Donald Trump Jr goes completely off the deep end
There’s nothing that instructs quite like a controversial fight online. For me it’s been a series of eye-widening revelations, beginning about five or six years ago with the Bill Cosby rape scandal. It was a practical crucible that ultimately led me to recognize the phenomenon of projection as something that says far more about the projectionist than anyone else.
Two of Cosby’s victims have become personal friends. Neither remotely fit the onerous descriptions invented by their gaslighting detractors. It’s an exasperating frustration to read the ill-informed opinion of some smug ignoramus excoriating with slut-shaming epithets people you actually know — women who are wise, kind, gentle and honest. It is at those times, more than any other, that the lacerating word “ignorance” inspires a white-hot, molten ingot of fury.
It took years of incessant repetition and a whole movement (#MeToo) but — at long last! — the victim-shaming question “why didn’t she come forward sooner” is now only ever asked by the pitiably stupid. Not coming forward sooner is now generally known to be the rule, not the exception, and that she came forward at all — ten, twenty, fifty years later — is and should be regarded as an actual miracle of valor.
So when a gaslighting idiot like the Vice President of the United States tacitly condones a gaslighting idiot like the First Brat, that white-hot molten ingot of mine gets returned to the kiln, and the familiar job of re-education of that right-leaning part of the public too ignorant to see what’s happening begins anew. If you’re wondering what all the fuss is about, Moron Junior had this to say, and while you read it, try to imagine the raised voice of a whiny, indulgently-reared teenager, because that’s what it sounded like: “For them to try to take a pandemic and seemingly hope that it comes here and kills millions of people so that they could end Donald Trump’s streak of winning is a new level of sickness.”
To be sure, anyone who wants millions of Americans to die from coronavirus (so long as it doesn’t include themselves, presumably) so Donald Trump’s “streak of winning” can end is indeed sick. Such people don’t exist, of course, except possibly among the ranks of the criminally psychotic. But that doesn’t stop Donald Trump Jr. from proclaiming as much in the (what has now become) patent-pending voice of counterfeit Republican outrage.
No one is saying they hope millions die. What we’re saying is we hope millions don’t. We actually want Donald Trump to succeed because that’s his job and that’s what we always wanted. In fact, if Donald Trump had done his job as spelled out in the Oath of Office — “faithfully execute the office of president of the United States” and “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States” — I and others like me would have left him alone. (Provided that he hadn’t also raped women and children, ripped off businesses, laundered money from Russia — you know the list.) But no, he’s screwing this up, just like he screws everything up.
So when Chuck Todd of “Meet the Press” played the clip of Donald Trump Jr. — talking about “them” who are allegedly hoping millions die so “they” can pin it on Donald Trump — for Vice President Mike Pence, Pence didn’t deny it. Instead, he changed the subject and attacked a New York Times columnist.
What Pence said to Todd was, “There’s been a lot of irresponsible rhetoric among Democrats [as if saying Democrats hope millions will die so Trump will fail isn’t “irresponsible”!] and commentators on the Left.” Todd asked, “Who? Who? Name some names, sir. This just feels like gaslighting. Please, name some names.” To which Pence replied “There was a column in the New York Times by a prominent liberal journalist [Gail Collins] that we should rename it the “Trumpvirus” so that the president would be blamed.”
First of all, nowhere in Ms. Collins’ column does she say it should be renamed the “Trumpvirus.” I don’t know who writes her headlines but it appears in the headline, and there only once. The headline’s intent was as an ironic reflection on the actual point of a column that exposes the shameful history of Trump cuts to an infectious disease-fighting infrastructure that is now desperately needed. In other words, America’s woeful ill-preparedness is Donald Trump’s fault. He (and John Bolton) made cuts and fired Obama-appointed experts that were installed precisely against a day like this one.
I don’t doubt that Donald Trump’s animal murdering son would happily see millions die if it meant getting a second term for his child-raping father and, perhaps, a term as governor of the state of New York for himself. He’s that kind of evil. It is the irony of projection, the ugly side of projection. Projection is sometimes nothing more than a revealing autobiography. And the vanilla Vice President is more than happy to cover for this kind of moronic tripe by attacking a writer for the New York Times. These are the people in charge of keeping us safe from coronavirus, and we desperately need to replace them.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.