Head–to–head: eyeball-to-eyeball, face-to-face, head-on, mano a mano, one-on-one, toe-to-toe, punch-counter-punch --> soft spot, dead ears?
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Thursday, Jun 23, 2016 09:42 AM PDT
Donald Trump keeps destroying his own campaign: His ill-timed attack on Clinton exposes his soft underbelly
Trump's hit speech on Hillary showed that the edges of his fact-free campaign are beginning to fray
Topics: Chris Christie, Donald Trump, Election 2016, Elizabeth Warren, Hillary Clinton, Judge Curiel, Elections News, Politics News
As Donald Trump harangued against “crooked Hillary,” on Tuesday, the longest-serving GOP Speaker of the House in history was on his way to federal prison in Minnesota. It was a fitting juxtaposition, worthy of a Greek play.
Trump — sticking close to his prepared remarks — didn’t actually use the phrase “crooked Hillary,” but he did accuse her of being “a world-class liar” who “may be the most corrupt person ever to seek the presidency.” Apparently, he hadn’t looked in the mirror recently.
As Amanda Marcotte noted on Salon already his entire speech was riddled with blatant well-known lies. Trump lied about Clinton being a bigger liar, he lied about starting off “with a small loan” and building a $10 billion business, he lied about Clinton’s server being hacked by foreign governments, lied about multiple aspects of her immigration policy, lied about Benghazi, lied about his own support for the Iraq War… the list went on and on. Meanwhile, the visibly broken former Speaker Dennis Hastert entered prison in a wheelchair.
Of course, Trump is supposedly at odds with the GOP establishment, and in some ways he surely is. But he’s Mr. GOP right now, their presumptive presidential nominee, with a long history of buried personal secrets, and devastating unanswered questions, which have only just begun coming into full public view. And Denny Hastert is a sharp, uncomfortable reminder of just how dark those buried secrets can turn out to be.
As the Atlantic noted recently in an overview of Trump scandals, “The breadth of Trump’s controversies is truly yuge, ranging from allegations of mafia ties to unscrupulous business dealings, and from racial discrimination to alleged marital rape. The[y] stretch over more than four decades, from the mid-1970s to the present day.” If Hastert avoided scrutiny by seeming to have nothing to hide, Trump has done exactly the opposite—at least until recently: he’s avoided scrutiny by having so much to hide that nobody seems to know where to begin. He has as many potential scandals to consider as he has lies in his anti-Clinton speech.
But as the primary campaign ended, and the general election phase began, that’s begun to change. The attacks on Judge Curiel overseeing a Trump University lawsuit were a case in point, and as Trump’s lie-laden diatribe against Clinton unfolded it was only natural to wonder which of his many weakpoints would be the next to buckle under the growing strain. (And no, I’m not talking about the underage rape accusation. I will not talk about Trump being a rapist! You’ll just have to click the link and read for yourself.)
Clinton herself highlighted one severe weakpoint, in her speech attacking Trump’s economics the day before. “Trump Ties are made in China, Trump Suits in Mexico, Trump Furniture in Turkey, Trump Picture Frames in India, Trump Barware in Slovenia, and I could go on and on, but you get the idea,” she said. “And I’d love for him to explain how all of that fits with his talk about ‘America First.’”
It’s not a scandal, in any traditional sense, which may help explain why Trump sleep-walked right into that buzzsaw in his speech. The economy was rigged, he said. “It’s rigged by big businesses who want to leave our country, fire our workers, and sell their products back into the U.S. with absolutely no consequences for them.” He was describing himself to a T—just as Clinton had pointed out the day before.
Trump also said, “It’s rigged by big donors who want to keep down wages,” which also described himself, when said American’s wages were “too high” in a GOP debate last November, explaining why he wouldn’t support increasing the minimum wage. He reversed course — sort of — after Bernie Sanders criticized him, but he still refuses to call for a higher federal minimum wage, saying — in typical Republican fashion — that it should be left to the states. The states — which are barring municipalities from raising their local minimum wages, in direct opposition to the bottom-up Fight For 15 movement.
These are not the juicy sorts of tabloid scandals that politicians normally worry about. But in the end, they could prove to be most damaging to Trump. Recent polling showing voters trust Trump over Clinton on the economy says less about either candidate than meets the eye, despite what pundits might say. Republicans have long been trusted more on the economy, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary going back for a century. It’s very difficult to get majorities to believe the truth—that Republicans are bad for the economy in general. But it’s much easier to get them to believe that Democrats care more about people like them, or about the middle class in general. So when economic issues are grounded in those terms, Democrats tend to do better.
That’s exactly what these issues Trump just stumbled over are all about. They haven’t gotten a lot of attention right away. But they should have, particularly since they’re not peripheral concerns in Trump’s consciousness, the sorts of things he can easily shift ground on, even in mid-sentence. Putting his name all over everything is who he is, in a most fundamental sense. And when it comes to anything outside of real estate, that is inherently synonymous with outsourcing, firing workers, and selling “products back into the U.S. with absolutely no consequences.”
