Donald Trump is projecting again, and he’s giving something away
You may recall a particularly irritating troll from a year or so ago who flagged typos and misspellings in the comment field. The two most laughable things about this troll (and there were several others) were that he himself made lots of typos and he was an outspoken advocate for the Monarch of Gaffes, Donald Trump himself. Is this a common hypocrisy among the quasi-literate alt-right? Maybe.
Lately Donald Trump has spilled a lot of Twitter ink tweet-shaming Joe Biden for inadvertently referring to the deaths caused by Donald Trump in the coronavirus debacle as “120 million” instead of “120 thousand.” I don’t know, maybe it’s a feature of the Dunning-Kruger Effect, but isn’t that a little like Hitler saying, “No, dummkopf, it’s 6 million Jews, not 6 billion!” You have to wonder, isn’t anyone in the Trump camp doing a giant face slap over this?
Besides the fact that Trump is broadcasting how many human beings he’s murdered, it is also the height of insensitivity. Think of it yourself, the loved ones, friends and relatives of the deceased aren’t going to want anyone turning a statistic about their dearly departed into a political excoriation of someone else. It really does beggar belief.
But besides all that, there’s the fact that Donald Trump himself made a similar gaffe. On April 7th of this year, while he was bragging about the number of coronavirus tests he’d done, Trump said, thus far there had been “One point eight seven million tests to date so there’s one million, eight hundred and seventy thousand million tests.” Oops, that’s a million times too many, Donny.
Remember, this is the guy who dared to try to educate the graduating class at West Point about Douglas Muh-Garther. Or who, during last year’s Fourth of July celebration, spoke of airports during the American Revolution. He once mistook 9/11 for the convenience store “7/11,” called John Bolton “Michael Bolton,” and spoke of Americans from “all walks of lice.” (There’s a kernel of truth in that last one if he was referring to the knuckle-dragging, drooling cretins who attend his rallies.)
What comes across more than anything else is what a little man Trump is, a little man who dares to compare himself — favourably, if you can believe it — with Abraham Lincoln. We must unite to defeat him in November. Every moment he spends in the White House is an effrontery to the dignity of the office of the presidency. Donald Trump must go. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.