The street violence erupting around Trump’s campaign and his supporters is but a preview of the bloody chaos to come as America continues to disintegrate
By Mark Cromer
The images are now are all too familiar in this Campaign 2016: Donald Trump on an American-flag bedecked stage speaking to tens of thousands of his mostly white supporters, while protestors outside the venue vent their unvarnished animus ostensibly at his message—then explode into a violent rage as the Trump crowd leaves.
Mexican flags are waved. American flags are burned. Fights break out between some protestors and Trump supporters, but more often seen are lone Trump supporters running a gauntlet in panic as they are spit on and set upon by a taunting thuggish mob, beaten down and consumed like young antelope separated from their herd and downed by a pack of hyenas with bandanna’s concealing their faces.
And in more than a few instances, the police on hand seem to standby rather idly, oddly disinterested in the crimes being committed in front of them by goons that are usually chanting: ‘Pigs in a blanket! Fry’em up like bacon!’ whenever Trump isn’t in town.
The escalating mob violence that greets Trump in urban population centers and the stark images that subsequently flash across the new media’s beehive networks of social connection that have made the once iron gates of the fabled Fourth Estate now largely moot are beginning to unsettle even the establishment players in the Democratic Party. Not that they are necessarily opposed to violent street terrorism as an expedient means to achieve their political ends per se, but rather they sense that if left unchecked for now it could well pay them a most bitter political dividend come November.
In the summer of 1934, a socialist named Adolf Hitler faced the same dilemma as the Democrats do today, and decided upon what became known as the ‘Night of the Long Daggers,’ dealing in one swift stroke a fatal blow to fellow Nazi Ernst Röhm’s nationwide army of street thugs that were impatiently clamoring for ‘the second revolution’ in pre-World War II Germany. Rich irony aside, it seems rather unlikely that Hillary Clinton will be so bold today, but not that she wouldn’t if she thought she would succeed.
And thus America is presented with the perennial hedge of the elites.
San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo, faced with disturbing scenes of peaceful attendees of a lawful political rally being violently attacked by the street thugs, first sought to blame Trump for his supporters being attacked, which has been the main vein of the messaging campaign coming out of the Democratic National Committee since last fall when candidate-for-a-nanosecond Martin O’ Malley made calling Trump a Klan leader his campaign’s raison d’être. Then perhaps sensing that that progression of logic wasn’t tracking well in the insta-polls canvassing voting Americans, Liccardo swiftly took to Twitter to declare that violence was never ok. Right. (And for those interested in the year-round fauna of violence in San Jose, according to its police department homicides, rapes, robberies and all manner of reported violent crimes have jumped in the city over the past two years.)
Clinton and Bernie Sanders issued similarly flat, non-denouncement denouncements of the violence against Trump’s supporters, with both careful to blame Trump for the bloody trouble nonetheless, not the thugs committing it. Collectively, they cribbed a riff from Chris Rock when he once memorably remarked about OJ Simpson’s murder of Nichole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman: “I ain’t saying it’s right, but I understand.” In its full context, Rock’s punch-line was not nearly as incendiary as it sounds, but Clinton & Co.’s milquetoast mumble of faux regret over the violence directed at Trump’s supporters is as disingenuous as they meant it to be.
Columnist Charles M. Blow looked down from his editorial page perch in the once gilded birdcage of The New York Times as he dropped another deuce on the newsprint by framing the roaming gang members and anarchists in San Jose as Freedom Riders understandably gone awry. “I understand that [Trump] is elevating and normalizing a particular stance of racism and sexism that many view as a spiritual attack, a kind of psychic violence from which they cannot escape,” Blow wrote, effectively declaring that a Trump ‘Make America Great Again’ baseball cap was the equivalent of a Klan hood, and as such an instrument of “psychic violence” from which someone who opposes Trump “cannot escape.”
Just as college students across the American academic landscape today have alternately collapsed into fetal positions and exploded into grand mal seizures at the mere sight of ‘Trump 2016’ chalked on the campus walls and walks, convulsing at what they believe to be a ‘hate crime,’ Blow gave credence to the belief that Trump’s words and the thoughts they express are equally fair game when encountered outside the hallowed grounds of the ‘safe space’ that is now the academy and that opponents of his policies are understandably if regrettably forced into violence.
The riot in San Jose, erupting on the eve of the California primary, handed Trump a golden opportunity to once more put a cherry on top of his message that America is coming apart at the seams even as an arrogant, elitist governing class watch their stocks rise while the working stiffs watch their anemic paychecks stagnate even more while zombie-like criminals brazenly take ever more turf in cities across the nation. Trump’s campaign was presented with enough raw footage out of San Jose alone to cut three Lee Atwater-class commercials that would eviscerate the Democrats by presenting scenes of street violence that would make Willie Horton look like Rochester on the Jack Benny Show.
But Trump blew it.
Not surprisingly, Trump couldn’t turn his bullhorn of a mouth off long enough to let a bloody blessing in disguise bloom into a few more percentage points northward in the national polls. No, instead he buried the sweet lead of a story by walking into a series of establishment media interviews where he blathered on in an almost more repetitively nauseating fashion than his usual broken-record bleating of verbal Tweets on a loop about United States District Court Judge Gonzalo Curiel being inherently biased against him in the case currently before his court because, wait for it, he’s a Mexican.
Qué? Qué!
The only problem for Motor Mouth Don being a) Judge Curiel is not Mexican, he’s as American as apple pie, and b) Judge Curiel has not done anything from the bench that would constitute demonstrable prejudicial bias against Trump in the case. Of course, that didn’t stop Trump from talking ever more about it, repeating and repeating again, like a wind-up toy, the same ADHD babble rap of impudent nonsense.
As the establishment Democrats clucked and pecked like nervous hens across the media, sensing another two to three million undecided independent voters in critical states were getting nudged, or shoved, into Trump’s column by the chaos on California’s central coast, Trump did much to allay their fears (for now) by merely doing what he has done to inspire them: he kept right on talking and walking off ever deeper into a senseless distraction, when he should have been laser focused on the gift dropped in front of him.
It might be cold comfort to Trump’s campaign that over the past year that literally nothing Trump has said, no matter how ingloriously vain or ridiculously shallow or politically obscene, has managed yet to scuttle his improbable rise to potential executive power. And as such, his missed opportunity in the aftermath of San Jose that he turned into a notable blunder may well blow over quickly into the controversy surrounding whatever he says next. For there’s no doubt he’ll keep burping Tweets and the street urchins that are attacking his supporters will continue to gather at his rallies for a little fun in between the robberies and carjackings that make up most of their usual day-to-day.
But the real story underpinning the violence in San Jose and Anaheim and Albuquerque and Chicago and indeed across all the other cities where it breaks out when Trump rolls into town—and Cleveland is going to be a real gas—is getting obscured in the media scrum.
Whether Trump wins or loses, either somehow in Cleveland or eventually in the fall, the real story is what follows November. And it’s not a pretty one.
Because either way, huge chunks of the American body politic will continue to fracture and splinter off into ever more brightly defined tribes of ethno-cultural tribes and classes, tribes that are ever more armed and embittered and aggrieved.
Jesse Jackson once observed “whites riot at the ballot box.” And the good reverend was right.
But over the past three decades working white Americans have increasingly determined that that kind of protest no longer counts for much in their interest. And thus the rise of Donald Trump: implausible, inarticulate and yet seemingly impervious to the algorithms of political gravity.
For all the fear now surging into panic at the prospect of Trump’s winning the White House, the Democrats and their establishment media harem haven’t seemed to yet grasp what lays ahead if Hillary stops coughing and cackling long enough to secure another lease back at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington D.C.
Columnist Blow used his column in The New York Times to fake worry about the violent upheaval that will spread across America’s streets should Trump win—it’s a warning dressed up as handwringing because if Trump does win in November then Blow will likely sanction his assassination along with setting the cities aflame from coast-to-coast (note: Times columnist Ross Douthat in February Tweeted out a helpful projection/suggestion to readers that Trump may have to be shot to be stopped)—but he didn’t seem to give a second thought as to what happens if Trump loses?
For a large segment of the 70 million or more Americans that will likely cast ballots for Donald Trump, or more accurately what he represents, losing in 2016 may well be the last time they decide to take their riot to the ballot box.
In which case Hillary Clinton, for the first time since she married Bill, will have to seriously wonder what the hell she just ‘won.’
And good luck with that, Hillary.
