Jeffrey Goldberg: Trump Is Getting Worse
I don't see any reason to believe that.
He's always been bad. Seems to me like more progressive hyperbole: bad Trump isn't bad enough. We must rhetorically manufacture Straw Trump, who is worse than bad. Straw Trump is, of course, literally Hitler.
Which is not to say that he isn't really, really bad. Just that he's always been.
It's utterly absurd to claim, as Goldberg does, that "Brown people in general have become his targets." And it's the kind of untruth that misleads people and makes things worse. That's a thinly-concealed version of the progressives' all-purpose shriek of RACISM!!! Trump has never targeted "brown people in general." This is the sort of thing progressives say when conservatives do things like oppose illegal immigration and hiring preferences. Not to put too fine a point on it: opposing those things isn't racist. Surely white racists oppose those things--but not everyone who opposes them is a racist. In fact: most people who oppose them aren't racists. If you don't realize that, then you've probably locked inside the pernicious leftist worldview. And: calling people racist for opposing those things is a big part of what's polarizing our politics. And (counterproductivity alert!) it's largely what gave us Trump in the first place. (So...nice work...) And: what makes him a viable option today.
What's really going on is that Trump is bad, and he's bad largely because he speaks and writes sloppily, and says the very kinds of thigs that even reasonable people might mistake for evidence of racism. Though much Trump-misinterpretation isn't reasonable. When he said, for example, that many people crossing the southern border illegally are rapists, the left said that he'd said that "All Mexicans are rapists." That would be racist, of course...but he didn't say it and didn't come close to saying it. Trump's contribution to the problem is: saying controversial, difficult things that need to be said clearly and with the understanding that they're likely to be misunderstood...uncarefully and with no such understanding.
We now have some kind of rhetorical oscillation between two shitty, irrational extremes. I guess, to stick with a shaky metaphor, we have to hope that we don't hit on the country's resonance frequency.
He's always been bad. Seems to me like more progressive hyperbole: bad Trump isn't bad enough. We must rhetorically manufacture Straw Trump, who is worse than bad. Straw Trump is, of course, literally Hitler.
Which is not to say that he isn't really, really bad. Just that he's always been.
It's utterly absurd to claim, as Goldberg does, that "Brown people in general have become his targets." And it's the kind of untruth that misleads people and makes things worse. That's a thinly-concealed version of the progressives' all-purpose shriek of RACISM!!! Trump has never targeted "brown people in general." This is the sort of thing progressives say when conservatives do things like oppose illegal immigration and hiring preferences. Not to put too fine a point on it: opposing those things isn't racist. Surely white racists oppose those things--but not everyone who opposes them is a racist. In fact: most people who oppose them aren't racists. If you don't realize that, then you've probably locked inside the pernicious leftist worldview. And: calling people racist for opposing those things is a big part of what's polarizing our politics. And (counterproductivity alert!) it's largely what gave us Trump in the first place. (So...nice work...) And: what makes him a viable option today.
What's really going on is that Trump is bad, and he's bad largely because he speaks and writes sloppily, and says the very kinds of thigs that even reasonable people might mistake for evidence of racism. Though much Trump-misinterpretation isn't reasonable. When he said, for example, that many people crossing the southern border illegally are rapists, the left said that he'd said that "All Mexicans are rapists." That would be racist, of course...but he didn't say it and didn't come close to saying it. Trump's contribution to the problem is: saying controversial, difficult things that need to be said clearly and with the understanding that they're likely to be misunderstood...uncarefully and with no such understanding.
We now have some kind of rhetorical oscillation between two shitty, irrational extremes. I guess, to stick with a shaky metaphor, we have to hope that we don't hit on the country's resonance frequency.
posted by Winston Smith at
11:19 AM
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