Dem
51
GOP
49
Earlier this week, we wrote about Donald Trump, who dug up Obamacare from the political graveyard, and decided to start carping on the issue again. We assumed that somehow, someone had put that bee back in his bonnet, but we didn't know who it was, at least on Tuesday. We know now.
As it turns out, The Wall Street Journal published an editorial about Obamacare (reminder: WSJ pieces are paywalled). The editorial was only tangentially about Trump, but even a perceived insult is enough to set him off, of course. Further, although the Journal is right-leaning, it's anti-Trump, so it's also "the enemy." Hence his angry tweet.
And yesterday, the pissing contest continued. In the morning, the Journal published another editorial, this one taking more direct aim at Trump, pointing out that Obamacare has its problems, but that Trump and other Republicans have offered no viable alternative. This infuriated the former president, and so he hopped on his failing boutique social media platform to blast Obamacare ("Obamacare Sucks!!!") and then to blast the WSJ:
The Wall Street Journal Editorial Page is really a MESS! The Globalist "paper" sucks, its influence is badly waning, and the concept of, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, is not exactly music to their ears. They fought me hard in 2016, but when I WON, Rupert Murdoch was the first to call. "Great going," he said, "lets have lunch." He called often, never getting what he wanted to get, or hearing what he wanted to hear. How did that work out, Rupert? Now he's given up on a hopeless Ron DeSanctimonious, who became Florida's Governor because of me, only to be pushing Nikki "Birdbrain" Haley, an even more disloyal candidate than Ron. Just like 2016 (In 2020 I got millions of more votes than I did in 2016, but the ELECTION WAS RIGGED!), 2024 will be a GLOBALIST DEFEAT, and a rebuke to the losers at the WSJ, who have gotten almost nothing right for years. Remember, I am leading Haley & DeSanctus by 50 Points, & Crooked Joe by a lot, & the Radical Left Democrats want no part of MAGA, or TRUMP!
Trump has no truck with actual salads, except for the occasional taco salad on Cinco de Mayo. But he's a Michelin-starred chef when it comes to creating word salads.
We mention this news for a couple of reasons. The first is that it's growing more and more likely that Trump will make Obamacare a key theme of his reelection campaign, particularly if hostile right-wing media makes a point of pushing his buttons on the issue. We continue to believe this issue is a loser for him and his Party (though see the upcoming Sunday letters for a reader who disagrees).
The second is that, in our item about the Koch machine backing Nikki Haley, we made a brief allusion to Trump's use of encoded antisemitic language (i.e., "globalists"). Well, it's back again in the WSJ screed. Although, in the Haley post, we overlooked something that reader J.A. in Puerto Armuelles, Panama brought to our attention:
While I'm glad you pointed out that "corrupt network globalist[s]" is far-right code for "Jews," I wish you had made a better job of it. It doesn't just mean Jews, it means "cabal of sneaky Jews."
Also, you really dropped the ball on the significance of "backstabbers," which I'm quite sure made the folks over at whatever sewer that Stormfront is hanging out in these days feel all warm and fuzzy, and was clearly meant to do so.
J.A. is quite right; all of this language (and we write this while exceedingly mindful of the risk of Reductio ad Hitlerum) is straight out of the Adolf Hitler playbook. We honestly don't know how we missed it in the first piece, but the stab-in-the-back myth was a core element of antisemitism in Europe after 1918, and was a key theme in Mein Kampf.
We do not pretend to understand the mindset here. The Koch network is wealthy, and the Journal is the financial newspaper of record. Maybe wherever there is money, Trump assumes there are Jews. Or maybe now that he's built his arsenal of hateful, dog-whistle rhetoric, he just fires it off at will, without regard to the original meaning/intent. Who knows? The only thing we can say for sure is that it is disturbing that such verbiage barely registers these days, thanks to Trump and his supporters having normalized it so thoroughly. (Z)