So yesterday the Great Orange Hope of the Internet’s Jew-hating white supremacist crowd gave a speech in the belly of the beast — the annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, a fiercely pro-Israel lobbying group.
Trump, whose “speeches” are generally free-jazz improvisations filled with crude jokes and insults, read a prepared text off a teleprompter this time, which enabled him to get through the appearance without making endless jokes about how Jews are very, er, careful with money.
As the Daily Beast reported, Trump “managed not to get booed” during the speech, though the audience did laugh a bit when he declared himself the world’s greatest expert on the Iran deal. But he got a surprisingly positive response for his highly atypical speech, and even managed to get a standing ovation.
So you might expect a great deal of wailing and gnashing of teeth from the Anime Nazis and other Jew-hating white nationalists who are some of his most fervent supporters. There were, to be sure, some who felt just a teensy bit betrayed, and some of them took their frustrations to Twitter.
I have to censor this Tweet a little.
This Twitter egg was equally angry, if a bit more difficult to parse.
https://twitter.com/cp20000000/status/712086552151773184
https://twitter.com/cp20000000/status/712089687578550273
This Tweet needs a comma after Trump:
https://twitter.com/cp20000000/status/712086970055442435
But a surprisingly large number of Trump’s anti-Semitic fans took the speech in stride. Some were grudging about it:
https://twitter.com/ReactionaryWASP/status/712065297193242624
Others were pretty chuffed that, as they saw it, the wily Trump had beaten the Elders of Zion (as it were) at their own game.
https://twitter.com/MiyazakiNoise/status/712113489603600385
Over on the Internet Nazi tabloid The Daily Stormer, Andrew Anglin offered a detailed realpolitik apologia for Trump’s speech.
Okay, guys. Here’s the deal: in order to get elected, Donald Trump has to say nice things about Israel.
As Anglin sees it, Trump wasn’t trying to pick up any Jewish votes. His “pandering is purely for the evangelical vote.”
I think he actually has a point here; many American evangelicals are fairly fanatical supporters of Israel — and of right-wingers in Israeli politics — not so much out of a love of Jewish people but because so many Rapture-ready fundamentalists think the existence of Israel is a sign of the coming apocalypse and they don’t want to mess that up.
Anglin continues:
Remember: these were just words.
Everything Trump has said he wants to implement as policy goes against the domestic agenda of the Jew race. And most of what he has said goes against the geopolitical agenda of the Jew race. … he attacks every aspect of their agenda (except Israel).
According to Anglin, his comrades on the far right need to take a page from the SJWs they’re always going on about.
Look at how the left did things. When the “gay rights” movement first began in earnest in the 1980s, they didn’t tell you they were going to be teaching anal sex with men to 5-year-olds in school. They didn’t tell you they were going to be injecting little boys with female hormones and ultimately cutting their penises off. They didn’t even tell you they were going to legalize gay marriage. It was a progression.
Granted, some of this is only taking place in the highly fertile imagination of right-wingers, but Anglin’s overall point is clear.
[M]oving things back rightward will be a progression. Trump is a yuuuuuuuuge first step in this process.
With Trump shifting the narrative right, identifying subversive alien forces such as the immigrants, he is bringing us closer to the place where we will be able to push the Jewish issue into the mainstream.
It’s kind of amazing just how many anti-Semites not-so-secretly yearn to be master manipulators and maneuverers like the imaginary Elders of Zion they make so much noise about.
But even as Trump is winning over the nation’s bigots and bringing about something of a revival of the Jew-hating, Nazi-symp far-right he is also galvanizing the left — and disgusting most decent people. To most Americans, Trump sounds more like a drunken neighbor than he does a political genius.
I suspect that the loyalty of Trump’s far-right followers will end him costing him votes. Hopefully, a yuuuuuuuuge number of them.
The school nurse said it was a smallpox inoculation!!!!
I’m off into hiding before she comes round to finish the job!
I’m like 70% sure that Mr. Twitter-Egg here is a poorly-crafted bot. All of their tweets are just a jumble of antisemitic conspiracy theory buzzwords, mixed with shares of Trump articles and videos that are literally just the title of whatever they linked to.
I really hope Trump loses badly in November. His base is so small he shouldn’t have lasted to Super Tuesday, but he had the benefit of an historically weak GOP field.
@C.S.Strowbridge
I think he’ll get creamed. Even if the Democratic nominee is Hillary Clinton, who’s arguably the weaker of the two candidates to go up against him, he’ll get steamrolled. He’s been winning primaries in part thanks to a largely crowded field at the start. That gave him momentum further down the road. He has historic dislike among women, Hispanics, and African-Americans.
Most Republicans who didn’t vote Trump in the last round of primaries said they wouldn’t vote for him if he became the nominee. Many would sooner vote third party or, in some cases, Democratic, since it would do less damage to the Republican brand and they mostly know what to expect from a Clinton or Sanders administration.
Oh and the Economist declared his potential presidency a top threat to the global market.
For those who want to follow the politics and manoeuvres of the election, http://www.electoral-vote.com is a great site to read daily – it has a calm and very well explained summary of everything that’s going on.
The most likely outcome just now is that Trump might barely win the nomination outright (although I’m hoping for the chaos of a broken convention) but will be absolutely hammered in the general election. I’m only worried about two things – the first is disillusioned Bernie voters staying home and denying Hillary votes (I like Bernie myself and he would probably be my choice if I had a vote, but I wouldn’t be upset with Hillary as the nominee either).
The second is Trump toning himself down throughout the campaign, and relying on the American electorate’s not-stellar memory to wash away the massively bigoted things he’d been saying for the last year. He seemed to do it here (enough for outright racists to disavow him, which for anyone else would be great but for Trump sounds like losing his primary base), and in his speech post-Super Tuesday, where he sounded shockingly, frighteningly electable compared to the persona he’d put forward at all other times.
Is it too selfish if I wish Trump wins so it will accelerate the fall of our current pro-US president?
…no?
PS: I can’t bring myself to *really* wish it because I can’t just ignore the suffering inflicted on millions of people that such a triumph would bring.
@davidknewton:
According to FiveThirtyEight, Trump’s road to winning the convention outright relies on him winning California. If he loses that, he can’t realistically make it to 1237 delegates and a brokered convention occurs.
7 June (the day of the California primary) is going to be an interesting day. NSON’s 13 March survey predicts Trump leading over Cruz by 38% to 22%, but field polls have consistently predicted a narrow Cruz victory.
It’s a shame they can’t both lose.
@Miss Andry
I think that it’s the other way around: Hillary is the stronger candidate*. There are some serious hurdles for Sanders
Sanders would be the oldest president ever (he’d be 75 at inauguration – Reagan was 73 when he started his second term), his leftist and populist policies are easier to distort and set a negative narrative on (something the GOP is great at – notice the disingenuous and stupid already believe our allies Euro-socialism is exactly the same as Soviet-style ‘communism’), and frankly, he may criticize ‘Clinton and the Democratic Machine’, but it’s that machine that helps win elections (especially in our two party system).
While Sanders’s views are closer in line with mine, Clinton has a greater chance of winning – and that’s all that matters, that a Democrat wins. Can’t take the chance Bernie’s flaws cost the election. It’s policy over people. Hillary may not be ideal, but she won’t roll back gay rights (which is very important to me), repeal the ACA, or fight to overturn Roe vs Wade. A Republican President would most assuredly do so.
*Which seems to be the pundit consensus as well, despite the amount of young, educated, urban liberal enthusiasm on the Internet for Bernie.
ETA: I spll reel gud
The “Jew race” has an agenda???
I better go ask my Jewish friends if they’ve even heard about it. Chances are, they’ll be scratching their heads just as much as I’m doing now.
Agenda? Is it something about bagels? Because that’s something I could get behind.
Yes, this. The idea of some sort of insular ethnic tribe using their wits and strategic mastery to rule the world was always a racist fantasy: a mirror for the desires of those doing the fantasizing (not of those they were fantasizing about).
After Romney lost in 2012 (in a race that many felt would be a shoo-in for the Republicans), the GOP did an ‘autopsy’ to try and determine what went wrong, and what would need to happen in order for Republicans to win the presidency in the future. The results: in order to win a nationwide election, the GOP candidate would need to worry less about appealing to white men, the far-right, and older conservatives, and more about appealing to Latinos, Black Americans, women, and youth (had the electorate been entirely white men, then Romney would have won in a landslide but, of course, he didn’t).
So basically, Trump is enacting the exact opposite of this strategy. He’s actively alienating non-white voters (and, to some extent, women) so as to appeal to the hard-right, white, male conservative base. If all the common wisdom (up to and including the GOP’s own research) holds up, then those things that have endeared Trump to the right-wing base will be anathema to actually winning a general, national election. The thing I worry about, though, is that so much common wisdom seems invalid w/r/t Trump – common wisdom would have it that he should’ve flamed-out months ago, after all.
“Don’t worry guys, he’s only friendly to actual Jews, not the imaginary Jews in my head.”
(Seriously, Trump’s frickin’ daughter is Jewish…how do they possibly think he’s going to support antisemitism?)
@Miss Andry,
Personally, I think Hillary’s the stronger candidate. (Not that I don’t have respect for Bernie’s policies, even if I’m a Hillary guy myself.) We’re seeing Hillary holding her own against constant attacks from both the Right and Left and fending off a couple of trumped-up scandals. We’re seeing her enduring pretty much everything her opponents can throw at her, and still coming out ahead. I’ve got faith that her poll numbers will at least stay as good (or likely improve) after the primary’s over. Meanwhile, Bernie’s being mostly ignored by the Right…his polls would take a huge hit once the GOP starts running attack ads if he’s nominated.
@feartheminotaur : actually, it’s the reverse, because Bernie appeal to Trump voters. So he can siphon a good bunch of his votes, which Hillary can’t.
@Luzbelitx:
Wouldn’t a Trump victory be actually beneficial for Macri, though? They’re buddies after all. Just you wait, with his help we’ll build a wall between Argentina and Bolivia… and the Bolivians will pay for it!
/justjoking (because no doubt many Argentineans would actually be thrilled at the idea)
@Luzbelitx
There is a part of me that wants to see Trump win. That part of me wants to see the carnage unfold. It wants to see the world burn. It is a part of me that does not have much control over me, fortunately.
@Kreator
Well, yours is a good point as well.
I just see it as adding straw to a newspaper on fire… sure, the flames will be bigger, but the whole thing will be consumed faster.
I’m not sure thisi s how it will work out, just hoping very hard that the worst-case-scenario would mean everything will end faster…
Well, we do have the wall between Retiro and Villa 31, and I’m pretty sure the poor people paid most of it :/
As someone who lives here: Good fucking luck, Mr. Trump. Even the Republicans in my family hate you.
Makroth,
I’m in the same boat. There’s a part of me that thinks that the political pendulum in the US will only start swinging left again if things hit rock bottom. Like what happened with the great depression leading to the New Deal.
However, there’s no guarantee such a thing would happen if we had another economic calamity. There was a significant fascist movement here during the depression and that’s something everyone often forgets. We were dangerously close to fascism winning and the New Deal only barely happened.
The more rational part of me prevails and I will take the status quo over chaos.
Let’s face it. We don’t know where rock bottom actually is.
@Ohlmann I wouldn’t hang my hat on that. That’s more ‘I want my candidate’ wishful thinking than anything that polling data or past results have shown.
Republican identifying voters aren’t going to put Bernie the Free Stuff for Them Commie (which is how he’ll be portrayed) into the White House because Trump says some (more) ridiculous nonsense.
And even if the GOP pulls a fast one and it isn’t Trump, the clowns supporting him aren’t going to vote for an old, Northeastern, establishment ‘Socialist’ who wants to give their taxes to someone that didn’t ‘earn’ them.
Look at the issues Trump is polling well on – anti-immigrant, anti-PC culture, anti-taxes – those aren’t issues that overlap with Bernie. Fervent Sanders supporters may think his anti-billionaire, little guy rhetoric will play with angry at the system Trump supporters, but the two diverge greatly in their approach in addressing those voter concerns: Bernie by removing billionaires from policy decisions; Trump by suggesting policy is best decided by a benevolent billionaire. If you support the latter, the former is not going to suddenly win you over because ‘brokered convention’.
The last couple of elections showed there are few ‘swing’ voters; once a nominee is in, voters generally vote for their party’s candidate or don’t vote at all.
feartheminotaur: I think that the “Bernie is the stronger candidate” argument boils down to the various ‘hypothetical line-up’ polls that were done awhile back. They invariably showed Trump losing against either candidate, but by a closer margin against Clinton. Of course, those polls tend to be a bit unreliable, especially this far out.
On the flipside, however, I think Bernie would have dramatically shorter coattails–he’d have less of a boost down-ticket for traditional Democrats, making it harder for him to get a cooperative Congress out of the gate. (In fact, I can see a lot of Republicans voting for him and making SURE they vote for a GOP Congress and so forth–stop Trump, but don’t let that dirty Socialist have any power at all).
**********
There’s a lot of weirdness this year because of Trump.
One possibility being discussed is the three-candidate situation, where either Trump secures the GOP and they put up a token alternate, or he gets booted at a brokered convention and runs as a third-party candidate, himself.
One theoretical possibility from that is a non-victor in November, with none of the candidates securing the majority. At this point, it gets kicked over to the House of Representatives–and the way this gets worked out there is wonky as hell:
An aside–those state delegations in the House are, if another blog poster I read is right, have to be all-or-nothing votes; if not all the Illinois Representatives can settle on someone, for instance, Illinois’ vote doesn’t get counted. I’m not sure how many states are single-party in their Congressional delegation…
Now, that said, this is a bit of a longshot–given the number of winner-take-all states, it’s unlikely the third-party candidate will do more than make the Democratic nominee an even bigger winner. However, in the case of a Trump GOP Ticket, the GOP also has another reason to run an alternate candidate–namely, providing cover down-ticket. They really, really don’t want to be dealing with ads across the country saying, essentially, “GOP candidate John Jackson is comfortable running on a ticket headed by a fascist. Should we be comfortable with John Jackson?” So they put up some inoffensive chumbalone to stand there and receive endorsements from any candidate being pressed on this point.
I’m hoping for the contested convention purely out of… spite? Shadenfreude? A vague hope that the entire GOP will finally receive some semblance of the blowback for the horrors they’ve perpetuated on the nation?
Whatever. As long as SOMEONE gets hit with the empty chair, I’m good.
The rock is at the bottom of the ocean. The ocean is fucking deep, and here be monsters. So far only one of those seems to have floated to the surface like a great orange kraken.
A brokered convention in which Trump isn’t selected is death for the Republican party. Trump’s support comes from a fairly wide swath of the Republican base who are fed up with the cut-taxes-on-the-wealthy agenda the Republican party has hammered to the exclusion of all other economic policy since at least 1980. Most Republican voters aren’t wealthy and they aren’t stupid. They know they are getting screwed by those policies, but they have stuck by the Republican party because of social issues like abortion and gay rights.
Trump is telling them, “It’s okay to think about your pocketbooks for a change.” His overall message is racist, which doesn’t hurt because most of these voters are at least somewhat racist, but the other candidates are perfectly capable of meeting or even topping his racist rhetoric. They can’t match his near-total disregard for the “cut taxes cut taxes starve the beast” standard Republican economic policy. His economic story is garbled and vague, but we can tell that it isn’t that.
Those Republicans aren’t going to meekly vote for Rubio just because the Republican party leaders tell them that Rubio is their candidate. If Trump goes into the convention just short of the minimum needed to avoid a convention fight, and then is ousted in favor of someone who had far, far fewer delegates, the Republicans will lose the general. Trump’s supporters will say (and have a point saying it) that Trump was screwed out of a nomination that he won by having the most delegates of any candidate, even if he failed to reach a clear majority. They won’t vote for a different candidate. They’ll stay home or vote for someone else (not Clinton, but maybe a write-in, or one of the minor party candidates like the Libertarian).
I honestly just don’t see a way out of this for the GOP. Either Trump wins the majority needed to take the nomination outright, or he wins a plurality and is given the nomination at the convention, or he wins a plurality and is not given the nomination. All of these scenarios lead to disaster for the Republican party, and him not winning at least a plurality just isn’t in the cards.
I never understood that, Trump was always pro-Israel and had absolutely no problems with his daughter’s conversion into Orthodox Judaism, why do all these neo-nazi antisemite-types flock to him, he’s not one of them.