Washington Post (Opinion)
By Erik Wemple
February 17, 2016
At
the conclusion of Thursday night’s town hall with Donald Trump on
MSNBC, the featured guest made pains to assert that he’d been through
the wringer with “Morning Joe”
duo Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski. “It’s not easy,” said Trump.
“It’s a lot of work. I mean, I’m here. I could be someplace else, to be
honest with you. Okay, I’m being grilled by the two of you; I could be
someplace else.”
“Grilled,”
here, means a few signs of skepticism from the hosts plus several
reasonably demanding questions. Like: “Will you make upholding the
[Supreme Court’s] Heller
decision a litmus test in Supreme Court nominees?” Like: “What do you
replace [Obamacare] with?” The Republican frontrunner also faced
questioning about his claims about ringing early alarm bells over the
Iraq war and about how he’d manage the federal government’s
dispute with Apple over accessing the iPhone of a deceased terrorist.
Skepticism,
questions, civil debate, issues — it’s all great. That longstanding
road map, however, doesn’t work well with Donald Trump, however. One
reason is because
he’s fact-check-allergic, as he showed in the back-and-forth over Iraq,
as he managed to repel yet another aggressive attempt to bust him out
on his allegedly early Iraq war claims. Scarborough, just like colleague
Chuck Todd on Sunday, noted that no one has
been able to find evidence of Trump saying that the Iraq war was a bad
idea before the March 2003 invasion.
Trump
filibustered the matter, saying, in part, “I said the war is a disaster
because you’re going to destabilize the Middle East. I said it long
before 2003 but I’m not
a politician,” he argued, suggesting that his remarks weren’t carefully
recorded for history.
Soon
enough, some tough-talking anchor is going to have to corner Trump on
this one and refuse to continue on to other topics until Trump names all
the people he informed
of his early Iraq-invasion opposition.
The
other reason for the journalistic shortfall in the
Scarborough-Brzezinski town hall is Trump’s shameful record of racism,
bigotry and rampant disrespect. The Washington
Post’s Dana Milbank summarized that record with this paragraph:
Since
then, Trump led the “birther” movement challenging President Obama’s
standing as a natural-born American; used various vulgar expressions to
refer to women; spoke
of Mexico sending rapists and other criminals across the border; called
for rounding up and deporting 11 million illegal immigrants; had
high-profile spats with prominent Latino journalists and news outlets;
mocked Asian accents; let stand a charge made in
his presence that Obama is a Muslim and that Muslims are a “problem” in
America; embraced the notion of forcing Muslims to register in a
database; falsely claimed thousands of Muslims celebrated the 9/11
attacks in New Jersey; tweeted bogus statistics asserting
that most killings of whites are done by blacks; approved of the
roughing up of a black demonstrator at one of his events; and publicly
mocked the movements of New York Times (and former Washington Post)
journalist Serge Kovaleski, who has a chronic condition
limiting mobility.
Any
hourlong session with Donald Trump that doesn’t ask him about those
obscenities is a puff session. Allowing this fellow to pronounce on
entitlement reform, strategies
on ISIS, campaign tactics, Iraq, Jeb Bush, healthcare reform, gun
rights, Supreme Court nominations and other such topics without grinding
through an extensive accounting of his racism and bigotry is an outrage
only sightly less egregious than the candidate’s
own.
Yes,
an audience member did ask Trump a question about civility: “My
question is where do you think the line is between boldness and honesty,
and disrespect and rudeness?”
Ever the talented debater, Trump deflected the inquiry into some vague
talk about how he handles the outbursts of people at his rallies.
Scarborough jumped in and wondered if he’d have allies on Capitol Hill —
again, showering legitimacy on the bigot seated
in the middle of town hall.
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