UNBREAKABLE TRUMPTY DUMPTY

Now I know I’m a real satirist. Why? Because The Republican National Convention this past week has both fascinated and repulsed me…And also reminded me to iron my brown shirt.

In my confusion and utter disbelief over this propaganda-fest, I revisited an old nursery rhyme that fits The Donald to a T — as in Trumpty. But forget nursery rhymin’, it sounds better if you recite it the way a rapper would:

Trumpty Dumpty keeps startin’ these brawls
Trumpty Dumpty keeps fallin’ off walls
But all the GOP’s horses
and media men
keep puttin’ Trumpty
back together again
‘Cause Republicans own the media
and Republicans like to win! win! win!

Like it or not, my little lampoon rings truer than most of the network coverage that TV viewers like me had to endure. It wasn’t a matter of being too critical and analytical of this Republican candidate for the Presidency. It all came down to being too reverential and too forgiving of The Donald’s megalomania and bizarre diatribes. ATTENTION, JOURNALISTS: you don’t have to pepper your reporting with invective about this guy, but you do have to be realistic sometimes. Stop putting lipstick on your favorite pig. Trumpty isn’t a politician or a public servant. He’s a real demagogue.

Forget about any Lincolnesque appeals to the “better angels of our nature.” Forget about any political platforms with realistic new visions for our democracy. Trumpty is trying to win votes by deliberately appealing to the prejudice, ignorance, and fears of the lowest socioeconomic classes — the poorest, most vulnerable, least educated Americans. And if those appeals won’t work, he uses lying, scapegoating, and vilifying his opposition with the worst hate-speech possible.

When they said any boy could be president they had to be talking about this guy. Only in America could a weasel like Trump with no background in public service or no experience in public office run for the highest office in the land. Nowhere else could so many voters and journalists alike keep kissing his ass as he spews venom and threatens our Constitution daily.

Is this really a presidential election or are we all extras in “The Hunger Games?”

Of course, anyone who knows anything about American history knows that presidential campaigns have almost always been low-down and dirty — sometimes more blood sport than psychodrama. Hitting below the belt, in other words, has usually been the rule rather than the exception. But Trumpty has taken it down to a new low. Way down, way lower. He has actually created his own political theater with his own self-serving script that the rest of the GOP party must follow. And he’s gotten his buddies in the media to report about his fabrication as though it were real.

But it’s not.

It’s not reality, it’s another staged media event. Lights, camera, cue the red, white, and blue balloons! The Donald wants to be our next President! His latest production has been deliberately planned to play like an ongoing soap opera on reality TV. Exactly like scenes from Paddy Chayefsky’s screenplay for “Network.” Fortunately for Trump, as long as he plays the hero and casts his opponents as villains, he’ll keep winning the ratings war — and, eventually, the election.

What everyone keeps missing, though, is Trumpty’s sociopathic MO. I’m talking about his Modus Operandi: his unethical way of working and doing things that too many journalists keep admiring or ignoring.

I just wrote about this phenom five months ago in “Why Donald Trump Should NEVER be President (HINT: He’s an all-American racist boor with no emotional intelligence).” After I posted that op-ed in “The Patch” on February 22, 2016, I figured more readers and voters would wise up to his underhanded tactics. That hasn’t happened.

Not only have his political attacks continued, but they’ve gotten far more frequent and far more virulent. Trumpty continues to launch misinformation against Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party in much the same way he perpetrated his phony feud with Pope Francis. And he’s going to keep doing it and doing it and getting away with it, too. Almost like some spoiled rich kid who keeps acting up and acting out and getting away with it because mommy and daddy have so much money that he’s beyond punishment.

For a more in-depth analysis of Trumpty’s sleazy methods of operation, please read my posting on February 22nd. For a basic primer that will help you better understand his MO now, read on.

Trumpty always attacks first.
Remember that. Whether he’s verbally assaulting Hillary Clinton, President Obama, or Pope Francis, he always has to fire the first figurative shot. He always has to start “the feud.” He always has to control his self-imposed battles. It’s what he lives for.

Trumpty will do or say whatever it takes to force a response from his victim.
He’s counting on the reaction of his unsuspecting victims so he can use it against them. He NEEDS that reaction. Without it, he can’t play his game. Even if his target takes the high road and refuses to dignify his slander, he’ll consider that non-response a reaction. Then he’ll use it against his attackee du jour. As in, What I’m saying MUST be true, otherwise I’d be getting an angry response or a lawsuit.

Trumpty then uses whatever response or non-response he gets — OR MAKES UP — to blame his target for attacking him first!
That way, he can maintain his misunderstood “outsider” status while generating sympathy for himself as victim. Poor Trumpty. He’s just trying to be President and save our country and Crooked Hillary keeps attacking him!

That, in a nutshell, is how The Donald operates when it comes to campaigning for the presidency, managing his business empire, and doing everything else. Just like a true sociopath.

Remember Trump’s book “The Art of the Deal”? Now even ghostwriter Tony Schwartz says it should have been called “The Sociopath.” In interviews with CNN and in an article he wrote for “The New Yorker,” Schwartz has expressed regrets for making Trumpty look so good and for just working with him. “I put lipstick on a pig,” he admitted.

Watch out, Tony. Your former employer-pig might try to sue you for exercising your freedom of speech. Oh, wait. Trumpty’s attorney has already smacked you with a cease & desist order. Never mind. (You just can’t make this stuff up.)

I could go on and on about Trumpty’s reprehensible conduct, citing numerous examples to illustrate how his MO is destroying our lives and our democracy. But that litany would fill several chapters in a book. So let’s focus on the most striking examples of his sociopathy at the convention: his wife’s speech.

This time, Trumpty used his stunning wife Melania to stir things up on night #1 of the Republican National Convention. Let’s take a good look at how he tried to gain even more media attention.

More importantly, let’s examine how the media came to his rescue and even celebrated his demagoguery.

Unless you’ve been vacationing in a media-free zone, you already know why her speech last Monday night was so controversial. It wasn’t original. Her speech was a blatantly obvious repeat of what First Lady Michelle Obama had said eight years earlier at the Democratic National Convention. Same exact words. Same exact phrases. Same exact paragraphs.

No, I don’t mean discussing similar topics or ideas. No, I don’t mean using familiar catch-phrases like “fog of war” or the “American Dream,” either. I’m talking about actually lifting the same sentences, even the same long passages, VERBATIM from Michelle Obama’s 2008 speech.

I’m talking about what some news commentators and curious citizens online are now calling plagiarism.

Plagiarism that involves writing implies outright theft of written material. It means knowingly and deliberately taking writing that you know doesn’t belong to you. It means taking credit or ownership of stolen writing for your own use. In this particular instance, there were so many passages in Melania’s speech that were exactly like that of the First Lady’s that it couldn’t have been a coincidence. Or a psychic fluke. Someone had intentionally used Ms. Obama’s address from 2008 and tried to pass it off as a new, original speech in 2016. But who did it?

When asked about his wife’s speech the next morning (on July 19th) on “The Today Show,” Trumpty gave his first denial. He blew off the question by answering that Melania had written most of the speech herself. End of discussion.

That same afternoon, however, both CNN and MSNBC ran videos of both Mrs. Obama and Mrs. Trump, side by side, giving what literally sounded like the very same speech. Even if the spoken words of politics have less legal protection than a novel or screenplay, stealing a First Lady’s speech just isn’t done. Even if it were legal, such a thing would be an unethical, disrespectful act. But that’s how Trumpty rolls.

After a period of silence, the story changed. Now a speechwriter working for Trump’s campaign admitted she used Michelle Obama’s speech from 2008 because Melania had always admired her. When she offered to turn in her resignation, however, Trumpty refused. He wasn’t going to fire her, he said, because “we all make mistakes.”

This was no mistake, however, just another lie. No doubt the speechwriter was merely obeying orders from her employer-pig. She used this speech that had been previously given eight years earlier because Trumpty and his organization told her to use it. Why? So he could agitate the First Lady and Hillary Clinton into some kind of response or reaction. When they wouldn’t take the bait and give him something to use against them, he seemed to retreat. Notice I wrote seemed to retreat.

In reality, he wasn’t retreating at all. He was lying in wait to blame Crooked Hillary for attacking him and his wife. Before he could do that, though, the media wagons needed to circle him and set the right fabrications in motion.

Despite the obvious proof of plagiarism, Trumpty’s obvious theft of Michelle Obama’s speech turned into “accusations of plagiarism” and “alleged plagiarism.”

“USA Today” reacted to the plagiarism by downplaying the obvious, unmistakable use of Mrs. Obama’s 2008 speech in Mrs. Trump’s 2016 speech. Looking at this coverage, any reader would conclude that there were only a few sentences in question. There were, in reality, several long passages and lots of sentences that were stolen from Michelle Obama’s written work.

If “USA Today” diminished the theft, then “The CBS Evening News” confused viewers by giving examples of other speeches that were definitely NOT plagiarized. Remember when JFK delivered his iconic inaugural address with these words: “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country”? Well, news anchor Scott Pelley implied that President Kennedy stole it from the address President Harding gave at the 1916 Republican convention. And here’s the quote in question: “We must have a citizenship less concerned about what the government can do for it and more anxious about what it can do for the nation.”

OK, both Presidents might be discussing a similar topic, but they’re not using the same words to say the very same thing. Yes, both Presidents are talking about personal responsibility of citizens in our democracy. But no, they’re not saying the same thing. If that sounds like plagiarism to you, you’d better beam yourself up, Scotty.

By the time voters waded through the biased coverage, heard the denials contradicted by admissions of mistakes, then heard this misinformation about plagiarism, they were really confused. And that’s what Trumpty and friends wanted: utter confusion. Confused voters, after all, are more gullible and easier to manipulate than informed ones.

So when Trumpty started blaming Hillary for calling attention to the plagiarism, it seemed believable. When campaign manager Paul Manafort accused Hillary of blowing the whole thing out of proportion, his charge seemed plausible. Especially when he told the press, “It’s what she does. Any time, there’s another strong woman around, she tries to destroy her.” So when USA Today reported “Trump blames Clinton camp for Melania speech plagiarism flap,” that headline seemed to make sense, too.

Welcome to Fascist Political Propaganda 101, Trumpty Division. We’re really living history now, and it’s not very pretty. Trumpty is fast becoming a real Il Duce de Leche because he knows as much about democracy as a can of condensed milk.

“When fascism comes to America,” Sinclair Lewis once wrote, “it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.” …But he forgot about the hairpiece.