Trump’s Speech About Hillary Was Terrifyingly Effective. By Michelle Goldberg. Slate, June 22, 2016.
Goldberg:
He left the clown act to his surrogates, mixed in a truth or two among the lies, and zeroed in on what people hate about Clinton.
Donald
Trump’s Wednesday morning speech about Hillary Clinton’s record is probably the
most unnervingly effective one he has ever given. In a momentary display of
discipline, he read from a teleprompter with virtually no ad-libbing, avoiding
digs at Bill Clinton’s infidelity or conspiracy theories about Vince Foster’s
suicide. Standing in a low-ceilinged conference room bedecked with square
chandeliers in the Trump SoHo, a lawsuit-plagued
hotel and condo development, Trump spoke for 40 minutes without saying anything
overtly sexist. Instead, he aimed straight at Clinton’s most-serious
weaknesses, describing her as a venal tool of the establishment. “Hillary
Clinton gave China millions of our best jobs and effectively let China
completely rebuild itself,” he said. “In return, Hillary Clinton got rich!” He
added, “She gets rich making you poor,” and called her possibly “the most
corrupt person ever to seek the presidency.”
The
point is not that this is true; as political analyst David Gergen said on CNN, the speech
was slanderous. But the lies in the speech, many taken from Peter Schweizer’s
book Clinton Cash, were not obviously
self-refuting. At one point, Trump said, citing Schweizer, “Hillary Clinton’s
State Department approved the transfer of 20 percent of America’s uranium
holdings to Russia, while nine investors in the deal funneled $145 million to
the Clinton Foundation.” This has been debunked many times over, including by FactCheck.org.
To
explain why it’s not true, though, you have to go into details about Clinton’s
role on the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which
approved the sale of a Canadian-based energy company with American mining
stakes to Russia’s nuclear energy agency. It’s a very different sort of lie
than the one Trump told at a meeting of evangelicals on Tuesday when he said
there’s “nothing out there” about Hillary Clinton’s religion—in fact, her
Methodism is extremely well-known even to her political enemies.
Like
all skillful demagoguery, Trump’s speech on Wednesday interwove truth and
falsehood into a plausible-seeming picture meant to reinforce listeners’
underlying beliefs. In May, Morning Consult polled
people with an unfavorable view of Hillary Clinton about why they didn’t like
her. Fifty-eight percent said she was too liberal, while 22 percent said she
was too conservative. But 82 percent of Hillary-averse voters said she was
corrupt, and 88 percent said she was untrustworthy. These are the beliefs that unite
her foes across the political spectrum. It’s why Trump, with his devious talent for derisive nicknames, was smart to dub her “Crooked Hillary.”
Some of the examples Trump chose to reinforce this
caricature are true. Describing Clinton as “a world-class liar,” he said, “Just
look at her pathetic email and server statements, or her phony landing in
Bosnia where she said she was under attack but the attack turned out to be
young girls handing her flowers, a total self-serving lie. Brian Williams’
career was destroyed for saying far less.” One could quibble about whose
exaggerations have been greater, but Clinton’s Bosnia tale really was mostly made up, and it will likely haunt her throughout the campaign.
Trump
is clearly hoping to reach working-class whites in places like Ohio, where a
recent poll shows him tied
with Clinton. “We’ll never be able to fix a rigged system by counting on the
same people who rigged it in the first place,” he said. “The insiders wrote the
rules of the game to keep themselves in power, and in the money. That’s why
we’re asking Bernie Sanders’ voters to join our movement, so together we can
fix the system for all Americans. This includes fixing all of our many
disastrous trade deals. Because it’s not just the political system that’s
rigged. It’s the whole economy.” It was a direct appropriation of the rhetoric Sanders used to
woo the white working class.
When
the speech was over, I spoke to Carl Paladino, Trump’s New York co-chairman and
frequent surrogate, who said that he expects the speech to mollify some of
Trump’s Republican critics. “They can’t come griping anymore,” he said. “He’s
on the teleprompter, and he’s on message. It’s a lot easier when you’re
scripted in your presentation.”
Paladino
then provided some of the extemporaneous insults missing from Trump’s speech,
deriding Republicans who’ve expressed concern about their party’s nominee. “The
press is always going to find some of these screwballs,” said Paladino. I asked
if he considers House Speaker Paul Ryan a screwball. “Absolutely he’s a
screwball,” he replied. “He doesn’t understand his responsibility to the
people. He wasn’t elected by all the people. He was elected by some people up
in Wisconsin and put into that office, and that office should have more dignity
and understanding that when you have a candidate who’s chosen by the people,
you will support that candidate, unequivocally. Paul Ryan thinks he can pass
judgment on the specifics of a Donald Trump. He can’t pass judgment.”
Maybe
not, but for at least one morning Trump did his best not to terrify his own
party, and it was terrifying to watch him succeed.
