As this election season enters its final phase, it's become painfully obvious there is a double standard in terms of candidate bashing. This piece from Olivia Taylor-Young sums it up quite nicely.
1) The most benign, run-of-the-mill stuff is automatic cause for suspicion.
2) Bad faith must always be presumed.
3) Regardless of source, every vicious, outlandish accusation warrants headlines and intense investigation.
This is, of course, what happens when you deal with a group of people (conservatives) who behave as adolescents. And a media that gets very high ratings when Clinton scandals are front and center.
Certainly, Trump has been the target of media bashing as well. But the story that sells the best with him is the "Trump is a crazy asshole" meme, not "Trump is crooked and broke the law." Today, I'm wondering why and calling bullshit.
Let's take this step by step. Remember this?
This was just one in a series of comments in which Trump bragged that he paid to play, something he is now pillorying Hillary Clinton for doing. The New York Times has an extensive article up today about how Trump has clearly violated campaign law.
In the 1990s, the Federal Election Commission fined Mr. Trump for exceeding the annual limit on campaign contributions by $47,050, the largest violation in a single year. And in 2000, the New York State lobbying commission imposed a $250,000 fine for Mr. Trump’s failing to disclose the full extent of his lobbying of state legislators.
For the most part, Mr. Trump has seemed unrepentant. Testifying in 1988 about a $50,000 bank loan he had first guaranteed, and then repaid, on behalf of Andrew J. Stein’s successful campaign for New York City Council president, Mr. Trump made no bones about the move.
“I was under the impression that I was getting my money back,” he told the New York State Commission on Government Integrity.
Imagine if this were Hillary Clinton. There would be calls for jail time, public floggings and a town hanging. But for Trump? He's just a businessman...that's what they do...and now he's calling attention to a broken system.
Except not really.
In the Florida case, Mr. Trump is accused of using a large and timely political donation in 2013 to ward off a potentially thorny investigation by Ms. Bondi’s office: Days before the donation was made, The Orlando Sentinel reported that the New York State attorney general’s office had sued Trump University and noted that Ms. Bondi’s office was weighing whether to join in that litigation.
A political aide to Ms. Bondi told The Associated Press earlier this year that the attorney general had solicited the donation in a conversation with Mr. Trump weeks before The Sentinel’s article. But Mr. Trump made the donation from his charitable foundation, in violation of tax regulations, and paid the penalty, as first reported by The Washington Post last week.
So, here we have Donald Trump behaving like...a politician? That really does not fit with his image as an outsider who wants to change politics as usual. Worse, and unlike the Hilz, there is clear evidence that violated the law.
The question now is...will all of the media cover this because it's not a "Crazy Donald" story?
1 comment:
Trump did the same thing in Texas when he gave Greg Abbott a $35,000 contribution to end the Trump University investigation when Abbott was attorney general.
The problem is that reporters already know that Trump is a crook. It's not news. There are literally hundreds of documented instances of Trump ripping people off, hiring immigrants without work visas, not paying vendors and plain old lying.
That's not "news." But when he goes to Mexico to look "presidential" or to a black church to pretend he's not a racist, that gets wall to wall coverage.
As Trump has said, his supporters would still vote for him if he shot someone on 5th Ave.: they know he's a crook, but they don't care. They are entertained by him and they vainly hope that he's not conning them, like he's conned everyone else.
Since he has such a long history of racism, they're sure he's going to continue the racist actions. The problem is that the only thing Trump cares about other than himself is money. And there's no money is deporting immigrants: they do the jobs at wages that native born Americans would never do.
Trump is just another wealthy business owner, and even though he's pretending to side against them, his past and current business practices and current rhetoric indicate that as president he would "negotiate" a way for the vast majority of immigrants to stay here and work for peanuts.
He would be "forced" to compromise with an "intransigent" congress, and he would blame them for giving him exactly what he and other big businesses have wanted all along. It won't be "amnesty" and it won't provide a path to citizenship, but that's exactly what Trump and his cronies want: wage slaves who are paid dirt, have no rights and can be deported if they start getting uppity.
Post a Comment