Shrugging at "Coco Chow"

[Celerity]

How do you even write about Trump’s anti-Asian racism at this point?

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/10/trump-mcconnell-elaine-chao-racist/



Maybe it makes sense that “DEATH WISH” was the part that garnered headlines. After all, a record of inciting real-life violence renders such a message concerning.

But even as someone who’s on the payroll to keep abreast of the relentless garbage, I didn’t catch the Coco Chow bit until well after a solid day later. It came as the second beat of Donald Trump’s message lashing out at Mitch McConnell, when the former president and forever frontrunner of the GOP called the Senate minority leader’s partner, Elaine Chao, a “China-loving wife, Coco Chow.” Neither Chao nor McConnell have responded to the overtly racist slur directed at the Taiwanese-born former transportation secretary. I found it while mindlessly stumbling across what Rick Scott thought about the whole thing. (Not much, by the way.) Most write-ups obscured it to the final lines of the news cycle.

Coco Chow is tired and unimaginative, something you expected from the outcast uncle at Thanksgiving. But the collective shrug has grated at me. Sure, we all wagged fingers at “Chinese virus and Kung Fu Flu,” racist rhetoric that deeply inflamed anti-Asian violence during the height of the pandemic. But a meh response to garbage like Coco Chow—duly relegated to the second beat of an unhinged post published on a floundering social media platform—is another entry into the generally underwhelming attention paid to Trump’s more casual bouts of racism: his utterances of “China,” a pronunciation so exaggerated and bizarre, yet always seemed to go under the radar; asking the “pretty Korean lady” where she’s from; his public mockery of Asian accents.

How do you even write about Trump’s racism at this point? Does doing so benefit him? I’m not sure. But McConnell and the rest of the GOP seem intent, in fact perfectly well-suited, on extending the very American tradition of ignoring anti-Asian racism.

snip

[MiHale]

1. I think he's worn us out..

Outrage about this…outrage about that…outrage about stealing documents…obstruction…lying..fraud…and on and on.

Name calling is really low on the list of outrages as wrong as that is just can’t be outraged about everything anymore. donnie is losing his creativity mostly old racist slurs. Not condoning just …worn out.

[Walleye]

2. He got away with saying Letitia "peekaboo" James.

[no_hypocrisy]

3. TFG throws so many dirt bombs at different people of different ethnicities

that even if prominent Democrats were to take him to task (what, you believe any Republican would protest?), he still benefits b/c it keeps his name alive for at least another day. He's the one who isn't afraid to take on non-whites for being so "uppity". An attack on Elaine Chao in his mind is also another attack on China, the country that brought us Covid (a disease that TFG disclaimed until he got it.) And he has completely disassociated the fact that he named her to his Cabinet. (Maybe when TFG exercised nepotism on behalf of McConnell, it was supposed to be a perpetual/eternal/infinite quid pro quo on McConnell's side.)

[Kid Berwyn]

4. "We call her, 'Pocahontas'"

Drumpf said to a group that included former USMC Navajo Code-Talkers.

[JuJuChen]

5. He's stuck in the 80's

some of that stuff he says you could get away with in the 80's and no one told him