Pocahontas Redux?

Trump tells us who he is . . again. Will anyone listen?

By Timothy P Holmberg

It’s been a tough few weeks for Trump. First, his VP turned out to have a cornucopia of media candy hiding in his back pocket. Then, Biden dropped out, throwing Trump’s entire campaign playbook out the window, while simultaneously sucking all the attention away from him. And, if there’s one thing Trump hates, it’s a lack of attention. To him, attention is oxygen, no matter how polluted the air might be with his own farts. In his math, if he’s getting attention, then his opponent isn’t, a very zero sum view of things.

So when he did what most political consultants would consider a bizarre and risky strategy in meeting a convention of black journalists on their home turf, it was entirely drawn from a longstanding and familiar playbook. With Elizabeth Warren, it was Pocahontas, with Obama, it was the birth certificate, and now, with Kamala Harris, it’s race “switching”.

No matter how odious or outlandish the accusation may be, he will drop it like a bag of dog poop on the media’s lawn, and skip away. When they chase him down and ask why he left dog shit on the lawn, he will say,

“what dog shit? I don’t own a dog? I don’t even know any dogs (or cats). Nasty creatures. If I owned one, it would be the greatest dog ever and would never shit. But, my opponent, that’s probably her dog shit, you know? She really is a nasty person . . . ”

And then he goes to work, defining his opponent and controlling the media like the ringleader of a political circus. This is the pattern that has served him well. And, it’s an indictment of both the media, and us as a nation that it has been this successful for so long. It exposes fundamental social and political flaws in our society that he has weaponized in a masterful and divisive way.

At least perhaps until this last incident. This is the one that may finally haunt him as he watches Kamala Harris being sworn in as 47th President of the United States. In this case, he departed his normal tactic in which he controls the entire narrative. He put himself in an exposed position, believing that black media personalities would be unwilling to manhandle a former president if he dropped the proverbial turd right there in front of them.

And then shit got real.

The last incident to put Trump on the back foot like this was following Fox anchor Megyn Kelly’s straight forward and direct question about his well documented misogyny. He later shot back with whopper of a dog turd by implying she was bleeding from her eyes and “from her, wherever”. In that case, he was able to parlay the turd into an expanding lead in the polls:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=x0Kcx25WCg4

But here, he faces a different dynamic. Whereas Megyn Kelly was under pressure to give Trump a pass, black journalist that confronted Trump are under no such pressure. Black journalists in general are much less beholding to a corporate media producer or corporate master simply because they have created their own microshpere after largely being excluded from mainstream media’s conformist machine. Trump also cannot afford to lose an ounce of the black vote to Harris in any of the swing states. In the past, Trump has been able to tap dance on a knife blade without much more than a nick to his shoes. But now, both the media and Harris’ campaign managers are a bit more wise to the play. And social media has been obscenely agile in firing off salvos of memes lampooning the “weirdness” of Trump and his single cat lady hating VP.

And if there’s one thing bullies and their followers hate, it’s being laughed at:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OroiRWIR2gQ