Republicans Can't Defend Trump and Vance's Indefensible Behavior So They Deflect, Deflect, Deflect
I was pleasantly surprised when Donald Trump repeatedly calling Kamala Harris mentally challenged was not ignored entirely by the media and treated like more harmless bluster from a patently, adorably unserious human being.
I was similarly surprised that the media is calling out Donald Trump and JD Vance for aggressively perpetuating the racist lie that Haitians have invaded a small town in Ohio and are feasting merrily on the pet cats and dogs of its citizens.
Trump overpowers the press by saying so many hateful, undefensible things that they can’t possibly respond to them all.
I don’t generally watch the news but it’s been fascinating and mortifying watching Republicans try to defend the incredibly hateful and clearly false things that their ticket has been saying in one of the worst, most toxic and hateful campaigns I’ve experienced in my forty-eight years as an American citizen.
In “defending” Trump and Vance’s words and actions Republicans have shown tremendous discipline. It doesn’t matter who is being interviewed or who is doing the interrogating, the Republican response is the same.
Conventional wisdom holds that politicians shouldn’t answer the question that they were asked but rather the question that they wanted to be asked.
So when Conservatives are asked questions along the lines of, “How do you defend Trump’s repeated assertions that Kamala Harris and Joe Biden are both ‘mentally challenged’ and consequently unqualified for office? What does that say to people who have intellectual difficulties, that a man you think should be given unlimited power uses that as a childish insult?” and “How can you possibly justify the racist scapegoating of Haitian immigrants you’ve falsely accused of eating pet cats and dogs?” they instead hear, “Rant to me defensively about how the failed policies of the dangerously liberal radical left Marxists are harming the men and women of our fine country!"
Republicans have zero interest in answering the first question because there is no good answer. There’s no way to justify what Trump said because it is unjustifiable. It’s hateful. It’s sexist. It’s bigoted. It’s ageist. It’s ableist. All at the same time!
Trump isn’t just behaving like a schoolyard bully; he’s behaving in a manner that would fill a schoolyard bully with shame.
The best Republicans could muster was Lindsey Graham sputtering that Harris’ ideas and policies are “crazy.”
You similarly cannot justify using your enormous power to scapegoat a vulnerable immigrant community whose lives were already difficult enough without crazed hate-mongers screaming at the top of their lungs that Haitians are vermin out to slit throats, rape women and munch happily on our tabby cats and Yorkshire Terriers.
Ironically, the most anti-dog president ever is being posited as the savior of your pets.
Trump and Vance have no shame. They are locked into the lie that scary brown people will steal and then eat their puppies. It’s literal red meat for the base. Trump still won’t concede that he was wrong about the Central Park Five after they’ve been exonerated in every conceivable way. He will never admit that he lost the 2020 Presidential election. I wouldn’t be surprised if, on his tombstone, it asserts that he won the presidential election “by a lot” but was robbed of his rightful victory by the deep state.
When a journalist confronted Vance about the hateful hoax that he was playing a huge role in perpetrating, he played the “one of my constituents said something” card. When pressed on the total lack of evidence validating his claim, he sneered that the exact details didn’t matter; what mattered was that there were scary foreign black people in Ohio—many here legally— who were committing crimes and turning Mayberry into a third-world country.
It doesn’t matter to Trump or Vance whether there are Haitian immigrants stealing pets and eating them; what matters is that ridiculous, hateful fiction feeds into their deeply xenophobic conception of a world where POC are terrorizing faultless white Americans who need big daddy Trump to protect them.
The particulars and the truth don’t matter. What matters is convincing people that the scary black lady who laughs is going to personally invite even scarier black people with even more exotic names to kill and eat you and your family.
Some Republicans are so flummoxed that they cannot muster a defense. On CNN, Ana Navarro asked Republican strategist Scott Jennings, "Yesterday, when (Trump) said that, he wasn’t being sarcastic, he wasn’t being hyperbolic, he was amplifying a conspiracy theory that I think you would agree puts a target on the backs of Haitian immigrants and that it is based on racism, would you agree on that?
Jennings sat in silence because there was no reasonable response beyond fierce condemnation of the Republican ticket’s deplorable actions. So she reframed the question and asked, “Do you think that if there were 20,000 Scandinavians that had been sent to Springfield, that people would be saying that they’re eating cats and dogs and geese?”
"I’m not going to answer for him, his memes, or anything else,” Jennings sputtered. When asked if this conspiracy was rooted in racism, Jennings replied, like a fragile little snowflake, "I don’t know the answer. I’m not going to sit here and answer for somebody. I don’t talk to Donald Trump about what the motivations are, and I don’t answer to you, either.”
The Republican playbook is simple, primitive, and, unfortunately, pretty damn effective: when called out on your sins and your lies,, deflecct, deflect, deflect.
Nathan had life-changing but expensive dental implants, and his dental plan doesn’t cover them, so he started a GoFundMe at https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-nathans-journey-to-dental-implants. Give if you can!
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