call in bomb threats in Springfield, causing the city hall, hospitals, schools and universities to evacuate, go on lockdown, and cancel classes, some moving activities online. That’s domestic terrorism, to go along with the actual felt terror of those in the Haitian community in Springfield and elsewhere.
Trump, asked directly if he would condemn the bomb threats, said that he hadn’t heard of the threats but that it seemed that migrants had taken over Springfield. So that’s a quadrupling down and a tacit endorsement of violence.
So now that’s the news story. It has taken on a life of its own.
Yesterday, in a separate news story, Trump was golfing when someone was chased down for brandishing a firearm in his general area (one hole away, which is several hundred yards). The media called this an assassination “attempt,” even though the erstwhile gunman never fired a shot – only the Secret Service discharged their weapons as they attempted to subdue the suspect (no one was actually shot). It’s telling that Trump, when asked directly following this incident, said that he was in good spirits, and immediately his campaign sent out a fundraising email (in fact, at least two such emails went out before the day ended).
Yet today he is in front of cameras, accusing Democrats of using rhetoric that is resulting in people trying to harm him.
“Donald Trump has given an interview to the Fox network’s digital arm, and in it he is directly blaming Kamala Harris, the Vice President and his rival in the upcoming election, as well as President Joe Biden for this latest attempt on his life,” reports Al Jazeera’s White House correspondent Kimberly Halkett.
“He says in this interview that he believes the rhetoric of the Biden/Harris team is what caused the second attempt on his life. He says, ‘The gunman acted on their rhetoric and their rhetoric is causing me to be shot at, when I am the one who is going to save the country. They are the ones who are destroying the country, both from the inside and out. They are the real threat, the enemy from within.’”
So here it is, very simply: Donald Trump is attempting to regain control of the news cycle, to wield his almost-assassination attempt in the very same way that he tried back in July to indict the Democrats on their word choices in describing Trump as a danger to the country. Yet he’s doing this the same week that he himself has used irresponsible and vicious rhetoric putting an entire community in danger.
Let’s be real about this. This is chutzpah. This is the Mendendez brothers throwing themselves on the mercy of the court because they’re orphans, when they were the ones who murdered their parents.
As Scott Lucas, professor of American and international politics at University College Dublin, told Al Jazeera English:
“I think it’s instructive to look at what happened after the first [assassination] attempt, and that is the Trump campaign immediately tried to take advantage of that. … You might remember he was nicked in the ear by the fragment of a bullet, pushing aside the Secret Service — ‘give me room’ — and then raising that fist and shouting, ‘Fight, fight, fight.’ You might remember the heavily bandaged ear, where you even had sympathizers that were bandaging their ears as well at the Republican National Convention.
“But they lost that advantage, in part because of Trump’s rambling 90 minute speech that just lost the crowd at that venue. Then a few days later Kamala Harris replaced Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee. She got all the media attention and she got all the momentum, which she’s had for the ensuing six or seven weeks.
“Now here we are in September. And you know that the Trump people did not cause that suspect to bring that AK-47 onto the golf course — they didn’t motivate that — but they’ll try to take advantage again.”
The media — if they are smart, if they are savvy — will focus on Trump’s erratic behavior and not let him wrest the news cycle. He doesn’t deserve to have it within his grasp. Harris won the debate last week with skill and aplomb, and nearly everyone agreed that she came away the victor. Trump is doing everything he can to negate that win, and in the case of the media that means turning attention away from her and putting the spotlight back onto him.
What I’d like to see the media discuss is how this person, who once was in the Oval Office, has basically declared war on an entire city. That needs to be unpacked and made plain to viewers at home. Americans must be told in no uncertain terms how much of a betrayal of an oath this is. Some in the GOP will be too beholden to racism to care; but others who are traditionalists probably will stop and think about this contradiction. That should be enough to blunt his attempt at regaining momentum, which he does not deserve and has not earned.
I’ve thought for a long time that non-white countries such as Haiti that defied the West and won are inevitably subjected to constant interference and economic punishment until they are forced to collapse. Basically, it’s the concept of the “uppity negro” needed to be put back in their “place,” but it’s an entire country. The West has and never will forgive Haiti for successfully giving their French slavers the boot and they must be punished for all time because of it (see the Haiti Independence Debt for starters). I don’t think it’s an accident that Trump chose to demonize Haitians in particular. I think there is a deep antipathy towards Haitians that is baked into our political establishment for the above reasons, along with cartoonish depictions of Voudon/Voodoo. The fact that so many ordinary Americans can easily be persuaded that dark-skinned others are kidnapping and eating their pets doesn’t reflect very well of them.
Even if we put this aside, there’s still the fact that our political discourse refuses to acknowledge that the reason migrants keep showing up is because the West keeps destabilizing their countries of origin. The European migrant crisis is the result of the US invasion of Iraq, coupled with the destruction of Libya. Similarly, most migrants to the US are fleeing the results of the Monroe Doctrine in Latin America. This is only going to get worse because of climate change. The West wants two things that are mutually incompatible, namely to have these isolated ethnostates, while also desiring imperial plunder to fund an increasingly unsustainable lifestyle.
As for the second Trump shooter, there’s a lot that is still unknown about him at the moment. What I have heard is that Trump wasn’t scheduled to be at the golf course at the time the shooter was there. I think this detail alone will give lots of fuel for speculation. It’s also odd that he lived in Hawaii and didn’t seem to have a job, yet he could somehow afford to travel all the way to Florida and somehow obtained military grade weaponry. Then there’s the Ukraine of it all. If the first shooter seemed like the stereotypical spree killer in his late teens/early twenties, this guy seems (at first glance) like an over the hill oddball. It’s also possible that this shooter really believed that Trump is an existential threat and needed to be taken out once and for all, but failed even more so than the first guy. It’s a strange situation.
The question is just how much violence will we have down the stretch to Election Day and then, what will happen in the aftermath of the election. Things are like this because of Trump’s stink, our press corps is pretty awful, and our political process is controlled by big money. Hold on to your hats! It’s gonna get rough.