Hey, don't get mad at me, Trumplicans, I'm just pre-quoting what's going to be in every Democrat attack ad between the day The Donald (as a Democrat) steals our nomination and November 8th, and with which every Republican incumbent and challenger all the way down to local dog-catcher is going to be tarred as well. Just like Trump passive-aggressively plays up his birtherism at Rubio's and Cruz's expense. Sauce for the goose, and all that.
Except in my case, I'm serious as a heart attack about those Donk attack ads, and the Pompadoured Prince's failure to escape that one of many general election holes into which he's dug himself. Hence the question: Is Trump tolerant of, or even sympathetic to, the KKK, given that white supremacists, led by David Duke, have become such passionate Trump devotees....
....a function, of course, of his attempt to appear anti-illegal immigration - that Duke recently declared that any white vote for anybody but the New York liberal will constitute racial treason? That's what CNN's Jake Tapper gave him a golden opportunity to debunk in no uncertain terms this morning - and Trump punted instead:
Tsk, tsk; such shifty ducking and dodging from the "strongman" candidate who "tells it like it is". And on a question that was not only easy-peasy-lemon squeezy but an attempt by the media he claims to want to sue out of existence to do him an engraved favor. So what gives? Is Donald Trump a racist? Why on Earth didn't he disvow Grand Wizard Duke?
As usual, the answer is....complicated.
Trump did disavow Duke once - fifteen years ago:
Trump clearly knew who David Duke was in 2000. Seems to have forgotten since. pic.twitter.com/Vz5L16GLyP
That was then, apparently. Oh, sure, he's barked the word "disavow" in a "if I tell you what you want to hear, will you go the hell away?" sense here and there, as when he was asked Tapper's question last Friday when he was rolling (literally) out the Chris Christie endorsement. But Tapper gave him the perfect setting to settle the question once and for all, and he refused to do it. Why?
Theories abound:
1) He was tired and had a brain fart. But that would run counter to his claim that he's healthier than Wolverine and never doesn't have an erection. So scratch that one, even if he will soon be a septuagenarian.
2) He's so stupendously narcissistic that he will not disavow anybody who supports him, no matter who or what it is. Which might work except for the fact that he did condemn Duke - much as a liberal would - a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away - when it suited his purposes to do so. It just so happen that now he feels that repeating that disavowal so publicly does not.
Which leads us, of course, to my theory:
3) Trump did not set out to attract the Klansman vote, but that was an unanticipated side effect of the wedge issue he used to try and sell himself as a "conservative". In other words, Trump, a liberal Democrat who clearly thinks that all conservatives and Republicans are "racists," depicted himself on illegal immigration in the way that he believes REAL conservatives and Republicans think and are motivated; not by the Constitution and the rule of law, but by "nativism" and "xenophobia". So instead of emphasizing the former, he emphasized the latter - "Mexican rapists," etc. - because that's the "language" he thought he needed to speak, and because he wasn't fluent in the other one. And that just happened to have been right in the wheelhouse of animals like David Duke.
In short, he's committed to this angle, and if he were to backtrack on any of it in the slightest, he fears it would be seen as weakness - to say nothing of bowing to "political correctness," also a concept that he and his drones don't understand (being "anti-PC" doesn't mean being a jerk and/or a monster).
This in turn reinforces what I've believed about the Trump candidacy from day one: that he got into the race to sabotage the GOP, at least for this cycle, and pave the way for a third straight Democrat White House triumph, but has, depressingly, done better than anybody, including Trump himself (which he, naturally, will never admit), dreamed he would. And now he finds himself the frontrunner and bordering on presumptive nominee, and now his inability to pass for a REAL conservative, and his being a political rookie, is coming back around to start biting him in the ass.
The media fangs, however, will hold off for at least another week or three, until Rubio and Cruz are functionally eliminated. And then they will start flensing The Donald's coiffed carcass mercilessly. And Trumplicans will begin to reap the bitter harvest their overemotive, foolish fanaticism has sewn.
Though they will, of course, never admit it. Not even on Twitter.
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