Monday, December 19, 2016

FOR TRUMP VOTERS, THERE WOULD NEVER HAVE BEEN A DEAL-BREAKER

I want to talk about this, even thought it's not exactly the most important story of the day:
While visiting with KIRO Radio’s Dori Monson on Friday to talk about his upcoming performance in Seattle, comedian Tom Arnold revealed a bombshell: He has the infamous unreleased outtakes of Donald Trump using inflammatory language on “The Apprentice.”

“I have the outtakes to ‘The Apprentice’ where he says every bad thing ever, every offensive, racist thing ever,” Arnold said. “I have that.”
Here's Arnold's description of the tape:
It was sort of a Christmas video they put together. He wasn’t going to be President of the United States. It was him sitting in that chair saying the N-word, saying the C-word, calling his son a retard, just being so mean to his own children. Oh, this is so funny, this is this guy.
Arnold was asked to release it before the election, but he didn't want to do so, because he believed that the people who put the tape together would have been at risk:
I said, ‘Well, now these people -- two editors and an associate producer -- are scared to death. They’re scared of his people, they’re scared of they’ll never work again, there’s a $5 million confidentiality agreement.’
So it never came out. And now there's a disagreement about whether the release of the tape would have made a difference:
Monson said he’s sure those recordings would have sunk Trump’s campaign, but Arnold disagreed.

“I don’t think so,” Arnold said. “I think if the people that like him saw him saying the N-word, he’s sitting matter of factly in front of, there has to be 30 people there, and he’s matter of factly saying all of this stuff. So I think they would have liked him more, the people, for being politically incorrect.”
I think a lot of Trump voters would have enjoyed the tape. Others would have said that it was no big deal. But they're not the ones who infuriate me. I imagine there are quite a few people who voted for Trump who would have said that this tape was way over the line -- you know, the way they did when he attacked John McCain, or mocked Serge Kovaleski's disability, or said Megyn Kelly had "blood coming out of her wherever," or attack the Khan family, or was heard on the Access Hollywood tape joking about sexual assault.

I sincerely believe that many Trump voters thought most or all of those things were disturbing. I think they would have felt the same way if they'd heard him use the N-word or call his son a retard. And then they would have voted for him anyway. To these voters, there was nothing he could say or do that would make them believe he was worse than Hillary Clinton.

Nothing? I keep trying to figure out whether that's really accurate. If we saw him violently assaulting someone on video? Or smoking crack? Or wearing a swastika and praising Hitler? What would it have taken? At what point would Trump voters, even the ones who seemed to have consciences, stop making excuses for him?

Certainly nothing on this tape would have crossed their line. I don't think it would have lost him a single vote.

8 comments:

  1. As long as he keeps playing Il Duce and validating their hatred, they're his.

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  2. You're 100% correct. Look at polling with Derp Fuhrer voters on attitudes towards Russia before and after the big push. Before, Russia = bad, evil probably still commies. After, Russia = wev.

    He could kill an intern and drink their blood during a State of the Union address, and the average person who voted for him would say something along the lines of, "well, that intern probably deserved it."

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  3. No, this would have changed nothing.

    t-RUMP had his finger on the pulse of the bigots and nativists. And, like he said himself, he could go out and shoot someone in the middle of 5th Avenue, and not lose a vote.

    Ein t-RUMP!
    Ein Volk!!
    EIN REICH!!!

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  4. Edwin Edwards' dictum is still in effect, I think. The only things that would have made any impression at all would have been seeing him in bed with a dead girl or a live boy.

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  5. Anonymous9:17 AM

    Nope, not one difference. In my hood, those who thought he was a terrible person voted R anyway by justifying they were voting for the PARTY PLATFORM.

    And that is going to cure everything (as if Hairfurrer give 2 hoots about that) shesh

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  6. That tape needs to be released. Now!
    It may not sway most Trump voters, and it's too late for that anyway, but it'll be fun to watch many Republican Congressmen and Senators swimming away from him as fast as they can dog paddle.

    Yours very crankily,
    The New York Crank

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  7. Voting for Trump despite the terrible things he said and did means you are ok with those things, that you now personify those things. In the Quentin Tarantino version of 2017, Brad Pitt would be carving "T"s on the foreheads of Trump voters, so we and they would always know what they did. I would only absolve those who could prove they awoke 11/8 from an 18 month coma, wandered down to the polling place, saw Trump's name and thought, "Look, that 'Apprentice' guy! What a hoot, I'll throw away my vote on him for a laugh."

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  8. Hasan Minhaj of The Daily Show said it best the day after the election, when he spoke to all those Trump voters who might not be racists themselves but who voted for the openly racist candidate, all those people for whom open bigotry and racism was not a deal-breaker. "What that tells me is that you don't hate me, you just don't care about me."

    One of the sadder things about Trump's election is that it proves political philosopher (and Nazi party booster) Carl Schmitt was correct when he said that people divide themselves politically into "friends" and "enemies." He didn't mean people necessarily want to actively hurt those considered "the enemy," just that - if push came to shove - such people would not mind much if outsiders had to suffer for political purposes.

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