From The Wall Street Journal comes this remarkable take on the various pronouncements of Donald Trump: Hey, where’s our sense of humor? Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. in his November 11 WSJ column, argues that many if not most of the things Donald Trump said during the campaign were basically jokes, or quips, or wisecracks that went over the heads of the too-serious media. He quotes venture capitalist Peter Thiel suggesting Trump should be taken “seriously, not literally.”
For example, Jenkins says this about the Billy Bush tape: ”Ninety-nine percent of America that doesn’t work in a media company in midtown recognized instantly that it wasn’t two rapists discussing the finer points of sexual assault. It was one guy clowning for another on the subject of celebrity sex appeal.”
Hmm. I wonder if Jenkins would have characterized it as harmless clowning if Barack Obama had said during his campaign…
"I moved on her, and I failed. I’ll admit it…I did try and fuck her. She was married,…and I moved on her very heavily…I moved on her like a bitch, but I couldn’t get there. And she was married…then all of a sudden I see her, she’s now got the big phony tits and everything. She’s totally changed her look…I’ve got to use some Tic Tacs, just in case I start kissing her…you know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait…and when you’re a star, they let you do it, you can do anything….grab them by the pussy…you can do anything.”
Probably not, I’m thinking. I think his reaction – and the reaction of fellow travelers in hypocrisy like Hannity, Giuliani, and Gingrich – would have been neck-bulging, vein-popping apoplexy, and I suspect their rage would have had racial overtones. For Trump, though, it’s just a joke the rest of us don’t quite get.
Or how about this? What if Obama said: “You know, it really doesn’t matter what the media write as long as you’ve got a young, and beautiful piece of ass.”
Would Jenkins say the media failed to read between the lines and grasp the humor in what Obama was saying? Nah.
Here are just a few other things Trump has said that Jenkins might have failed to see the humor in if Obama or Clinton had said them:
"My IQ is one of the highest — and you all know it! Please don’t feel so stupid or insecure; it’s not your fault.”
"I’m just thinking to myself right now, we should just cancel the election and just give it to [me], right?
“I could stand in the middles of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.”
An example Jenkins cited to illustrate his hypothesis was Trump’s remark about John McCain: “I like people who weren’t captured.” Jenkins writes: “It was disrespectful, yes. It was also a joke; a wisecrack, offered in response to Sen. McCain’s equally flippant dismissal of Trump supporters as ‘crazies.’
Maybe so. I doubt it, but maybe so. But imagine if Hillary Clinton had said that. My guess is that Jenkins et.al. would not have characterized it as a joke, a wisecrack, or even as merely disrespectful. I suspect they might have wrapped themselves in the nearest flag and gotten quite huffy about her disdain for a military hero. Just a guess.
How about if Hillary Clinton had said, “I know more about ISIS than the generals do, believe me.” What!? You!? You know more than the generals?! You, a girl?!” I don’t think Jenkins and the boys would have characterized that boast as harmless Clintonian japery.
I wonder if Jenkins considers the following an example of Trump’s jokey hyperbole: “Hillary Clinton meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty, in order to enrich these global financial powers, her special interest friends, and her donors.” What would Jenkins have said if Clinton or Obama had resurrected this ancient anti-Semitic trope of the sort that was quite popular in 1930s Germany. Would he have called out the idea for the fantasy that it is and solemnly castigated the person who advanced it for being a Jew-baiting demagogue?
The point: Even if we give Jenkins the benefit of the doubt here and conclude that everyone should have done a better job of reading between Trump’s lines, the problem remains: He would not have chided us for failing to do the same for Clinton or Obama. He would have taken them absolutely literally.
The double standard applied to these candidates in this election, and not just by the right, was breathtaking. We had Trump the phony “university” swindler, Trump the deadbeat who put multiple businesses in bankruptcy and left investors and vendors holding the bag, Trump the playboy who went through glam wives and lived extravagantly large while pleading poverty to avoid paying federal taxes, Trump the admirer of the KGB operative whose country has nuclear missiles pointed at American cities, and so many others – things he said and did any one of which, if said/done by his opponent, would have buried her forever. Clinton’s sin was to use the wrong email server. Gasp, said the chorus of critics who didn’t really know what an email server was.
The media (and pollsters) did get one thing right, though. They predicted that Clinton would get slightly more votes than Trump, and that’s what happened. The great previously undetected uprising of the working class actually amounted to a bit less than half the electorate.
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