Wednesday's postcard, and about last night...
September 11, 2024
Wild water and early fall color on the Spokane River
Worlds apart
I hadn't planned to write this morning. But there is something I heard historian Jon Meacham say about last night’s Harris/Trump debate that inspired me to do so. Rest assured, I do have “a concept” for a 2,500 word essay that will convince even Lara Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene to put aside their scarlet, MAGA caps and wrap their minds in garlands of peace roses. But that piece needs just a tad more work.
“A lot of towns don’t want to talk about it because they’re so embarrassed by it. In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.” —Donald Trump, during last night’s debate.
I learned early on that I don’t have a poker face; that when I attempt to mislead people my face and voice turn me in, and my arms extend to receive the handcuffs. Blame it on my father, blame it on the nuns.
But not only does Donald Trump have no shame, he lies with such conviction that a subset of his devotees will risk their lives for him, as they did on January 6, 2021. It’s in his voice, the smothering bro-bravado that also emanates from Sean Hannity, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, the late Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, Joe Rogan, and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., among others. (Nikki Haley, not so much.) It’s seductive and it plays so well to others’ grievances and weaknesses that there’s no place for lingering-doubts and certainly no pause for fact-checking.
To fact check is heresy, which is why Trump world was in a tizzy last night and this morning over even the few fact checks that the ABC moderators attempted last night. Trump’s bellicose accusation (above) about Haitian immigrants killing and eating pets in Springfield, Ohio is one of them. In a low-key matter of fact way, ABC’s co-moderator David Muir told Trump that the on-line meme that spawned his steam-powered charge was false, based on a phone conversation that Muir had with the town’s city manager. Rather than back down, Trump amped up, saying he’d seen it reported on TV. (You can watch CNN’s ace fact-checker Daniel Dale address it here. Dale counted 33 “falsehoods” from Trump during the evening, versus 1 for Harris).
The Springfield nonsense is no loose strand. Trump’s main thrust against Biden, and now Harris, is that they’ve opened the borders to immigrants and criminals who are “poisoning the blood of our country.” (In case you’re wondering recent studies show the crime rate among immigrants is lower than that for native-born Americans. It so easily stems from Trump’s longstanding smears against Latinos and African-Americans that—as Harris reminded viewers least night—includes his years-long and bogus campaign to diminish and tarnish Barack Obama by suggesting he was born in Africa, not Hawaii. Odd that this warning of alien criminality comes from someone under pending criminal indictment, already facing sentencing on 34 felony counts.
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—tjc
