Sunday's postcard, and How the truth about Trumpism is (finally) finding its shoes

September 29, 2024

Footbridge to an Afterlife, Beautiful Wounds collection. Meadow Creek, lower Grand Coulee

The Eleventh Hour of Trumpian Indecency

“A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on.” (origin disputed)

I remember George Allen’s “Macaca” moment.

This was in August of 2006 when Allen—a Republican, incumbent U.S. Senator from Virginia—was running for re-election. He was being shadowed and filmed by S.R. Sidarth, an Indian-American volunteer for former Navy Secretary James Webb, Allen’s Democratic opponent.

At a campaign stop in southwest Virginia, Allen spotted Sidarth and his camera and said, into his microphone: "This fellow here, over here with the yellow shirt. Macaca or whatever his name is. He's with my opponent, he's following us around everywhere.” To which Allen added: "So welcome, let's give a welcome to Macaca here. Welcome to America, and the real world of Virginia.”

The rebukes to Allen’s racist mind-belch—from both liberal and conservative commentators—arrived swiftly. A few days later, Allen apologized to a group of Indian-Americans: "It was a mistake, it was wrong, and it was hurtful to people,” he told them.

By then it was too late though. The crude insult to Sidarth was the beginning of the end of Allen’s political career. He would lose his Senate seat in the next election.

Times have changed. Amidst the near-daily brain attacks of the Trump era—wherein the ex-President repeatedly trashes immigrants for spreading disease, crime, terrorism and “poisoning the blood of our country” — Allen’s not-so-long-ago slip of the mind is almost tame by comparison. Trump’s smears are more hateful, more deliberate, and never followed with an apology. The steady flow serves a purpose. Not that it’s a surprise, but it’s worth noting that Trump’s former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham has shared from Trump’s advice to her during her tenure: “As long as you keep repeating something, it doesn’t matter what you say.” Grisham recently endorsed Kamala Harris for president.

The rolling thunder of bullying and lying has worked well enough for Trump. At least until now. I wrote, last Wednesday, about the perfect storm that Trump and his vice presidential running mate JD Vance created and then walked into at Springfield, Ohio. More so than any other fix that Trump and his enablers have gotten themselves into, the still-unfolding Springfield fiasco has brought the full-frontal, moral rot of the MAGA movement into view, as clearly as a group mugshot.

We can thank JD Vance for this, but also Louisiana Rep. Clay Higgins and the people who sent him to Congress. More on Congressman Higgins in a minute.

Vance’s gift to the moment was to say the quiet part out loud to CNN’s Dana Bash. Over the past several years CNN has struggled with institutional vertigo in the turbulence of Trump’s unrelenting lying. The network has one of journalism’s premier fact-checkers in Daniel Dale, but foregoes real-time fact-checking (as it did in the Trump-Biden debate in June) because it doesn’t want to appear biased and confrontational. It’s a tightrope act, and the tension is often registered in Bash’s demeanor when she interviews people from Trump-world on the Sunday show she hosts.

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-Today’s post is free to all readers but please consider supporting The Daily Rhubarb with a paid subscription at the link below—tjc

So it was when she interviewed Vance on September 15th. (You can view the interview here.) Bash was confronting Vance with the facts that there is no evidence Haitians in Springfield were stealing and eating their neighbors’ dogs and cats. Bash visibly blanched (11:24 in the video) as Vance then tried to turn the table on her. “If I have to create stories so the American media actually pay attention to the suffering of the American people,” he said, “then that’s what I’m going to do Dana, because you guys are completely letting Kamala Harris coast.”

Not that I would presume to advise JD Vance but, as a general rule, a political movement that pumps “Trump Bible” sales then reflexively attacks accurate reporting as “fake news” is not exactly seizing the moral high ground. If the media were ignoring the cat-eating story out of Springfield, it’s because city officials were telling reporters the story was bogus. Perhaps the time had come to apologize and leave Springfield alone.

But no. Trump doubled down on his attacks on the innocent Haitians of Springfield at a rally the next day in Indiana, Pennsylvania. This may seem all too familiar, but in this case, the people who took the lead in calling out Trump and Vance for their lies were elected Republicans (including the Governor of Ohio, Mike DeWine) and a father outraged that his young son’s death in a school bus accident was being used by Trump and Vance to inflame racial hatred toward the Haitian community.

Another way for the media to counteract the auto-belching-accusation of “fake news(!)” from Trump and his defenders is to simply let people who’ve worked for, with, or closely observed the 45th President speak for themselves. The New York Times did this last week, simply quoting from the record more than a hundred voices, including:

•former chief of staff Mick Mulvany: “I think he’s a terrible human being.”

•former chief of staff John Kelly: “a man who admires autocrats and murderous dictators”

•former hand-picked attorney general Bill Barr: “He will always put his own interests and gratifying his own ego ahead of everything else, including the country’s interest. There’s no question about it.”

•former Secretary of Defense under Trump, Mark Esper: “I do regard him as a threat to democracy, democracy as we know it, our institutions, our political culture, all those things that make America great and have defined us…”

A venerable thread in American political culture is tolerance and inclusion. Countless Americans have given their blood and lives to the dream Martin Luther King, Jr. gave voice to from the Lincoln Memorial 61 years ago. King’s vision is not revocable but Trump has knowingly created room in his movement for those who believe that it should be erased. They read white supremacy into the “again” part of the MAGA slogan.

Lousiana’s Third District Congressman Clay Higgins

And this brings us to Congressman Clay Higgins who represents southwest Louisiana. Before running for Congress, Higgins agreed to resign from his job as a captain in the St. Landry Parish Sheriff’s department after he resisted an order from the sheriff to “tone down” his violence-charged messages in a popular “crime stoppers” video series. According to Mother Jones Higgins voted for former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke when Duke ran for Louisiana governor and resigned from the Opelousas, Louisiana police department in 2007 after admitting he lied about an incident in which he physically abused an unarmed African American suspect.

Last Wednesday, attorneys representing Haitians in Springfield announced they were taking action to bring suit against Trump and Vance alleging, among other things, “aggravated menacing.”

Higgins saw the Associated Press story about the action and reposted an image of it to Facebook along with this message:

“LOL. These Haitians are wild. Eating pets. Vudu (sic), nastiest country in the wester hemisphere, cults, slapstick gangsters..but damned if they don’t feel all sophisticated now filing charges against our President and VP. All these thugs better get their mind right and their ass out of our country before January 20th.”

Higgins took down the post shortly afterward, but that didn’t prevent a call for censure from the Congressional Black Caucus. Higgins told the Washington Post that the “unintended impact” of the posting had been “very sincerely”explained to him by a colleague. Yet, in the same news cycle, CNN quoted Higgins saying: “It’s all true”..“I can put up another controversial post tomorrow if you want me to. I mean, we do have freedom of speech. I’ll say what I want.”..“It’s not a big deal to me. It’s like something stuck to the bottom of my boot. Just scrape it off and move on with my life.”

The kindest thing one can say about the Trumpian movement is that it has thus far survived the mind-bending contradictions of its leader and its factions. How do you weld together the piety of the evangelical, Christian White Nationalists, the great leader’s documented criminality, open invitation to racists, and his promise of an ends-justify-the-means autocracy (Project 2025)? Specifically with regard to Springfield, the evangelical wing of the MAGA movement purports to serve Jesus wholeheartedly—as if Jesus would be in favor of demonizing and lying about a group of people seeking refuge from violence and natural disasters.

I lose as much sleep as anybody worrying about what a second Trump regime would mean for my children’s future, the future of the biosphere, and the fate of a society whose health ultimately depends on honor, civility and integrity. I don’t think Trump/Vance will win the election but, obviously, there’s some chance, maybe even a good chance they shall.

But I wouldn’t have written this piece if I weren’t more hopeful than I’ve been in months. Even if Trump wins election, it should be obvious that Kamala Harris has already inspired and energized a resistance to Trumpism, especially among younger voters, that—unlike the MAGA movement—has a solid moral foothold in the Enlightenment.

Trump’s popularity still confuses me. But his emptiness and the moral bankruptcy of JD Vance, Elon Musk and his other enablers does not. Its furniture is plywood, not oak. It’s telling that it took some of the most desperate people in the world, arriving as welcome (and legal) refugees in Springfield, Ohio to help bring into focus the contradictions and abject poverty of Trumpism as a political movement. Regardless of the outcome in November the days of the MAGA movement are numbered, and I doubt it will be a big number.

—tjc