Donald Trump, coward
As a political analyst, deciphering Donald Trump’s morning Twitter rants has become part of my daily routine. By trying to stir up controversy about certain topics, he often unwittingly gives away what it is he’s hoping the media and the public won’t focus on that day. That helps me figure out what I should be covering. But this morning, Trump’s actions on Twitter were the most telling thing he’s said yet: absolutely nothing.
Reluctantly, I have my phone set so Twitter sends me a text message whenever Donald Trump tweets anything. I can’t tell you how rare it is to wake up in the morning and not have any text messages documenting whatever stupidity Trump has already tweeted while the sun was still coming up. Yet I knew with a fair amount of certainty that there wouldn’t be any tweets this morning – because Trump is a predictable coward.
Trump will always publicly and cravenly attack people who stand in his way, whenever he thinks he can get away with it. And when it’s a fight he can’t win, he just attacks someone else instead, hoping to change the conversation. In that sense he’s both a bully and a coward, as bullies are always cowards when the tables are turned. And here’s Donald Trump, too much of a coward to stand up to the white supremacists and Nazis who helped get him elected. Not because he feels any loyalty to them, but simply because he’s afraid of them.
We’ve watched Trump systematically sell out his own supporters over and over again since he took office. He’s sold out the poor by trying to take away their Medicaid, because he thinks he can still con them into continuing to support him. He’s sold out his few LGBT supporters by going after their rights, because he only had a small handful of them to begin with, and he’s concluded he doesn’t need them anymore. He’s sold out some of his own most loyal advisers and staffers, strategically ruining their careers and lives along the way, just because he needed a political distraction that week.
But Donald Trump is afraid to sell out his Nazi and white supremacist supporters, because he knows he needs them. They’re too central to his base. They’ve been too enthusiastically in his favor. They’d turn too loudly against him. Nevermind that he might actually gain a few points with the American mainstream for once if he sold out these Nazi pariahs. Trump doesn’t think in terms of boldness or courage. So he allowed his staff to quietly put out a statement today insisting that he really did condemn white supremacists yesterday, when we all know that he didn’t – even as he cowers to the point that he can’t even bring himself to try to tweet a distraction. Donald Trump, coward.
