Age of the Geek

By: 
Travis Fischer

Words mean things
     Donald Trump is preemptively blaming the media for his impending loss in this year's general election.
     I suppose it's a fair conclusion. After all, abundant media coverage on every outlandish thing Trump said practically gift-wrapped the Republican nomination for Trump. Why wouldn't it work the other way around?
     Surprisingly, to Trump at least, what worked for him during the primary is hurting him in the general. Trump is currently down in every swing state, from Virginia to New Hampshire to Georgia. Also, Georgia is apparently a swing state now.
     All because the media is doing what they've been doing from the beginning. Relaying the things Donald Trump says under the premise that he actually means them.
     "If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do folks," said Trump at a rally in North Carolina. "Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is. I don't know."
     I'm not going to speculate on what Trump meant by that. Feel free to do that for yourself. What I can tell you is what he didn't mean by that.
     Trump cannot be talking about voting in this sentence. There is no way you can take that string of 23 words and conclude that Trump is referring to the voting power of Second Amendment proponents. That is an 'if-then' statement, describing a scenario in which Clinton has already been elected and apparently the only people capable of stopping her from selecting a Supreme Court Justice unfriendly to guns are the "Second Amendment people."
     Trump's doesn't explicitly state what exactly he thinks the "Second Amendment people" would be able to do to stop Clinton and/or her pick of justice. In fact, he admits ignorance about the details by ending his thought with "I don't know." He's just saying that the "Second Amendment people" might be able to do something.
     Whatever he actually meant, the implication is obvious, as though it was posted in giant gold letters on the side of a building. Technically, I wouldn't say Donald Trump was inciting violence against Hillary Clinton. But only on a technicality.
     After all, it's not like Donald Trump doesn't have a history of inciting violence against people at rallies. In fact the city where Trump made his "Second Amendment" comment is only an hour away from Fayetteville, where a Trump supporter was charged with assault and battery after a protester was attacked last March.
     In a normal campaign, it would be a crippling blow that would virtually guarantee the end of the speaker's political aspirations.
     For Donald Trump, it was Tuesday.
     I foolishly thought I could dedicate a whole column to this topic, revisiting the subject of where the line of responsibility is drawn between people and the crazy mobs that do things on their behalf.
     It's one of the risks of a weekly paper that sometimes a topic becomes old news before you get a chance to print anything about it, but surely something grave enough as implied assassination would stay in the news cycle for a while. Right?
     Well not if, just one day later, Donald Trump claims that President Obama founded ISIS. Four times.
     Now one might say that Trump was referring to the power vacuum in Syria and Iraq creating an opportunity for ISIS to rise to prominence. The group existed well before then, but at least that's something you could say happened on Obama's watch.
     But no. That's not what Trump meant, because when presented with that exact out on Hugh Hewitt's talk show, Trump explicitly denied that was what he meant and doubled down on the original statement.
     So apparently President Obama used his time machine to travel back to 1999 and create ISIS. This would be the same time machine Obama used to start the Afghanistan War in 2001, get Captain Humayun Khan killed in Iraq in 2004, and cause the 2007 financial crisis.
     That was sarcasm.
     What Trump said was not. I don't know what he thought he was doing when he made those comments, but it wasn't sarcasm.
     Donald Trump is running for president, not posting in the comments section of Yahoo! News. Calling for Russia to hack a political candidate stops being a joke when you know Vladimir Putin is probably going to hear you.
     The only saving grace here seems to be that by the time you can respond to one inane thing Trump says, he'll have already done something else. Because in the time it's taken me to write this far in this column, I've found out that Donald Trump told a Make-A-Wish kid that he would never lie to him, and then immediately promised to do something he cannot possibly do.
     We accept the popular notion that the promises of politicians mean very little. Political reality forces them to oversell themselves. The sad irony is that if politicians were honest, nobody would vote for them.
     Donald Trump has taken this concept to the next level. For somebody running as a outsider not abiding by the usual political rules, Trump has become a cartoonish embodiment of abhorrent political tactics. He will say anything he thinks will play well with the audience in front of him. If it works, he'll keep saying it. If it gets him in trouble outside of his bubble, he'll claim he was only kidding and still keep saying it.
     It's interesting behavior for a guy whose rise was largely based on the perception that he "tells it like it is."
 
     Travis Fischer is a news writer for Mid-America Publishing and actually could stand to wait a while to see what Trump comes up with next.

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