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August Antics and Trumpster Chaos

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August Antics and Trumpster Chaos AUGUST ANTICS AND TRUMPSTER CHAOS The first week in August 2016 saw numerous articles claiming that Trump’s campaign and perhaps his mind was unraveling, that he might not even make it through the next 90-plus days of the campaign, and even that he was plain crazy.91 Trump had taken to calling Clinton the “devil” and chiding Bernie Sanders for making a “deal with the devil.” Secretary Clinton was also, according to Trump, along with Barack Obama, “the founder of ISIS,” and whenever he described her as “crooked Hillary,” the enraptured crowd chanted “lock her up,” with Trump smiling and encouraging his minions. In a classic case of projection, in a stump speech on August 5, Trump proclaimed that Hillary Clinton, “the Queen of Corruption,” was “pretty close to unhinged and you’ve seen it…she is like an unbalanced person.” Predicting the “destruction of this country from within” if Clinton is elected as the president, Trump was obviously following his handlers’ advice to stick to attacking Clinton and not fellow Republicans as he slowly read his diatribe from a prepared speech that he held in his small hands. As Trump’s poll numbers nationally and in key swing states continued to plummet in August, Crazy Donald returned to his primary theme that “the election is rigged” – a claim Trump makes whenever he is behind in his beloved polls. While campaigning in Philadelphia, Trump charged that election rigging was especially likely in African American precincts and called on his followers to “monitor” polling places, raising the specter that Trump was calling on his troops to intimidate black voters and would claim a stolen election if Clinton won, unleashing his rabid hell hounds to protest. During the week of August 15, rumors flew that Roger Ailes, long the President of Fox News who was deeply connected with Republican politics, was going to run Trump’s campaign, or at least to be his debate coach for the coming Presidential debates that were sometimes considered to be the key event of the presidential election cycle. Ailes had just been fired from Fox News after a lawsuit was filed 63 August Antics and Trumpster Chaos against him for sexual harassment, and many more Fox News women employees claimed that they too were sexually harassed by Ailes. Then, the morning of August 17, the Trump campaign announced the appointment of former investment banker Stephen Bannon, currently the executive chairman of Breitbart News, to become his campaign manager. The hardright website Breitbart News had been one of Trump’s most ferocious supporters that fed on Trump’s most extreme nationalist, racist, xenophobic, Islamophobic, and aggressive instincts and tendency to promote the most extreme conspiracy theories and extremist ideas, a feature of both Trump and the Breitbart site. Indeed, Bannon was characterized by news sources as the “most dangerous political operative in America”,92 as well as well as “the Leni Riefenstahl of the Tea Party movement,”93 referring to films he’d made celebrating Sarah Palin and the Tea Party, and vilifying the Clintons and Obama, portending an even nastier and dirtier Trump campaign. These appointments suggested that during the last weeks of the campaign “Trump will be Trump” and his most aggressive instincts would be unleashed, that there would be no “lid on the Id” as one Republican operative ruefully mourned. With Ailes and Bannon, Trump would have two of the most hard right and hardball political operatives imaginable by his side, with Nixon era Dirty Trickster Roger Stone lurking in the background, and with no one knowing to what extremes the Trump campaign will go.94 Curiously, the funder of Breitbart News, Robert Mercer, was becoming one of Trump’s major funders, while its’ ideologue-in- chief Steve Bannon was brought in to help run Trump’s campaign. This is ironic since Breitbart News – in addition to promoting wild conspiracy theorists and racist, sexist and Islamophobic rants – has been dedicated to destroying the Republican Party elite. Emerging from the far-right fringes of the Tea Party, Breitbart helped produce a toxic “alt-right” blogosphere which curiously focused more hate and venom on the Republican establishment than on Democrats. Their first target was Republican House leader Eric Cantor who made the catastrophic mistake of discussing amnesty for immigrants with the Obama administration and was subject to vicious attack by Breitbart and the lunatic right. The extreme right found a kindred Republican 64.
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