“When someone shows you who they are, believe them…”

— Maya Angelou

There was a time when we believed that Donald Trump was simply playing a role, gaining support by his extremism, building a base with his racism, becoming known by his misogynistic outbursts. There was, after all, an entertainer in Trump the candidate, and that entertainer sought to be better known.

There was, just maybe, a certain genius in his ability to touch upon the darkest emotions among Americans, to evoke that inner voice that beckons us to speak aloud our fears and our bigotries.

But Donald Trump was not acting, not pretending. While we were wondering his intentions, He was showing us those intentions with every speech, every off-hand comment and insult and every bigoted argument.

Trump is a business/entertainer who has filed or been named in over 4,000 lawsuits and a handful of bankruptcies. He has manufactured his products around the planet, though rarely in the U.S., while reviling companies who do as he has done with exporting jobs. Trump is the builder who has, all too often, refused to pay for the labor of workers while telling voters he is for the “working man.”

Trump is a guy who lives and dies by his press coverage, good or bad coverage often seems not to matter to Trump, just coverage. But bad reports, critical reporters and harsh media coverage gain Trump’s attention with brutal and often childish rebuttals along the line of “your mama.”

Trump does not have an extensive vocabulary, nor does he have a memory for what he may have said yesterday. Instead, Trump’s world is a stream of consciousness, a reflexive, responsive, always attack, never defend, constant volley of words thrown together with an intent to elicit a response — any response.

When Trump became presidential candidate Trump, many thought he would change, only to discover the obvious. We had seen the real Trump and he could not change. He has no more interest in running a presidential campaign than he has in mastering the meaning of silence.

And so the Trump campaign, trailing by double digits nationally and in key states, decides it is their choice to burn down the campaign rather than to re-start it.

Trailing hopelessly with women voters, African-American voters, Hispanic voters, young voters and college educated voters, Trump decides to turn his campaign over to a radical right writer who has never run a political campaign and to a pollster who has never run a presidential campaign. Their combined expertise is in misrepresentation and demonization of people who may be not white.

These two will expand the Trump insult tour of America, not just because they are paid, but because, like their boss, Donald Trump, they see the world through a white lens and see any opponent as worthy of any baseless attack.

If you think that Trump has greatly damaged American public rhetoric with his base rudeness and his dislike of the truth, you have yet to see what Kellyanne Conway and Stephen Bannon will add to this campaign.

The Trump campaign will never need to buy TV time with this new campaign. They will find themselves in the daily news by claims that Clinton is a Chinese spy, or the Clinton campaign recruits foreign ISIS members to answer their phone banks.

We are known by the company we keep. The company Donald Trump wants closest to him are people like him, people free of the cumbersome weight of facts, charged with the desire to attack their opponents on a personal level, and determined never to discuss issues when personal attacks are so much more enjoyable.

Donald Trump will leave a burned field behind him, a field from which the Republican Party may not find its way again for decades, for Republicans also will be known for the company they keep.

 

Jim Crawford is a retired educator and political enthusiast living here in the Tri-State.