Trump Gladly Plays the Fool in the Endless SharpieGate Farce in Order to Distract Media Attention From His Racism, Cruelty, Grifting and Dismantling of Democracy
September 10, 2019
MARK KARLIN, EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH
How we enjoy mocking him, but he is playing us for the fool.
SharpieGate is more than a week old, and the press is still reporting every nuance of a farcical clown circus. Regardless of how much delight and bewilderment is taken by journalists in expressing bemusement at Trump’s prolonged slapstick, the reality may be far more sinister.
Indeed, as is often the case with the entertainment and press-engagement savvy Grifter- Racist- and Divider-in Chief, consider the strong possibility that Trump has prolonged this astonishingly ludicrous situation not because he desires to be the heir to Jerry Lewis, but because he has shown that throughout his years in office that he is willing to play the fool if it covers up for his racism, dismantling of the government, cruelty and brutality on the border, and countless other assaults on democracy, integrity, and non-whites.
Of course, SharpieGate is also drowning out any robust discussion of the millions of dollars in personal enrichment Trump and his family have gained by grifting from the public purse.
SharpieGate has been his longest Trump reality TV comedy episode thus far, in large part because so much wanton abuse of the national soul is going on while eyes are focused on his acting role as the village idiot. How we enjoy mocking him, but he is playing us for the fool.
Amy Siskind has been chronicling Trump’s actions and words that undermine democratic norms, both online and in a book published last year. It is exhaustingly compiled by week, and is a testament to how well Trump has succeeded in normalizing destructive and even deadlier behavior.
Trump knows that the corporate media will cover spectacle and bemused chaos over his racism, his barbarism on the border, his efforts to strangle democracy and toss it into a bath tub, his flamboyantly ludicrous foreign policy and his ongoing deleterious administration undertakings.
Part of the challenge of moving beyond Trump’s calculated buffoonery is the sheer volume of the damage and destruction that is his legacy.
Personally, I have particularly kept track of his racism and appropriately called him an accessory to murder the morning after the weaponized white supremacist massacre of persons of Mexican heritage in El Paso. I also followed suit with a commentary, “Message to the Mainstream Media: Stop Normalizing Trump's Behavior. He Is a Racist, Liar and Instigator of Violence. Full Stop.”
Sure enough, just a few weeks later, after racist violence and shootings that he has incited since he called Mexican migrants “rapists” during the 2016 presidential campaign, the media — including some of the progressive media — is back to treating Trump as some sort of half-wit. But the joke’s on them. Trump knows that while he plays the fool, his wretched deeds are going virtually uncovered rendering him unaccountable.
I personally think much about his anti-nonwhite immigrant policies, formulated largely by Stephen Miller, that are so extensive — and barbaric unto death — that they pop up like mushrooms for a news cycle or two, so it is difficult to understand the cumulative and the strategic, visceral of Trump’s contempt for non-white migrants as literally disposable people. Because before the full horror can sink in, Trump has turned the next news cycle into the Donald Trump as spectacle and provoker of outrage show.
Trump is the ringmaster of the press, snapping his whip to shape the narrative from news cycle to news cycle, each time further normalizing the untenable and ignoble deeds of an administration who sees the only survivors on his reality TV island as his white base.
We are the frog being boiled slowly, who doesn’t realize it until it’s too late.
By then the full authoritarian takeover of our government will be complete, and Trump will emerge as “The Chosen One” of his evangelical voters and other followers. He won’t be playing the fool if he wins in 2020, because there will be nothing left to stop him.
Meanwhile, SharpieGate continues to spawn feverish news alerts about the long-running comedy that should have been tossed in the trash can after day one. The corporate press is complicit in keeping the grand farce coverage blossoming like a Fourth Estate gaper’s block, while the nation becomes further debased as our democracy and moral standing is incinerated in plain sight.
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