Blow's Friday tweet:
But if you read The Hijacked American Presidency, you will be glad he kept at it.
This is a superbly crafted column, which begins like this:
Every now and then we are going to have to do this: Step back from the daily onslaughts of insanity emanating from Donald Trump’s parasitic presidency and remind ourselves of the obscenity of it all, registering its magnitude in its full, devastating truth.There is something insidious and corrosive about trying to evaluate the severity of every offense, trying to give each an individual grade on the scale of absurdity. Trump himself is the offense. Everything that springs from him, every person who supports him, every staffer who shields him, every legislator who defends him, is an offense. Every partisan who uses him — against all he or she has ever claimed to champion — to advance a political agenda and, in so doing, places party over country, is an offense.We must remind ourselves that Trump’s very presence in the White House defiles it and the institution of the presidency. Rather than rising to the honor of the office, Trump has lowered the office with his whiny, fragile, vindictive pettiness.The presidency has been hijacked.
Now I have limited myself — I cannot really quote much more without violating fair use.
And yet, there is so much more that is worth quoting.
So let me just offer a few snips to illustrate how superb this column is.
Consider this:
But his words shouldn’t have shocked. His tweet was just another pebble on a mountain of vulgarities. This act of coarseness was in fact an act of continuity. Trump was being Trump: the grossest of the gross, a profanity against propriety.
Note the use of superlatives, note how he places Trump in an appropriate extreme category.
And yet, it is hard to say anything new, as Blow told us in that tweet when he was trying to craft this column, at a time even before the latest outrage of the Wrestlemania tweet (which since is was retweeted from the official POTUS account is now no doubt an official Presidential statement). Blow himself realizes this:
There are no new words to express it; there is no new and novel way to catalog it. It is what it is and has been from day one: The most extraordinary and profound electoral mistake America has made in our lifetimes and possibly ever.
Those reading those words at Daily Kos, where I am sharing them, will agree with the assessment of “profound electoral mistake” and probably agree with the “possibly ever.”
I will leave to you to read in the original all of the material Blow cites to support his argument.
In his penultimate paragraph we read
Donald Trump is depending on people’s fatigue. He is banking on your becoming overwhelmed by his never-ending antics. He is counting on his capacity to wear down the resistance by sheer force.
I am reminded of how the attorneys for the Police who beat up Rodney King wore down the jurors by replaying the video over and over, desensitizing them, making them numb to the sheer impact. One problem with the Clinton campaign was that it overdid the the focus of the outrageous statements by Trump, and did not as clearly offer a forceful presentation of Clinton’s ideas or her own record of achievement. In a sense, some voters became numb to the antics and implications of Trump’s statements and actions.
Now we face the deliberate distractions Trump presents us with almost daily. The people are not hearing as much about the implications of health care policy, the fraud of the “electoral integrity” commission (a subject Blow does address), and other matters of great importance to the future of our society. Yes, it is true that often his outbursts are simply emotional explosions,and they do demonstrate the danger of Trump’s lack of emotional control on the world stage. And there is no doubt we SHOULD be aware of his latest outrages, but it should not be at the expense of our understanding the implications of policy and personnel.
We also face the conundrum of how we address Trump’s grossness without desensitizing ourselves and most importantly the larger American populace.
Blow rightly holds to account those Republicans who do not oppose Trump on his grossness not only of expression but of devastating policy. When you read the column — and I insist you do — you will read his articulate explanation of what is happening, his clear challenge on this.
We must remain consistent. We cannot let ourselves get worn down. We must resist this cynical dismantling of the polity of democracy.
So I will conclude as does Blow:
We must be adamant that that will never come to pass. Trump is an abomination, and a cancer on the country, and none of us can rest until he is no longer holding the reins of power.
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