Wherein, to give away the end of the diary, after throwing red meat to his bigoted audience for over an hour, Trump endorses Claudia Rankine's Citizen at the rope line.
You may remember the recent story about a young black woman who, unimpressed by a Donald Trump speech she was attending, turned to reading a book, Citizen by Claudia Rankine, while Trump continued his free association analysis of who and who is not an American citizen.
There was a Trump rally in Columbus, Ohio last night with about 10,000 in attendance at the Convention Center. Various protests of Trump’s immigration positions were planned, mostly with chanting and signage outside the venue:
A number of people silently protested in the crowd inside with a “read-in”—bringing books on social issues to read while Trump spoke:
A there were a few Merry Pranksters:
I attended the rally—not really recommended, a bit hard to take while sitting on your hands for all the applause lines—and brought along a copy of Citizen to read, hopefully on camera if I could get behind the podium.
As you can see above, I was behind the podium but pretty far off the line to the cluster of media cameras in the back. Oh well.
Plan B was to see if Trump would sign the book at the rope line, which could have been interesting if he recognized Citizen from the previous incident. Mission accomplished! Below watch him do a quick once over on the book’s cover and then nod his assent.
Here are some clips from the rally:
There was a lot objectionable in the speech, but I’d like to point out one bit that got my attention. Trump was talking about ISIS terror cells and took umbrage that the ringleaders are called “masterminds” (emphasis added):
They call them masterminds. I call them the guy with the dirty filthy hat, who's a semi-thug. He's nothing, he's nothing.
Semi-thug? That’s curious. He’s talking about the most heinous type of criminal, who kills people indiscriminately. But he is only a semi-thug?
Trump speaks more or less off the cuff, without notes or teleprompter, and the focus of his comments often changes mid-sentence. Non-sequiturs abound. For example, at one point he talks about “our kids” being recruited into ISIS and then “we let them back in” because of the Constitution, but umm, they aren’t really citizens. I.e., he conflates American Muslims.
I submit in this case that “thug” is simply racist code for black, as has come into usage especially since Ferguson, and “semi-thug” was a Trump brain fart when thinking about a way to describe brown jihadis. His audience of course pick up on such dog whistles and as he puts it, his polls go “through the roof.”
“I'm going to be even better at our security, and at making us really strong and at not having you worry about horrible things happening to your cities. Where you have scum. Where you have scum. Garbage--where you have garbage. ... You have people that are bad. We're going to be safe, and we're going to help the world, we're going to be with the world, we're going to fight with the world, but we're going to do it together. We've gotta do it together.”
— Donald J. Trump, Columbus, Ohio, Nov. 23, 2015