Do Rich Residents Of Beverly Hills Really Stink?
Many people wonder just how senile Trump really is. His keynote speech/standup comedy routine Friday afternoon at the California GOP convention in Anaheim answers that question pretty definitively. AP’s Michael Blood and Jonathan Cooper were there and called it a “dark and profane speech,” complaining, for example, that “rich people in Beverly Hills smell bad because they’re denied water, reiterating lies about widespread election fraud and calling on police to shoot people robbing stores,” all to tremendous ovations from a crowd of MAGAts as deranged as he is.
While many of his remarks at the California Republican Party convention in Anaheim were familiar retreads of Trump’s attacks and grievances, his encouragement of violent retribution against criminals marked an escalation of his longstanding tough-on-crime message.
“We will immediately stop all of the pillaging and theft. Very simply: If you rob a store, you can fully expect to be shot as you are leaving that store,” he said, drawing loud applause. “Shot!” he added for emphasis.
…Trump’s comments on Friday underscored a central question surrounding Trump’s effort to return to the presidency. While his focus on red meat issues plays well with the GOP base, it’s unclear that it will hold much appeal with the broader set of voters needed to win a general election.
His remarks about crime, for instance, were especially pointed. In the past, Trump has proposed shooting migrants to prevent them from crossing the border. In his book and in interviews, former Defense Secretary Mark Esper alleged Trump inquired about shooting protesters during the George Floyd demonstrations. He has also proposed the death penalty for drug dealers, human traffickers and anyone convicted of killing a police officer.
During his first year in office, Trump advised police to be rougher in their handling of suspects being apprehended, telling recruits, “please don’t be too nice.”
“The word that they shoot you will get out within minutes and our nation, in one day, will be an entirely different place,” Trump said Friday. “There must be retribution for theft and destruction and the ruination of our country.”
Homicides and other violent crimes have risen in California, where residents have also been deluged with headlines from rampant car break-ins and drug use in San Francisco’s troubled Tenderloin district to street racing and illegal takeovers across a new $588-million bridge in Los Angeles.
Republicans see crime as a salient issue that can help them win back some of the suburban voters who have turned away from the party since Trump emerged as its leader and the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to an abortion. Several GOP presidential candidates and others in the party have pointed in particular to events this week in Philadelphia, where dozens of people face criminal charges after a night of social media-fueled mayhem in which groups of thieves, apparently working together, smashed their way into stores in several areas of the city.
Trump tapped into California Republicans’ exhaustion with their state’s Democratic leaders, who he said brought the state homelessness, open borders, high taxes, inequality, “woke tech tyrants” and rising crime.
California was once a symbol of American prosperity and creativity but is “becoming a symbol of our nation’s decline,” Trump said.
“We will reverse the decline of America and we will end the desecration of your once great state, California,” Trump said. “This is not a great state anymore. This is a dumping ground. You’re a dumping ground. The world is being dumped into California. Prisoners. Terrorists. Mental patients.”
Trump told his supporters “help is on the way,” falsely claimed his 30-point defeats here were the result of fraud and said, improbably, that he would win California in next year’s general election. He railed against using mail ballots on the same day the Republican National Committee launched its “Bank your Vote” initiative in New York, which urges Republicans to vote before Election Day. RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel brushed off Trump’s continued skepticism.
I don’t know if David Corn was at the show or not but the title of his column for Mother Jones yesterday, Trump Loses A Battle In His Long War On Reality, indicates he might as well have been. Actually, what Trump has lost in tat regard is more than a battle; that war in over and he lost in a landslide. What Corn had in mind specifically was the ruling by New York Judge Arthur Engoron that Trump had committed fraud for years by massively overvaluing his properties and assets ordering several of Trump’s businesses removed from Trump’s control. “This,” noted Corn, “was a major blow to Trump’s corporate and real estate empire. It was also a stunning defeat for Trump in his decades-long war on reality… Trump for most of his life has acted as if the truth means nothing and he can concoct his own convenient reality. He has done this through deception, bullshit, subterfuge, and never-ending image spinning. That is, through unrelenting fraud.
It would take an entire book— and it has— to trace Trump’s life of fraud. His first major deal in Manhattan— buying and rehabbing the Commodore Hotel next to Grand Central station in 1975— was predicated on a fraud. (To seal the deal with New York City, he falsely declared he had signed an option with the bankrupt Penn Central to buy the hotel, and he sent city officials a phony option agreement that was unsigned.) During the 1990s he engaged in shady tax schemes that included fraud to expand the fortune he received from his parents. Trump University was a fraud. His foundation was a scam. His Trump Organization was found to have run a tax fraud. On November 4, 2020, he fraudulently claimed victory. And, of course, he is a relentless liar who lies about…everything.
Trump appears to believe that he can say whatever he wants— whatever is best for him— and forge those falsehoods into a fake truth. (This is why he has waged a campaign against the media, calling it “fake news.” He wants to delegitimize the institution that can challenge his crap.) For him, everything is a sales pitch. He doesn’t bend to reality; reality bends to him and his desires and falsehoods. And he’s gotten away with this. He has built a life of glitz and wealth. He became a TV star (on a fake reality show). He was elected president. It’s been one long con, with Trump repeatedly triumphing in the battle against reality.
Joe Biden put a stop to that in 2020. And now so has Judge Engoron. His ruling repeatedly says to Trump: Just because you say something is so doesn’t make it so. Much of it describes how Trump brazenly lied and declared specific properties to be much more valuable than they were to secure loans and deals. Engoron over and over states that Trump’s assertions are detached from reality and that Trump does not possess the power to define what is real or not. For instance, he raps Trump for insisting he can estimate the value of his personal brand to be whatever he wants it to be. Nope, Engoron says. You can’t BS that way.
Engoron’s historic ruling… addresses the essence of Trump: his reliance on fraud. The judge is telling him, No, you don’t get to shape reality with your lies.
Authoritarians and fascists need to control reality. The Soviets airbrushed out-of-favor officials from photographs. Vladimir Putin’s propaganda machine pumps out lies about the Ukrainian war to the Russian public. China, North Korea, and Cuba censor the internet. In his novel 1984, George Orwell presented a simple example:
In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy… For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable— what then?
For decades, Trump has been telling people that two plus two equals five. That is literally what he did in his business, albeit with much bigger numbers, according to Engoron. The judge’s ruling aims to put a stop to that and punish Trump harshly for his lies. The bigger question is whether the American citizenry will do the same.
This has been a terrible week for the Trumpified Republican Party— and everything about it can be traced directly back to Trump himself. The party’s grassroots base has chosen a MAGA fascism over fuddy-duddy conservatism and Dan Balz explained how that manifested itself last week, “a kaleidoscopic display of self-inflicted wounds by politicians unwilling to govern responsibly and a party still loath to confront the damage done by Trump.”
“At every turn this past week,” he wrote, “when the spotlight was on them, Republicans showed the public their worst: marching toward a government shutdown wholly of their own making; botching their first hearing in an impeachment inquiry into President Biden that was launched without serious forethought or evidence of criminal wrongdoing; squabbling and shouting by presidential candidates during a nationally televised debate that mostly ignored the elephant not onstage. Meanwhile, that elephant, Trump, facing 91 felony counts in four indictments, tried to look past his challengers for the Republican nomination. He went to Detroit to focus his attacks on Biden with a speech that was notable for promises of the kind that went largely unfulfilled during his four years in office.
Trump’s speech highlighted the gap between campaigning and governing, but that was even more evident in the Congress throughout the week as House Republicans stumbled toward a shutdown of the government while Speaker Kevin McCarthy struggled to maintain his grip on the gavel in the face of rebellion from his hard-right colleagues. It’s well known that Republicans have been unwilling to compromise with the Democrats. This week they showed no willingness to compromise with one another.
This is the face Republicans offered to the public at a time when they are asking voters to give them full control over the executive and legislative branches in next year’s elections.