At a leading newspaper, an air of complacency
Indignity Vol. 4, No. 178
THE WORST THING WE READ™
Why Won't People Take Donald Trump's Threats Seriously?
ON THE FRONT page of this morning's New York Times, the paper's scene reporter on the Donald Trump presidential campaign, Shawn McCreesh, described a confounding feature of the Trump 2024 movement:
One of the more peculiar aspects of Donald J. Trump’s political appeal is this: A lot of people are happy to vote for him because they simply do not believe he will do many of the things he says he will.
The former president has talked about weaponizing the Justice Department and jailing political opponents. He has said he would purge the government of non-loyalists and that he would have trouble hiring anyone who admits that the 2020 election wasn’t stolen. He proposed “one really violent day” in which police officers could get “extraordinarily rough” with impunity. He has promised mass deportations and predicted it would be “a bloody story.” And while many of his supporters thrill at such talk, there are plenty of others who figure it’s all just part of some big act.
The contrast between the raging, bigoted, ever more explicitly fascist Trump on the campaign stump and the Trump in the campaign polls is genuinely shocking. Trump the candidate is vicious and addled, visibly decrepit, unable to articulate a vision of the next four years beyond tariffs, ethnic cleansing, and a generalized vengeance. Yet Trump the candidacy is moving toward November as a standard, largely stable Republican presidential entry, seemingly destined to get the usual number of votes from the usual people in the usual places.
