Donald Trump says something insane, the media barely bats an eye, and an exhausted public doesn't care. Welcome to the 2024 presidential race.
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Donald Trump can consider himself lucky that Americans don’t take most of the batshit crazy things he says seriously. Some of them know he is nuts, others assume he is either lying or doesn’t know what he is talking about, or, in the case of his supporters, they simply don’t care.
In addition, the media is largely doing a terrible job of pointing out just how insane the stuff is that comes out of the former president’s mouth every single day.
Trump supplied a great example of how this works on Saturday, when he told the convention of the Libertarian Party what he views to be the most persecuted group of Americans ever… the people who stormed the Capitol on his behalf.
“It will be my great honor to pardon the peaceful January 6 protesters, or as I often call them, the hostages,” Trump said. “There has never been a group of people treated so harshly or unfairly in our country’s history.”
That’s quite a thing to say… especially if you are trying to court Black voters, who probably feel a bit differently about whether their enslaved ancestors were more harshly or unfairly treated than a bunch of idiots trying to stop the ceremonial process of certifying Joe Biden’s victory over Trump in 2020.
Of course, they are not the only ones. There are literally hundreds of groups that were treated more unfairly than the people who were indicted by a grand jury and then either plead guilty or were convicted by a jury of their peers for being in a place they weren’t supposed to be while an insurrection was going on.
Essentially, any person who is not a straight white male has, at one point or another, been treated more poorly than the MAGA acolytes who had the means to travel to Washington, DC, to partake in a riot that turned deadly.
Now, if any candidate other than Trump, for any office other than, maybe, grand wizard of the KKK, had said anything even remotely like this, it would have been a big story… and they would have rightfully been skewered.
Not the former president.
Trump gets a pass because he says so many dumb, outrageous, hyperbolic, and nonsensical things that he has worn down the media and numbed the public.
If people took the former president seriously, he would probably lose in a landslide and only win a handful of states like Idaho, West Virginia, and Alabama.
But they don’t.
It is fascinating to see how his supporters, and even plenty of swing voters, watch his insane speeches and only believe what they want to believe, e.g., that everybody was better off four years ago… you know, that time when thousands of Americans were dying from COVID every week and the country was essentially shut down.
One day, when historians look back at this time, they will be baffled that someone like Trump could ever amass this much power.
If they want to know why, they need to look no further than the indifference of voters and the media whenever he says something indefensible… and gets away with it.
