This won’t be a full column – I’ll still have my usual Friday one out tomorrow. But I want to comment on this before it’s older news that it already is.
Regular readers know that I was (and am) a DeSantis guy, and that I’ve had a love/hate relationship with Trump. We won’t re-hash that old ground now, but suffice it to say that as much as I liked most of his presidency and much of his skill set, he drives me crazy with his undisciplined, childish and self-harming verbal excesses.
But when he’s good, he can be amazing! He’s got a great instinct for counter-punching, and I saw an excellent example of that from him on Tuesday.
He was doing a Q&A after a press conference in Howell, Michigan. (An act which Que Mala has avoided like the plague!)
When the Harris goat-rodeo corps found out he was going to Howell, they put out a statement about how Howell, MI is somehow a hotbed of KKK influence in these United States, and so obviously Trump is going there because he’s a vicious racist.
Sorry, that should have been “the Harris campaign,” not goat-rodeo corps.
Or should it?
Anyway, Fox reporter Aishah Hasnie asked him about Que Mala’s charge that appearing in Howell is inherent racist. (By the way, many on our side have lambasted Hasnie and the question as typical leftist-hack dishonest reporting. But my impression of her is that that she’s not a hack, and I think this kind of question is sometimes legitimate: “Your opponents say this about what you’re doing. How do you respond?”)
There are lots of good answers to such a stupid charge, and many of them could be quite verbose, and thus open to a rambling Trump response.
In fact, when I first heard that charge, something didn’t add up for me: Could it be true that a racist organization with its origin in the Democrat deep South right after the Civil War somehow had a vibrant outpost in far-north Michigan, 160 years later?
So I researched it, and found the following, which Trump could easily have gotten into, saying something like this to Hasnie:
“Okay, let’s have a history lesson about the KKK. Do you know in what political party it was formed, and who the primary founders were? The answer is the Democrat party, and that it was started by 6 ex-confederate soldiers, all Democrats, in Pulaski, TN. Do you know who the first KKK grand wizard was? Democrat and ex-Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest.
Do you know what Howell’s supposed KKK connections refers to? A day in 1994 when one local idiot racist held a KKK rally that klan members from outside the community attended.
How many thousands of klansmen attended, and how much violence and destruction did they cause to the community? They didn’t cause any destruction; they played loud music from a boombox, waved Confederate flags, and yelled like morons for a while.
How did such a huge mob of mouth-breathers do so little damage? Because they weren’t a huge mob. And even though police forces around the country have traditionally had trouble coming up with reliable estimates of crowd sizes, this one was simple.
Because, and I am not making this up, the horde of white racists attending this high-profile rally was… wait for it… ‘less than a dozen.’”
So yes, Trump could have done all that, and blasted the reporter with actual facts that demonstrated that the MSM’s “Trump goes to racist-land” story was a despicable lie.
And 38 seconds after he was done, the first MSM story would appear, with the headline, “Trump Excuses KKK Rally,” or “Trump on KKK Rally: ‘No Big Deal’”
Instead, Trump was at his best. He just walked to microphone and said, “Who was here in 2021?” Hasnie answered, “Joe Biden.” And Trump laughed and pointed at her and said, “Thank you!” And then walked away.
Because the mic he spoke into was on a stand, he couldn’t drop it. And yet somehow he did.
That’s great Trump! He sees an opening, he strikes with a lightning-fast jab like the young Thomas Hearns (he was the “Motor City Cobra,” for those of you who think I can’t pull a 40-year-old, geographically appropriate boxing reference out of my conical wizard hat), and then walks away in slow motion, as the building behind him explodes.
And everybody knows that Que Mala couldn’t have done that on her best day.
Her answer would have started, in a nasally drone, “Well, racism, in terms of its significance in our country, has a great significance in our country…” Followed by an entire buffet of word salad, ending in a bone-chilling cackle, and then a whimper.
What can we take away from this?
Two things we already knew: Brevity is the soul of wit.
And – pardon my French, as we used to say in the late 1800s – the MSM is the soul of s**t.
More, please, Mr. Trump. More of this!
Coming tomorrow: my take on the lowest of the low points of the DNC
Hamas delenda est!
Martin Simpson 