Last updated on July 17th, 2023 at 07:04 pm
Senator Jeff Sessions, who, in an interview with Politico, told the GOP it must adapt to Trump or die (not, as we would expect, the other way around), has now excused Trump’s racist attacks on Judge Gonzalo Curiel (never mind the most recent excuse that ‘Mexican’ is not a race, therefore it’s not racist to attack Mexicans).
Appearing on Fox News Sunday, Sessions told Bret Baier that “It was a rough week, because it got him off message,” and that “It was one off-the-cuff comment that he probably shouldn’t have made.”
To his credit, Baier did push back on the idea that it was just something Trump said in passing, that “he did say it numerous times in a couple of interviews, and he was pressed on it,” but Sessions insisted Trump “was irritated about because he felt he was not being fairly treated in that lawsuit,” and brushed off all questions in order to pursue Trump’s vendetta against Mitt Romney.
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However, Fox News wasn’t through with Donald Trump and his attacks on Judge Curiel. George F. Will told the Fox News Sunday panel that, “Well, Senator [Jeff] Sessions [(R-AL)] says it’s a bad week because Mr. Trump got off message.” On the contrary, Will insists. “This really is his message, which is a constant barrage of this sort of thing.”
Watch courtesy of Media Matters for America:
GEORGE WILL: Well, Senator [Jeff] Sessions [(R-AL)] says it’s a bad week because Mr. Trump got off message. This really is his message, which is a constant barrage of this sort of thing. Now, senior Republicans are going to him saying, “change your persona.” It’s like going to the Rolling Stones and telling Keith Richards and Mick Jagger, “Rock and roll’s been very good to you, and you’ve been good at it, but it’s time for you but it’s time to go for chamber music.” I don’t think they do that, and I don’t think he does that.
[…]
BRIT HUME: Well, Trump now must appeal to a much larger universe of voters than he did during primary season, and he seems not to recognize what that means. And what it means is that you simply have to be very careful and disciplined in what you say. And, as George suggests, it may not simply be in the man to do that. We will see. But these kind of reactions to things, this was a personal reaction to what he claims is unfair rulings by a judge, and he shot from the hip, and it worked like crazy, this sort of stuff, during the primary season. It will not work during a general election when you need to gather in people who previously weren’t for you. It’s as simple as that. And he needs to recognize that and act accordingly if he can.
George F. Will wrote in a Washington Post op-ed at the end of May that, “Parsing Trump sentences is a challenge but is rewarding because it frequently reveals that he actually has said nothing at all,” but Will and his panel did a pretty decent job Sunday at getting to the heart of Trump’s message and identifying the hate at its core.
Trump has made it abundantly clear that he is exactly what we are seeing. As Will put it, this attack is “his message.” Even some of the white males at Fox News can see he needs to change, but also recognize that he will not. And why, when 80 percent of Republican voters say Trump’s racist message is “just fine”? Trump is giving the Republican base what it wants: unrepentant hatred of the other. Or, as documentary filmmaker Ken Burns told Stanford graduates Sunday, “always making the other wrong.â€
In that op-ed, Will asked, “Who will follow Trump off the cliff?” Paul Ryan, for one. In yesterday’s op-ed in the Post, Will compared Trump to the degenerate Roman emperor Caligula, writing that “The Caligulan malice with which Donald Trump administered Paul Ryan’s degradation is an object lesson in the price of abject capitulation to power,” and lamented over the price Ryan has paid for supporting Donald Trump – his reputation. Will, of course, judiciously ignores his own network’s earlier degradation at Trump’s hands.
Liberals will of course answer that Ryan had no good reputation to begin with, but they have to remember that Ryan took up leadership of the House as a sort of messiah, fueled by the idea that if he acted exactly like John Boehner he could somehow be better than John Boehner. We can no more explain such expectations than we can any other Republican expectations, but Will says the House agenda was not worth Ryan’s soul (which is certainly true as the House agenda itself isn’t worth its weight in bull excrement).
And if Will is right that Trump will destroy the GOP (or, as liberals recognize, at least finish the job Republicans began in destroying their own party) he will certainly destroy Ryan (and his precious agenda along with him).
Which is precisely what Paul Ryan and the Republican Party deserve.
Hrafnkell Haraldsson, a social liberal with leanings toward centrist politics has degrees in history and philosophy. His interests include, besides history and philosophy, human rights issues, freedom of choice, religion, and the precarious dichotomy of freedom of speech and intolerance. He brings a slightly different perspective to his writing, being that he is neither a follower of an Abrahamic faith nor an atheist but a polytheist, a modern-day Heathen who follows the customs and traditions of his Norse ancestors. He maintains his own blog, A Heathen’s Day, which deals with Heathen and Pagan matters, and Mos Maiorum Foundation www.mosmaiorum.org, dedicated to ethnic religion. He has also contributed to NewsJunkiePost, GodsOwnParty and Pagan+Politics.
