Donald J. Trump by Foreword by Victor Davis Hanson Conrad Black

Author:Foreword by Victor Davis Hanson Conrad Black [Conrad Black, Foreword by Victor Davis Hanson]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781621577881
Publisher: Regnery Publishing
Published: 2018-04-04T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8

Race to the Wire

At Wilmington, North Carolina, on August 9, Trump accused Hillary Clinton of seeking to repeal Americans’ constitutional right to bear arms through her gun control proposals. This was a serious exaggeration, but not an uncommon one in political campaigns. He said “if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although [with] the Second Amendment people, maybe there is.”1 Without asking for clarification on what he meant, the jackals in the pro-Clinton media reported he had called for Mrs. Clinton’s assassination. He clarified that he was only referring to the well-known and frequently demonstrated political influence of Second Amendment enthusiasts, and their chief lobbying arm, the National Rifle Association, to get their way.

The Democrats and their media allies would not let it go in their desire to exploit what they thought a vulnerability of Trump’s about incitement to violence. Tom Friedman, the absurdly partisan Democratic sympathizer who comments on national and international affairs (very predictably) in the New York Times, wrote “And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how Yitzhak Rabin got assassinated.” It was a false and scurrilous statement, but it is doubtful that this controversy had any lasting impact because it was so manifestly untrue; in fact, it would eventually be proven to be the reverse of the truth as liberals themselves delighted in publicly imagining Trump’s assassination. Still, Trump did not help himself by adding in September that Mrs. Clinton’s secret service detail should disarm themselves and “let’s see what happens.” Trump was not promoting violence at all—in this case, he was trying to underline the effectiveness of guns for personal protection—but his belligerent spirit of “We won’t take it anymore,” which appealed to tens of millions of people, was easily construed by those who viscerally disliked his strident egotism and bluntness as betraying a tendency to violence. Most of these controversies, based on different interpretations of ambiguous statements, reinforced people where they were and did not move large blocs of opinion durably in one direction or another.

Trump too was on the offensive every day of the campaign. On August 11, he referred to Obama and Hillary Clinton as “co-founders of ISIS.” The anti-Trump media went through their ponderous fact-checking process to establish that the accusation was not literally true, as if Trump had claimed that Obama and Clinton had personally set up an organization calling for a new Muslim caliphate. There were widespread media reports on August 11 that Reince Priebus had threatened to withhold Republican National Committee funds from Trump and consign them to Republican candidates for other offices. There was no actual evidence to support this allegation; it was vehemently denied on all sides, and was one of the early egregious examples of what Trump called “fake news.” On August 16, 123 people who claimed to be Republicans, including two congressmen (Reid Ribble and Scott Rigell), eight former congressmen, and twenty-seven former members of the Republican National Committee, signed a petition making the request that the media had already attributed to Priebus.

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