US presidential hopeful Donald Trump,June 2016. Jane Barlow /Press Association. All rights reserved.Donald Trump is not strutting so well these days, so he’s resorted to the last recourses of a man who knows in his spleen — of his heart, if there is one, I cannot speak — that he’s a loser.
Consider:
- - He’s all in, trashing the media, as in his recent declaration:“I’m not running against Crooked Hillary, I’m running against the crooked media.” His presumption — an excellent word for him — is that if only he were only left alone to rant unopposed and unquestioned, to gobble up the American mediascape as he did during much of the primary campaign, he would be on his way to a coronation. In his mind there can be no other explanation for his plummeting prospects — not his grotesque insults, not his all-purpose assaults on people he disapproves of, not his ridiculous political program, not his nonstop fabrications. No, from this point of view, the problem is the media “filter,” as George W. Bush called it in 2003, and it’s not a friendly one. This has been a recurrent theme on the right, starting with Barry Goldwater in 1964 and continuing through the polysyllabic whines of Richard Nixon and Spiro T. Agnew, as scripted for them by the PR man William Safire, who was rewarded for his labors with a guaranteed space in The New York Times.
- - Trump is declaring, in advance, that the election will be rigged. This is a very expensive insurance policy that he’s taking out, for it guarantees that his unreconciled legions will feel justified, after Nov. 8, in taking whatever steps they deem necessary to obstruct the operations of a White House that is not only crooked, in their terms, but illegitimate. This is an unprecedented charge. It is the prologue to insurrection. You can be sure that some of Trump’s beloved “Second Amendment folks” will be paying attention.
Now, there was surely a decent case to be made in 2000 that the Bush presidency was illegitimate — having been installed, as the Florida vote recount was stopped dead, by a Republican Supreme Court. Bush was not entitled to the presidency. But the Democrats were into playing nice guys then, and so George Bush was inaugurated, with dreadful consequences that ought to have been — and still ought to be — evident to anyone paying attention.
