Last updated on July 17th, 2023 at 06:59 pm
It is significant that as President Barack Obama is telling Rutgers graduates Sunday that “ignorance is not a virtue,” Donald Trump is considering Sarah Palin as vice president.
Obama condemns ignorance while Trump seems to say, au contraire, it up a ‘yuge’ virtue. And Trump is living proof of that; he doesn’t need Palin.
Trump has already said he wants Bill Gates to “close the Internet” and that he will use his power as president to destroy Amazon’s Jeff Bezos (Trump promises “such trouble”) because his Washington Post doesn’t say what Trump would like it to say.
Perhaps not coincidentally, according to The Washington Post, asking who was on a new poll, Ben Carson was told “John Kasich, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Sarah Palin and Chris Christie,” to which he answered,
“Those are all people on our list.”
Did your blood just run cold? It should have. Trump said once he wanted a political insider as VP because as he admitted at the time, he’s a business man, not a politician.
And he gives us the shortlist from hell instead. SNL wasn’t far off the mark when it included George Zimmerman on the shortlist.
Never mind that Carson has since said he never said what he said. You’d be hard-pressed to find a Republican today who admitted he actually said anything. The greatest sin is the great “gotcha” of quoting Republicans back to themselves.
Which brings us back to President Obama.
Obama said at Rutgers,
“It’s not cool to not know what you’re talking about. That’s not keeping it real or telling it like it is. That’s not challenging political correctness. That’s just not knowing what you’re talking about. And yet we’ve become confused about this.”
But that’s precisely what Trump has done and continues to do. He says he is going to make America great again, but what, precisely, he intends to make great, or how he intends to do it, are as much a mystery today as when he opened his campaign.
It is difficult to categorize Trump, because he has been all over the place and frequently contradicted himself. Julian Zelizer, a history professor at Princeton, says Trump is not a conservative, that he is a heretic instead, since his stated positions are at odds with many Republican positions, but given the fact 9 out of every 10 things Trump says is a lie, and the many contradictory positions he has held, what quotes you use and what day it happens to be, he is a conservative or he is not a conservative.
Definitions have always been problematic and will always be. The fact remains, Trump is running as a Republican, not a Democrat, and the people who are voting for him – and not against those other Republicans – are conservatives. Maybe Trump is right. He won the Republican Party and it is what he says it is.
Zelizer is right about one thing. A Trump victory could change the GOP for years to come. A loss and a shrug and we’re back to the deplorable, appallingly bad status quo. The thing is, what Trump wants to replace the status quo with is no better, and in many ways, worse.
Whatever he is, he is also ignorant. And so are his friends and supporters. No Democratic candidate has had support of white supremacists of all stripes, or would lift Vladimir Putin to BBF status, as Trump has. Nobody else has an Ann Coulter in their corner, or Sarah Palin on their VP short list, or a butler who wants to kill Obama (or maybe even has a butler period?), and a friend, Roger Stone, who now says Hillary is going to “kill me.” Other of Trumps pals have Hillary marked down as a “lesbian murderer.” But of course, no other candidate has a friend who owns the National Enquirer.
We realize that going into the 2016 contest the GOP, led by Fox News, had set the bar low. Friday Fox Follies tells the tale there, if you’ve been keeping track. But look at it this way: Trump says he wants to make America great again, but in any pre-Fox era he might use as a benchmark, he’d have been laughed off the podium so many times by now he’d never dare show his face again. It’s only since Fox News took to the airwaves, that nonsense like that which Trump spews gets gobbled up instead of flushed.
And he surely can’t mean that the next decade is his benchmark. The years 2001 to 2008 were horrible years for America, marked by war and a collapsing economy. We have to assume he doesn’t mean the economically prosperous years of the Clinton administration, because his friends say Hillary is a lesbian murderer and Bill is a coke fiend.
If this is somehow supposed to soften the blow of Sarah Palin as VP, Trump has another thing coming. Palin is actually as bad as she seems. Inventing a bunch of stuff about other people isn’t somehow going to make Palin more intelligent or knowledgeable or suddenly cause her to actually read and remember the names of newspapers and magazines. People, some of them, tout Ben Carson as VP. Seriously? You’re going to tell us Carson is a better choice than Palin?
The New York Post is already ripping headlines out of the National Enquirer and presenting them as fact and Fox News is quick to hold up the New York Post using fake news from the National Enquirer because nobody loves fake news like Fox News. Especially when those headlines indict the Clintons.
Donald Trump “verified” the story for Steve Doocy. President Trump would go one better and give us a press secretary straight from the pages of, and as trustworthy as, the National Enquirer, which is only fair, as his entire administration would be at home in its pages.
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