When I ask people why they dislike Trump, they rarely mention his performance as President from 2016-2020. True, they point to his behavior on January 6, 2021, but their animus preceded that event. Moreover, they rarely mention his policies, foreign or domestic. Some object to his insulting remarks about his opponents. They just wish he would tone down the rhetoric.
I did a search for Trump’s insults and found that the New York Times had compiled an exhaustive list of insults hurled by Trump at various people and institutions from 2015 to 2021.The list is in alphabetical order based on the name of the recipient of Trump’s invective. I only went through the A,B,Cs which I found contained a good sample especially since it included Trump’s opponents in the past two elections. Here is a selection from the Times list.
ABC. Fake News. (ABC was first on the list but most media were called fake news)
Stacey Abrams. Will destroy the State etc.
Jim Acosta. A fake reporter
Anderson Cooper. A waste.
Bashar al Assad. A gas killing animal who kills his people.
Ruth Bader Ginsberg. Has embarrassed all by making very dumb political statements…her mind is shot.
Steve Bannon. Sloppy Steve.
Paul Begala. Dopey
Jeff Bezos. Jeff Bozo
Joe Biden. Sleepy Joe etc. (the Biden file is almost a page of small print)
Hunter Biden. Crooked as can be.
Michael Bloomberg. Mini Mike
John Bolton. A warmongering fool.
Jeb Bush. Jeb low energy Bush
Pete Buttigieg. Alfred E. Newman.
James Clapper. Dirty Cop…proven liar.
Hillary Clinton. Crooked Hillary etc. (her file is as long as Biden’s)
Michael Cohen. Bad lawyer and fraudster.
Anne Coulter. Wacky nut job
Chris Cuomo. Fredo
It seems pretty mild to me except for the charge leveled against Bashar al Assad, the Syrian dictator, who has in fact used poison gas on his own people. Today, after the various hoaxes promoted by the media in the last eight years, “fake news” seems like a matter of fact and not an insult. I found no foul language on the list. Certainly, nothing close to the insulting language hurled against Trump by his opponents. He is often called a Nazi and compared to Hitler. Remember that Maxine Waters, a Congresswoman from California, called him a mother f---er. He did say that Stacey Abrams would destroy the State of Georgia, but recently, outside the NYC courthouse, actor Robert DeNiro claimed that Trump would destroy the Country and the World.
No, it is more than insults or rhetoric. For half the country, Donald Trump is the epitome of the big, bad businessman that has been part of American lore from the beginning, especially from the time of the nineteenth century Robber Barons to the present. From Colombo to Law and Order the killer has always been a successful white businessman or professional.
From the time he came down the escalator in Trump Tower to declare his candidacy, Trump was the successful white businessman par excellence. Moreover, he showed no guilt about his riches. He had inherited wealth but then increased it immensely. He flaunted his wealth. He lived in Trump Tower and Mar a Lago amid furnishings of gold. He loved to play golf and had a reputation as a womanizer. He married a beautiful young wife after dumping two previous wives. He had a good education but still seemed boorish and uncultured. Most of all, he was not the “not for profit” type. He always watched out for Number 1.
Think about it. The last three Democratic Presidents never had to be in business. They never had to run a profit or worry about taking a loss. Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary were lawyer politicians, Barack Obama was a community activist before his election to the Senate from Illinois, and Joe Biden has been in government forever. They were all public servants who made millions, but somehow escaped the opprobrium of being rich.
Many years ago I was a young teacher at a newly founded small college in Connecticut. Like me, most of the faculty were liberal arts teachers just out of grad school. For some reason, we all looked down our noses at businessmen even though most of us had little real contact with people in business. We thought they were ill-educated and uncultured, and it seemed especially unfair that they should make much more money than we did. We even looked down upon the school’s fledgling Business department as a kind of necessary evil. I suspect that such anti profit prejudice still prevails today in most colleges and universities despite the fact that most of them now turn out hordes of business majors.
As one letter writer in the Wall Street Journal pointed out this week,Trump was prosecuted not because of anything he said or did, but simply because he was Donald J. Trump.
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This was a sham, for instance 1 incident led to 30 + counts by a prosecutor who stated he was out to get DJT.
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