Former president Donald Trump participated in an interview that aired on Fox News on Sunday. If so inclined, as many Fox News viewers presumably will be, it\u2019s easy to pick out pieces of the conversation that would assuage concerns one might have about his authoritarian inclinations \u2014 concerns that many Fox News viewers presumably don\u2019t have.<\/p>\n
Trump was asked, for example, whether he would use law enforcement to punish his political opponents.<\/p>\n
After some back-and-forth, he said what he was supposed to say: No, \u201cbecause that\u2019s a bad thing for the country. I don\u2019t want to do that. \u2026 I haven\u2019t said that I would.\u201d<\/p>\n
Asked about the attack at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and his comments at an event last week that it was a \u201cday of love,\u201d Trump defended himself by drawing a distinction.<\/p>\n
He noted, as he often does, that his speech that morning had included a call for the protests to be conducted \u201cpeacefully and patriotically\u201d and described the rioters as \u201ca small group of people [who] went down to the Capitol.\u201d He wasn\u2019t talking about them, he said. He was talking about the speech and \u201cthat tremendous crowd, the largest group I have ever spoken to, in front of these beautiful monuments, I thought it was actually a beautiful thing.\u201d<\/p>\n
And there you go. All this brouhaha about Trump as a threat to democracy or a fascist despite his having checked the boxes he was supposed to check. It\u2019s just like how the media criticizes Trump for saying there were \u201cvery fine people\u201d on both sides of the violence in Charlottesville without noting that he also checked the box to say that Nazis are bad!<\/p>\n
But then, as now, the context is important \u2014 context that includes everything else that Trump said.<\/p>\n
In the Fox News interview, conducted by media reporter Howard Kurtz, Trump did say he wouldn\u2019t go after his political opponents. Kurtz could have pointed out that Trump triggered investigations of a number of his political opponents when he actually was president, but didn\u2019t. But the reality seeped into the conversation anyway.<\/p>\n
Kurtz began with Trump\u2019s recent frustrations about CBS News and the \u201c60 Minutes\u201d interview of Vice President Kamala Harris. Trump has sought to suggest that the interview was unfairly edited to benefit Harris. But, Trump being Trump, he\u2019s done so in hyperbolic terms, suggesting that the edit was so egregious that it constituted one of the largest breaches of media ethics in recent history. And because he\u2019s so effectively cast the media as hostile to his base and to America, he has demanded \u2014 as he did to Kurtz \u2014 that CBS lose a broadcast license granted it by the federal government.<\/p>\n
In other words, he thinks the federal government should punish an organization he presents as his political opponent. He also said, as he has often in the past, that he was going to sue the New York Times for whatever reason \u2014 which at least isn\u2019t a pledge to leverage presidential authority against the newspaper. (Which would not itself be terribly surprising.)<\/p>\n
Trump also made very clear that he stood by his comments about the \u201cenemy within,\u201d a term he applies to his political opponents and critics. As he did when he began using this descriptor earlier this month, he cast these \u201cenemies\u201d as more dangerous than foreign actors such as China and Russia.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe outside people, the so-called enemies, if they\u2019re enemies \u2014 and they might not be enemies,\u201d Trump said of those countries and their leaders, \u201cif you have a smart president, they can be handled.\u201d But those paled, he suggested, in comparison to the people who had investigated him.<\/p>\n
That framing itself is fascinating, of course. Russia is not as worrisome as Rep. Adam Schiff (Calif.), the Democratic candidate for Senate, because Schiff elevated concerns about ties between Trump\u2019s 2016 presidential campaign and Russia? Trump\u2019s presentation of the \u201cenemy within\u201d was offered solely in the context of the threat to him.<\/p>\n
The Washington Post\u2019s Bob Woodward recently reported that Gen. Mark A. Milley, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had described Trump as \u201cfascist to the core\u201d in a private conversation. Using government power to punish and centering himself as the most important element of that government certainly comports with that idea.<\/p>\n
Kurtz asked Trump about another element of Milley\u2019s condemnation, his referring to Trump as \u201cthe most dangerous person ever.\u201d Trump responded that Milley was \u201cwoke\u201d and that he\u2019d fired him, which he didn\u2019t. (A second later, he clarified that he was going to fire Milley but \u201ctime was pretty short, so I just left him.\u201d)<\/p>\n
The Capitol riot lingered over the entire conversation, for obvious reasons. That event was the culmination of a months-long effort by Trump to insist that the 2020 election would be or was stolen. He demanded that his supporters show up in Washington that day, promising them it would be \u201cwild.\u201d And he encouraged them to march to the Capitol from the White House, which thousands did \u2014 his sole mention of doing so \u201cpeacefully and patriotically\u201d muffled by a fusillade of disparagements and demands for action, to fight.<\/p>\n
Even when talking to Kurtz about the \u201csmall group\u201d that went to the Capitol, Trump claimed that they were ushered inside by the police. (This, too, is how Trump works: He throws out as many defenses as he can muster \u2014 like the one he posted on Truth Social blaming the government for the riot \u2014 recognizing that he only needs his audience to accept one to give him a pass.) He also claimed that \u201cnobody had guns here either.\u201d<\/p>\n
This isn\u2019t true, as Kurtz pointed out, but Trump rejected that feedback. (\u201cWell, I have not heard that at all, no,\u201d he said. \u201cI don\u2019t think so. They had no guns. They had no guns.\u201d) In fact, testimony offered at the House select committee\u2019s probe of the riot indicated that Trump knew his supporters in Washington were armed but wanted the metal detectors at his speech shut down. After all, he reportedly said, \u201cthey\u2019re not here to hurt me.\u201d<\/p>\n
It is good that Trump at least still believes that he should say, for example, that he won\u2019t target his opponents. Even that should carry an asterisk, of course, given how fervently he\u2019s insisted that the purported targeting of him is a moral outrage. Nor is it clear that labeling his opponents as enemies is less dangerous than threatening to have them audited by the IRS.<\/p>\n
In a related way, it\u2019s also better if he isn\u2019t explicitly saying that he approves of the most violent actors at the Capitol riot. But he keeps edging closer to those lines, calling the rioters \u201cwe\u201d and insisting that those in prison \u2014 often for committing violence against law enforcement \u2014 are \u201cpolitical prisoners.\u201d<\/p>\n
Someone viewing the interview with an eye toward feeling comfortable in supporting Trump will be able to find fig leaves covering the necessary unpleasantries. Someone viewing it through the lens offered by Milley, though, will not find those unpleasantries obscured.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Former president Donald Trump participated in an interview that aired on Fox News on Sunday. If so inclined, as many Fox News viewers presumably will be, it\u2019s easy to pick out pieces of the conversation that would assuage concerns one might have about his authoritarian inclinations \u2014 concerns that many Fox News viewers presumably don\u2019t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":11429,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11428","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11428","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11428"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11428\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11429"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11428"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}