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(85,996 posts) Wed Sep 14, 2016, 01:37 PM Sep 2016

In his haste to condemn Clinton for “deplorable,” Trump leashed himself to the filth of the nation

Brian Beutler ‏@brianbeutler ( 4h4 hours ago
In his haste to condemn Clinton for using the term “deplorable,” Trump leashed himself to the filth of the nation. https://newrepublic.com/article/136779/hillarys-deplorables-barb-wasnt-gaffebut-trump-campaigns-response

Hillary’s “Deplorables” Barb Wasn’t a Gaffe—But the Trump Campaign’s Response Was

It’s obviously normal in politics for party members to hold their co-partisans to lower standards than their opponents. House Speaker Paul Ryan has reluctantly scolded Trump for making racist comments, but he can always be counted on to criticize Clinton in full-throated, unambiguous ways for far lesser sins. By the same token, it’s natural that Pence would be comfortable attacking Democrats in terms he’d never use to describe Trump or Ryan.

The damning thing is that Pence and the Trump campaign are now extending that umbrella of rhetorical protection to an unrepentant Klansman. In their haste to condemn Clinton for using the term “deplorable,” the Trump campaign robbed itself of control over who it gets to present as its allies, and who it does not.

The truth, though, is that Trump set this trap for himself a long time ago.

The Trump campaign has gone to odd lengths to convince Republican voters (suburban women in particular) that Trump isn’t unacceptably racist. Thus the strange recent spectacle of Trump addressing white suburban audiences with entreaties to black people in which he depicted their lives as fully unredeemed (“You live in poverty, your schools are no good, you have no jobs”). A less clownish way to accomplish the same goal would be to treat Clinton’s point with some level of nuance. Yes, some bad people have attached themselves to our campaign, as they have with every campaign in human history, but we reject them and will not be serving their interests from the White House.

That option is foreclosed for Trump because these people prop up his campaign—not just in the sense that he can’t relinquish the white supremacist vote in November, but in the sense that his campaign chair and some of his top surrogates are white nationalist heroes. What they are finding is that it’s impossible to play deplorable to the deplorables, and admirable to the admirables, without giving away the game to one or the other.