Morning Thanks

Garrison Keillor once said we'd all be better off if we all started the day by giving thanks for just one thing. I'll try.

Tuesday, January 09, 2024

Does everybody understand what he's saying?


"I just hope we get fair treatment," said Trump at a rally in Sioux Center, Iowa Friday afternoon. "Because if we don’t, our country’s in big, big trouble. Does everybody understand what I’m saying? I think so, because they’ll cover that completely differently."

It was a fool's errand for him to think--if, in fact, he did--that a second visit to the little town of Sioux Center, Iowa, would resonate with that big line he threw out to the nation the last time he was in town, the one about him shooting someone on Fifth Avenue or Broadway, or whatever it was. Specifics are less important than analysis, and he seemed, way back in 2016, to be explaining his own level of surprise, as if to say, "Can you believe  I've somehow created, this whole MAGA crowd?" 

No single line of that magnitude emerged from his second visit to Sioux Center just last Friday. The only one repeated with any effect from both sides is the one above--"because if we don't, our country's in big, big trouble." That one made news. And he understood why: "they'll cover that completely differently."

If you're a regular at Fox, then the line needs only to be read for what's there, probably didn't even merit a mention. Donald J. Trump, the much-maligned ex-President, is repeating what everybody knows: if he doesn't get treated fairly by the courts, then the U. S. of A is going to be even more divided--after all, he might have said, a house divided against itself can not stand. If your sympathies lie with the MAGA crowd, he's merely declared what everyone knows-- there will be trouble, even in Sioux Center.

But if you believe Donald J. Trump is a red-tied Satan from Milton's Paradise Lost, the line trembles because it carries a stiff warning (as did several shot from his arsenal before January 6, 2021). He's not assessing the state of the union, he's telling disciples, the ones who set up Pence gallows, that it's time for yet another hymn sing, "stand back and stand by." 

Among other things, Trump is a poet. His words demand interpretation, although there's no particular mystery to what he says, and, either way, what they reveal is someone who, plain and simple, is not to be trusted, able to say one thing and mean another. "Does everybody understand what I'm saying?" he asked, making sure everyone discovered the meaning of "if we don't, our country's in big, big trouble?" 

Think I'm wrong--just imagine where we'd be if he hadn't originated "the Big Lie" long before the 2020 election. If he'd done what every other President has done since the constitution was written, if he'd simply passed along the keys to the White House to the man who almost sixty court appeals determined was, in fact, the candidate who was the winner, if he'd dropped the big lie we would not be in this mess, that Minnesota guy would be back selling pillows, hundreds of mad men and women wouldn't be imprisoned, Trump wouldn't still be dominating all of our lives.  

That's exactly why he continues to broadcast the big lie.

This week's New Yorker sends another message. Here our guy is as a composite Stalin, Hitler, and Mussolini, a rotund man with orange hair, kicking his way down the street, his ample chest adorned with medals he's earned with his bone spurs. 

If I was MAGA, I'd see that magazine cover as yet another way in which the deep state (New Yorker readers???) have been out to get the poor guy ever since he and what's his wife's name again? came down that elevator in Trump Tower. The lame-brain media are always picking on him. You can't help feeling sorry for him because those bastards are always devising something--they planted FBI phonies in that January 6th crowd, you know. Antifa too. That's what was really going on--false flag. Ask anyone who was there!

That cartoon may be prophetic. Watch him marching up Fifth Avenue, arm in arm with Putin and Kim Jong Un, brilliant men, brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.

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