The quirkiest habit among anti-Trump resistance types might be their ascribing to President Trump powers, influence, and abilities he simply does not possess.
MSNBC’s perpetually aggrieved Rachel Maddow, for example, credited Trump this week with managing in just four years to cut down the 244-year-old American republic.
This says less about what she thinks of the president and more about what she thinks of the United States, which is apparently very little. If one believes sincerely that the man who lost money on casinos can destroy the U.S. before finishing a single term in office, one can hardly claim to understand the power, resilience, and wisdom of the makeup of the federal government.
“The president now saying, insistently, that the election will not be decided by the voters,” the MSNBC host warned her viewers this week, “that this election is not a real election. The ballots that we will all use vote in the election? Those ballots are a ‘scam.’ We need to ‘get rid of the ballots.’ He also is saying explicitly that he expects the Supreme Court, to which he’s trying to appoint a new justice right before the election, he expects that it will be the Supreme Court which handles the question of who the next president is, rather than the election itself, rather than the voters. It will be the court.”
Maddow added, “And he expects that the conservative majority will throw out the ballots, and then we won’t have to worry about any transition of power, peaceful or otherwise, because it will be a continuation of power then because he will stay.”
MSNBC then played a clip from a White House press briefing this week wherein a Playboy correspondent asked Trump whether he would “commit to making sure … there’s a peaceful transfer of power.”
“We want to have — get rid of the ballots, and you’ll have a very trans–,” Trump began to respond, changing course midsentence, “we’ll have a very peaceful — there won’t be a transfer, frankly; there’ll be a continuation. The ballots are out of control. You know it.”
From these comments, Maddow concludes that the American experiment is dead, that Trump killed it, and that it took only four years to do it.
“Yeah,” she said, imitating the president, “it will be very peaceful when I stay in power because we’ll stop the ballots. We have to get rid of those, and then I’ll continue in power. We are here. It is now upon us. There is not any ambiguity about where this is heading or how bad his intentions might be or what lengths he’d go to. I mean, we’re here.”
She continued, doing her best impersonation of a talk radio host, “He’s just flat-out saying that the reason he wants to move ahead with getting a new Supreme Court justice on the bench before the election is because he’s declaring now, in advance, that ballots cast in the election don’t count. That ballots cast in the election are part of a fraud and a hoax that is illegitimate, and, therefore, it will be the court, including his newly appointed justice, that will … ‘get rid of the ballots’ to stop the Democratic hoax election so there doesn’t have to be a transfer of power to a new president.”
Maddow added in her most ominous tone, “We are there, everybody. It took four years, it turns out — 244 years to stand this republic up, four years to cut it down.”
This is all rather silly. It is obvious Trump was boasting that he was going to win the election. Right or wrong, his prediction hardly amounts to a declaration of his intention to ignore the election outcome or remain in power in the event he loses.
In any case, Trump cannot even bar reporters from the White House, let alone “cut down” the republic. Why do the president’s most ardent opponents credit him constantly with doing things he has not done, nor that he could do even if he tried?
