Donald Trump wants you to feel sorry for him. And, if you don't, it's okay because he feels plenty sorry for himself.
That's the lesson from the written statement that Trump issued on Tuesday, in which he continued to defend and repeat his claim that Mexicans are basically rapists. Frankly, the statement reads as if he went on an all-night bender and then, at rock bottom, fired off a drunk-text to his press secretary. Or, to put it another way, his remarks smack of something you'd read on Facebook at 3 a.m. This new and sleazy document is at once megalomaniacal and self-pitying, the kind of hysterical statement more familiar to anonymous Internet commenters than national political figures.
To wit, he started out right away by saying he doesn't understand why everyone's being so mean to him -- a theme that reoccurs throughout.
Quoth Trump:
I don’t see how there is any room for misunderstanding or misinterpretation of the statement I made on June 16th during my Presidential announcement speech.
The tragic thing is that too many Republican voters absolutely understand what he said -- and they agree -- which is probably why Trump continues to repeat the line over and over again in spite of being almost universally condemned for it by Republican leadership. His latest polling shows that in spite of scrambling the GOP field, his anti-Mexican bigotry is rallying the slack-jawed racist vote, which remains a not insignificant demographic on his side of the aisle.
Next, Trump reprinted his Mexicans-are-racists comment for clarity, and he made sure to weirdly preserve the parenthetical notation that he made pointing gestures in the original speech:
They’re not sending you (pointing to the audience). They’re not sending you (pointing again).
Did you get that he was pointing? Good, because apparently pointing is very presidential. I only assume he included the parentheticals to help us envision Trump saying it all over again, and since he's pointing, he must mean business. Personally, I'm looking forward to one day reading the transcript of a Trump speech that includes the parenthetical: "wig awkwardly blows in the wind."
He continued by making a patently false statement:
They are, in many cases, criminals, drug dealers, rapists, etc.
Nope. Wrong. David Fitzgerald pointed out in Salon on Tuesday:
From 1994 to 2007, the number of immigrants per capita living in the United States rose from about 9 to 13 percent of the population. At the same time, FBI reports show that the rate of violent crime declined 34.2 percent. The property crime rate fell 26.4 percent.
Cities with large immigrant populations such as Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, and New York also experienced declining crime rates during this period. The 2008 California study found that cities with relatively larger inflows of immigrants between 2000 and 2005 tended to see lower rates of violent crime.
By the way, you might recall the most recent border crisis -- the one that sent Rick Perry and Sean Hannity to the border equipped with a cartoon-sized machine gun. It involved children; tens of thousands of children who were sent the United States to escape violence in Guatemala. Are we to believe those children were "criminals, drug dealers and rapists"? Trump hopes we do, because Trump thinks everyone is stupid except him.
Then Donald added another layer to his man-sized turd sandwich, writing:
Likewise, tremendous infectious disease is pouring across the border.
While immigration always plays a role in the spread of diseases, as does basic traveling, is it actually "pouring across the border"?
It's especially nice of him to refer to immigrants, literally as "tremendous infectious disease(s)." Let's be clear: he didn't say "immigrants carrying diseases are pouring across the border," he said the diseases themselves are pouring across the border. So, not only are Mexicans drug dealers and rapists, but they're also literally diseases. Tremendous ones, according to Trump.
Yet he has the cojones to write this:
I have great respect for Mexico and love their people and their peoples’ great spirit.
Sure, but as soon as they cross an imaginary line, they're rapists and diseases. And, despite all that, we've now entered the pity-party portion of Trump's statement:
I have lost a lot during this Presidential run defending the people of the United States. I have always heard that it is very hard for a successful person to run for President.
[Cue Debbie Downer sad horn.]
Let's now take a moment from examining Trump's egregious misrepresentations to agree on a few established facts. They are: Trump hasn't defended the people of the United States at all. He's spent every day defending his own ass, and it's been hilarious to watch.
But even though his announcement speech has been widely panned, Trump insisted that people loved it.
After the speech was made, there were numerous compliments and indeed, many rave “reviews” — there was very little criticism.
Trump put "reviews" in quotes. I didn't. Which is the first truly accurate thing to appear in this statement. He heard numerous rave "reviews," which, in scare quotes, makes it sound like the reviews aren't actually real. Maybe he's slyly admitting that his positive "reviews" were written by Trump himself via one of his many Twitter sock-puppets. Who knows but, in that case, as least he's being honest for once when he's normally just, you know, "honest." Also, if he thinks there was very little criticism, he's way more delusional than we thought -- like Christopher Guest movie character delusional.
Delusion might also explain his closing statement:
I would be the best jobs President that God ever created.
The notion that God created Trump, by itself, makes me want to become religious again. Thank you, Lord, for giving us this bottomless cup of stupid. Send more. Amen.
There's a deep and disturbing tendency on display here and it's uniquely Republican. Modern GOP leaders have perfected the concept of championing personal responsibility and commanding others to pick themselves up by the boot-straps, while simultaneously showing a remarkably tone-deaf penchant for being whiny diaper babies when they're attacked, blaming everyone and everything else for their own ignorant positions or undisciplined gaffes. In Trump's case, it can't possibly be that saying Mexicans are rapists and infectious diseases offends people, including anti-immigration Republican leaders, it has to be that no one understands Trump, or they're just being unnecessarily mean to him.
Briefly put, Trump basically wrote: I'm the greatest, so why is everyone being mean to me? To which, the only appropriate response is, Stop whining, you big baby.
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