Donald Trump proved today that, while his mind is not exactly a steel trap, it is a trap of sorts—a long strip of fly paper to which every passing conspiracy theory sticks, stinks, and festers. Rather than give a speech on foreign policy, or on the economy, or on where the hell he left his tax forms, Trump’s entire speech had exactly one thing to say: Hillary Clinton is a supervillain.
This was a long speech. To help provide some structure, let’s first deal with all the substantive, factual charges Trump laid at Hillary’s feet today.
Okay then—now on to the rest of the speech.
Much of what Trump said was recycled from the pages of Clinton Cash by Bush speechwriter, Breitbart mythologizer, and Glenn Beck co-author Peter Schweizer. Schweizer’s book, which mixed up timelines, inflated dollar amounts, and simply invented events when it ran out of mistakes, was thoroughly debunked before it was published, but since right-wing writers know that a Bill and Hill bash-a-thon will always bring the ravening right to the book heaps at Sam’s Club, no effort was made to correct its errors. Neither has anyone bothered to stop raving about the book on Fox, or bothered to correct Trump when he’s used the text verbatim in previous speeches. Trump’s declarations that Hillary was a world-class liar and “most corrupt person ever to seek the presidency” were based on a list of items taken straight from Schweizer’s book, none of them supported by facts.
In fact, this wasn’t so much a new speech as a Greatest Conspiracy Theory hit list, with every fantasy ever un-spun by O’Reilly or scrawled onto the pages at Regnery Publishing trotted out and lined up like the Usual Suspects.
However, the total lack of facts and reliance on late-night scare points passed along between discussions of where the black helicopters went today isn’t going to bother Republicans. They’re going to love this. Republicans are going to call this speech the most presidential thing since Adam was elected president of Eden (1-0, since Eve didn’t get to vote).
Because this wasn’t a Trump speech at all. It was a summary of the GOP.
Vince Foster. Webb Hubbell.
I’m bringing them up because Hillary’s part-time work as an assassin and Chelsea's true father are the only Republican yup-yup-yups that didn’t get airtime in Trump’s screed.
Did you know Hillary Clinton caused the Arab Spring? It’s True!
Did you know Hillary Clinton killed thousands of Americans in the Middle East while Secretary of State and spent “trillions, and trillions” of dollars? Now you know!
Did you know that Hillary installed a cash register in the State Department and instituted a pay-for-play foreign policy? Of course she did!
Did you know that Hillary Clinton sent millions of jobs overseas, tore open our borders, and kept workers salaries low? She’s just that evil.
After laying out the long, long list of Hillary’s sins as sanctioned by Pope Limbaugh, Trump harkened back to the Golden Age, the now sadly forgotten best time ever in American history. He was speaking, of course, of the George W. Bush administration.
Does no one now remember the perfect peace and prosperity we enjoyed in those days “before Hillary was sworn in” to wage her one-woman jihad on the Middle East and wreck the burgeoning economy? In that better age, “Libya was cooperating, Iraq was seeing a reduction of violence, Syria was under control, Iran was being choked by sanctions, and Egypt was governed by a friendly regime.” And of course, Donald Trump was predicting that we shouldn’t touch this delicate jewel—except when he was actually urging people to go into Iraq, and go into Syria, and go into Libya.
Man, if only we could go back to that time when Libya was under the boot of a brutal dictator, Syria was under the boot of a brutal dictator, Iran’s economy was growing faster than any other in the Middle East, and Egypt was under the boot of a brutal dictator. But then, Trump has developed a great fondness for strongman boots. Can you visualize Putin, Assad, Mubarek, Hussein, and Trump sitting down for a great, great dinner at the Mar-a-Lago Club? Sure you can.
Let’s add ‘em up, shall we? Assad has been running Syria for 16 years, taking over from his father who ran the place for the previous 30 years. Mubarek was president of Egypt for 30 years. Colonel/Revolutionary Chairman/Brotherly Leader Gaddafi had his foot on Libya’s throat for 42 years. So yeah, that’s a lot of stability, so long as you don’t mind democracy being utterly suppressed and dissidents being killed by the tens of thousands. Surprise! Trump doesn’t mind. Republicans don’t mind.
This image of Middle Eastern neoconservative paradise is key to the picture Republicans have been pushing for the last eight years. It’s all part of the “Obama broke it” story line, which can now be shifted to Hillary with very economical editing. Oh, and that Iranian bomb that’s always on the way because of Obama/Clinton’s weak, weak negotiating with Iran? As part of the treaty signed by the Obama Administration, Iran has given up 98 percent of its nuclear fuel in the past year. Scanning. Scanning ... No, somehow Trump missed getting that into the speech.
The same evil-starts-with-an-H approach applies to the economic end of Trump’s speech. Hillary comes in for attack for declines in American wealth, for the erosion of the middle class, and for piling up the national debt. But the economic crash under Bush? Never heard of it. Surely that was an Obama Hillary thing. The recovery of American jobs? The longest period of growth on record? Never happened.
The bulk of Trump’s speech was squarely in the heartland of Republican Conspiracy Theory. That is—Email Servers Kill, Hillary is a greedy bitch, and Bennggghhhaaaaziiiii! But it least it showed that Trump could put down Clinton Cash long enough to read other conspiracy theories on his Twitter feed.
Trump painted Hillary as a monster who never missed an opportunity to enrich herself, one who “has spent her entire life making money for special interests.“ To come up with the numbers he cited, Trump had to throw together a few special interests like, oh, charitable foundations. But then, Trump’s personal experience with charitable foundations may make it hard for him to understand that other people use these things to give away money, not make it.
Trump paused for a little Trump boosting in mid-speech, because you can’t spell Trump without me-me-me. His auto-hagiography of his struggle to build his humble business from a just a small loan (of $1 million, later followed by $4 million, followed by being gifted an already existing company with tens of millions in property all over New York). We can all agree that this is a guy who started with just millions in real estate, and turned it into millions in real estate along with four bankrupt companies. Would someone wake Mr. Alger? He’ll want to hear about this.
But despite demonstrating his continuing inability to read from a telepromter (which is much harder to use than a TelePrompter) and fumbling around about the five, maybe three, definitely four judges he gets to replace, Trump did show something to warm GOP hearts today.
It’s when you get down to the end of the talk that you get the clearest signals that there really is a New Trump in town. There was a claim that America is the highest taxed country in the world (it’s not), that Hillary was going to appoint judges to repeal the Second Amendment (she can’t) and then a list of things to be done in the first 100 days. Not on that list? Trump’s wall. The immigrant ban. In fact, everything that originated with Team Orange was absent.
What was on the list? Talking points. Standard GOP talking points. The same cut the taxes, cut the regulations, trickle-down, trickle-on Reagan via Newt seasoned with tea talking points that every single Republican candidate running for senator, state rep, or sanitation chief is expected to reproduce.
Republicans are going to love this speech. They’re not going to care that it’s full of lies. Because these aren’t Trump’s lies, these are the lies Republicans have been telling themselves for the last eight years.
These are the lies they tell every morning in the mirror and every night over dinner. That the mess in the Middle East is Democrats’ fault. That the economic crash was Democrats’ fault. That the long decline of the middle class is Democrats’ fault. That everything bad is Obama’s, make that Hillary’s, fault.
When they fold their hands and repeat that cutting taxes helps the middle class. That if we make the air a little dirtier, work a little less safe, banks a little more risky, that will be just what it takes to let them (not everyone, but them) spring forward as they’ve always known they were meant to do. And, of course, when they declare that Bill and Hillary Clinton are evil people whose every move is orchestrated by a grand plan to sell out America? They’ll know that Trump is with them.
This is what Republicans mean when they talk about Trump being presidential. They mean that he should recite the words every Republican says. They don’t mean that he should lead. They mean that he should echo.
That wind going past? That’s every Republican giving a sigh of relief. Why, he is one of them, after all.