As the Trump campaign steadily sinks deeper into the swamp of racism, misogyny, and anti-semitism, there are a couple of phrases I hear over and over, in multiple variations, and it just needs to stop.
“We didn’t know he was this bad”. I usually hear this one from Republicans. It’s a lie. We’ve all known that he was a colossal boor since at least the 1990s, and he hasn’t gotten worse — this is the same jerk we’ve known for about 30 years. There is absolutely no surprise in his behavior or his record, but people have just always looked the other way. You probably know assholes like this right now, and we’ve always just rolled our eyes, shaken our head, and walked away.
“And now he’s running for President of the United States,” usually said by Democrats with a note of horror. The high office he is running for should not make the slightest difference. Would this be acceptable if he were merely a real estate tycoon, or a ditch digger? Is there some kind of invisible class line such that if you’re below it, it’s expected that you will call women pigs, but once you’re above it, only then does it become rude?
What prompts my irritation is that a friend of mine, a woman, a feminist, and a prominent atheist, has been receiving a flood of hateful comments on facebook that aren’t really that different from what Trump says. We all take this for granted as the normal state of affairs. But I have to wonder…these petty vulgarians have friends — I should say enablers — who retain their associations with them even as they call women “ugly”, “fat”, and “pieces of shit”. They are not shunned. They have their own little communities of hatred. They thrive. They get healthy sums of money from their patreon accounts. They have turned the atheist movement into an embarrassing crap heap.
What I’m learning from Trump is that we can’t expect to see them condemned until a) they’ve been at it for 30 years, or b) they decide to run for president. And until then, the only people we’re going to scorn are the ones who dare to call them out before either of those eventualities are reached.
“It’s nazi frogs all the way down.”
Sorry – I meant to post that on the MOPM thread. I’ll just leave it here.
Well, running for prez does magnify things a bit, brings that focus right down on a person and my, don’t those orange warts look ugly at 100x!
The fact that Trump is enjoying such wide public support is proof that he actually reflects the beliefs and attitudes of far too many people. Even if Trump vanishes tomorrow, the people who were supporting him will still be here. They’ll still be doing Trump-like things. They’ll still hold their Trump-like ideas.
As scary as Trump is, his followers are far more terrifying and can do far more damage to far more people than he can.
I know you’re essentially echoing the claim that “quantity has a quality all of its own”, ck, but his followers aren’t actually running for President, unlike him.
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In passing, one expression I’ve disliked since the 1990s is “the Donald”.
(Yeah, I read NPC stuff too)
that so many of the republicans seem to be finally shocked that their nominee is far from optimal and are being forced to think seriously of not voting for him next month is amazing. They have like all of his gullible “marks” have been blinded by their overwhelming need for a “strong man” that they only saw what they wanted to see.
They desperately want some “powerful man” to do something to save their view of the world. Anyone who can “act the part” will get elected hence Bush and his flight jacket on the carrier flight deck which did not work all that well.
uncle frogy
Welcome to the tone troll group.
Democracy contains the seeds of its own destruction.
I doubted that, until I saw Trump, running for President.
@deepak shetty — Condemning misogyny isn’t tone trolling.
Sorry PZ but you are totally clueless here. Just because “X” is less terrifying than “Y” does not mean that “Y” is acceptable. Donald Trump as a businessman scumbag is less terrifying than Donald Trump the president of USA. So yeah, it makes a big difference that this guy is the nominee of one of the two major parties in US and still have a non-zero chance of becoming the president.
Minor correction because I sincerely doubt this would ever have been made public or so much as incovenienced Trump if he wasn’t running for high office. Except it’s not so minor and actually very depressing. Keeping a low profile is apparently enough to get away with this crap for years and years. And since it’s Trump we’re talking about I’m using the expression ‘keeping a low profile’ in a very loose sense.
I’m not sure it’s fair to say that he hasn’t got worse since the 1990s. Yes, he was always a colossal boor, and perhaps he hasn’t got any more boorish (if that’s even possible), but back in the 90s he wasn’t a pandering demagogue steeped in racist, right-wing ideology. He was just an incompetent misogynistic narcissist back then, which is of course more than enough to earn condemnation, but now he’s an incompetent, misogynistic, racist, narcissist who champions the most regressive currents in American society.
Though that’s not really a line the Republicans who are suddenly baffled by how awful he is can take, given that all the extra awfulness he’s taken up over the years is just their party’s core platform.
cartomancer,
Actually, Trump has always been a racist.
cartomancer @ 12:
Yeah, not so much.
I almost completely agree. He’s always been a racist, sexist, xenophobic ass. And a complete tryant in his soul.
But still I’m was a bit surprised to see him channel Henry Ford in the blaming of the “international bankers” aka the Jews for his flailing around as of late.
Public reports of Trump sexually assaulting women go back to 1993 at the latest. Public reports of his sexually harassing women go back to the 1980s.
As others have mentioned, he’s been publicly blatant racist for most of his life. He’s been a promoter of mass murder for decades too (calling for five innocent people to be execute => promoting mass murder).
“colossal boor” is an understatement.
You’re absolutely right that he’s reprehensible regardless of his status as candidate for POTUS. I haven’t noticed Democrats saying this particular line myself. What I know Democrats do say is “Bill isn’t running for President” whenever someone brings him up, as Trump did.
John Morales wrote:
Kind of, but not quite. It doesn’t seem likely that Trump will actually win the presidential race at this point, and most of the damage he’s doing is from the pulpit of his campaign. Unfortunately, this campaign has show that there are millions of wannabe-Trumps out there, and those millions can and will do a lot of damage. Worse still is that Trump has spent a lot of time telling them that Clinton will try to rig the election in her favour, so even if Trump loses, these people will still think they have the will of the American people backing them up. The only way I can imagine this not happening is if Trump loses so spectacularly badly that he only ends up with a single digit percentage of the popular vote.
As bad as the “Moral Majority” and “Tea Party” were when they thought they had the silent majority of Americans behind them, how bad do you think the alt-righters and neo-nazis will be while they believe the silent majority is backing them (despite the loss)?
Robro, I have said “he’s running for president ” with horror. And bill clinton has had his past investigated. It is troubling, but that was not done by Hilary.
PZ, the reason why we say it is because we always felt that we could identify with the greater community that did not subscribe to his ugliness. We want to be represented to the world with honor. In his candidacy for president, there is a distinct possibility that I will be represented to the world by Trump, and that he will have power to nuke on a whim. I was always disgusted by him, its just that hemay have power over law that frightens me now.
Hey, if you prefer Bernie Sanders as president, that could still be possible.
US Electoral Law is funny.
@20: Conservative Evan McMullin of Utah has a much better chance than Sanders of ascending to the presidency by that route, given that he is already on the ballot in Utah, is running a reasonably close third, and would win twice as many electoral college votes as Sanders.
Five Thirty Eight gives McMullin around a 1 in 50 chance of preventing a majority for either Clinton or Trump and thus throwing the election to the House, where all kinds of craziness could happen, but I suspect McMullin would have a much better chance than Sanders in persuading what would likely be a majority Republican delegation to elect him president in place of their presidential nominee.
I’ve been enjoying telling Republicans that the only reason Hillary Clinton is going to be the next president is because their party chose the one (major) primary candidate that couldn’t beat her.
I doubt even Ted Cruz would have been behind at this stage, given the incessant drip, drip of the Wikileaks document drops. Even the best run campaign would have a tough time dealing with the fallout from the publication of so much of their internal communications, even if 99% of it was completely innocuous.
And yet, somehow, they chose an orange-haired buffoon. Pundits of all stripes are going to be shaking their heads for years…
ck @18, ah, I get you now. Thanks.
I think it matters that he’s running for president as the candidate of one of the two major parties, because it legitimises those views and makes them acceptable. There have always been racists and misogynists. But when it’s publicly acceptable to voice those views, they spread. It’s like a contagious disease.
Giliell, professional cynic -Ilk- wrote:
Good point. Prior candidates would at least pay lip service to the idea that racism, and sexism were bad. Trump tried to pretend he didn’t know who David Duke was, and that there was nothing wrong with his endorsement. That was a pretty significant boost to Duke’s credibility, and I have a feeling that white nationalist group memberships have likely increased as a result.
It doesn’t affect how acceptable it is. But there is obviously something different you can do with the information about the terrible person who happens to be running for public office: you can think about how you’re going to vote. You may do other things about it, if you find out real estate tycoons or ditch diggers are terrible people, but not that.
Did anybody need this explained to them? Probably not. But they may be expressing obvious shit like that when telling you the fact (which you probably already knew as well) that’s Trump’s running for president. This seems like a simple theory.
Since when were Democrats “usually” implying any of this is acceptable for ditch diggers and horrifically unacceptable for presidents? What single conversation, much less several that “usually” involve a certain specific claim, is PZ talking about? No clue. This doesn’t seem like a simple theory. We shouldn’t prefer those.
Trump is an ugly fat piece of shit.
One of the scary things for me about Trump running for President is that he was doing it as part of a major political party. That makes a difference.
Trump can be an odious racist and sexist and be sheltered from consequences via money. Terrible people get away with it by being rich all the time. Hell, even being an independent candidate for office might be in his grasp with his money: letting him hire a campaign manager to handle the paperwork and drum up the minimum number of people to get him on the ballot in some places.
But he won the Republican primary based on the fact he was far more willing to be openly racist, xenophobic, sexist and generally a boor than the other candidates. Millions of people think Trump is not just better than Clinton, but actually the guy you want being president: that being all the things Trump is doesn’t disqualify him for office. And they won’t go away when Trump loses. (Hell, given all the talk about rigging, they might not even get the message that most people are uncomfortable to appalled at Trump.)
Jessie Foster, neither of your first two descriptors is useful in describing the Trumpian character. You can be fat, you can be ugly, and be the nicest person on the planet.
@29
It also involves quite a bit of splash damage. What did all the innocent fat and ugly people do to deserve being compared to Trump?
Try petty and evil or privilege-drunk sexual predator instead.
malignant narcissist is also accurate and does not splash.
Has anything really interesting come out of the Wikileaks document drops? Everything I’ve seen is just the usual behind-the-scenes campaign stuff. It’s a treat for political junkies because usually we don’t get to look at this stuff until *after* the election, but it seems like regular people just find it boring. (But anyone else enjoys reading this sort of thing, I’ve got to recommend “Game Change” and “Double Down” by Heilleman & Halperin, which take a look behind the scenes at the 2008 and 2012 campaigns.)
Anyway, we haven’t heard much about Ted Cruz since the end of the primaries, but he’d be floundering if he’d made it as far as the general election. He doesn’t have any real policy positions beyond “The government is bad and needs to be shut down”, and the Republican Party base would have forced him down Trump’s path of frothing racism and Islamophobia. Cruz also would have said a lot of wildly unpopular stuff about Gay Rights and Transgender Rights; Trump has somehow managed to keep those issues off the table. Cruz would have wound up losing the general election by at least a Romney-sized margin. (Which would still be better than Trump can manage.)