Friday, September 30, 2016

More on Trump's Utopian Promises

Charles Krauthammer:
Take the most striking — and overlooked — moment of Trump’s GOP convention speech. He actually promised that under him, “the crime and violence that today afflicts our nation will soon — and I mean very soon — come to an end.”

Not “be reduced.” End.

Humanity has been at this since, oh, Hammurabi. But the audience didn’t laugh. It applauded.

Nor was this mere spur of the moment hyperbole. Trump was reading from a teleprompter. As he was a few weeks earlier when he told a conference in North Dakota, “Politicians have used you and stolen your votes. They have given you nothing. I will give you everything.”

Everything, mind you. “I will give you what you’ve been looking for for 50 years.” No laughter recorded.

In launching his African American outreach at a speech in Charlotte, Trump catalogued the horrors that he believes define black life in America today. Then promised: “I will fix it.”

How primitive have our politics become? Fix what? Family structure? Social inheritance? Self-destructive habits? How? He doesn’t say. He’ll will it. Trust him, as he likes to say.

After 15 months, the suspension of disbelief has become so ubiquitous that we hardly notice anymore. We are operating in an alternate universe where the geometry is non-Euclidean, facts don’t matter, history and logic have disappeared.
And then this, which appears as the caption to a photograph on the same page:
Speaking at a rally in Melbourne, Fla., Sept. 27, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said there are only "41 days to make possible every dream you've ever dreamed."

1 comment:

G. Verloren said...

I and many others have previously mocked Trump by sarcastically placing impossibly overblown and exaggerated promises into his mouth - bringing peace to the Middle East by nuking ISIL, somehow curing cancer (or at least deporting it and building a wall around the country to keep it out), personally making Kim Jong-un bawl like a baby by beating him at arm-wrestling and then giving him a noogie, et cetera.

But now Trump, ever one to rise to a challenge, has done us all one better and simply gone ahead and literally promised anything and everything the human mind can imagine.

The mind boggles that the man has the gall, and that his supporters still haven't caught on to the scam.