Quote:I've Finally Had It with Trump
I don't know why, but this was the gross public lie that broke the camel's back.
GETTY CHIP SOMODEVILLA
BY CHARLES P. PIERCE
NOV 5, 2016
HERSHEY, Pennsylvania—There was a vivid slice of orange moon low on the dark horizon and the campaign of Donald Trump had pulled into the Giant Arena in the sprawling Hersheypark complex.
It was as typical a rally as you might expect after a year of listening to the vulgar talking yam for the past 18 months, as though anything about his entire candidacy was in any way typical. But, at long last, El Caudillo del Mar-A-Lago managed to exceed even my admittedly expansive limits for political obscenity.
On Friday, at a campaign event in Fayetteville, North Carolina, the president was interrupted by a Trump supporter. This prompted some ill-feeling among the other people attending the rally. The president responded the way a president responds to something unexpected like this.
Hey! Listen up! I told you to be focused, and you're not focused right now. Listen to what I'm saying. Hold up. Hold up! Hold up! Hold up! Everybody sit down, and be quiet for a second…
First of all, we live in a country that respects free speech. Second of all, it looks like maybe he might've served in our military and we got to respect that. Third of all, he was elderly and we got to respect our elders. And fourth of all, don't boo, vote.
By the time he'd rolled into Hersheypark, Trump had folded the incident into the insane mechanism that he laughingly calls a thought process, and this, as recorded by NBC's Ali Vitali, is what the mechanism produced.
There was a protester and a protester that likes us. And what happened is they wouldn't put the cameras on him. They kept the cameras on Obama... He was talking to a protester, screaming at him, really screaming at him. By the way, if I spoke the way Obama spoke to that protester, they would say he became unhinged.
I don't know why, but that was the gross public lie that broke the camel's back. By all objective measures, it was perfectly of a piece with every other barrel of bullshit that Trump has rolled out during this campaign.
His account of what the president did was manifestly, laughably false. It could be demonstrated to be as such by a recent technological breakthrough called "video."
It slandered the president because the president has the kind of class that Trump never has been able to buy for all his borrowed, foreign millions.
There was enough room in the ludicrous general untruth of the thing for Trump also to lie about how the president's response had been televised—Once again, check the "video" for proof of this—and enough room for him also to wank away once again about how he has been victimized by that ol' debbil media, and he was lying about that, too.
I have a respectably high tolerance for this stuff, and I can't tell you why this particular incident shoved me over the International Crapola Line for good. Maybe it was because it was so ludicrously provable a lie.
Maybe it was the smug confidence he has in his own mind that that he is talking to a country full of thoroughgoing morons. Maybe it was how little he cared that people could go on their fcking telephones and find out how dreadfully obvious his lie was. They could do it right at that moment, while he was telling the lie.
He didn't care. He never has cared. His contempt for the democratic processes and for the norms of self-government is matched only by the deep contempt he has for all the suckers who mistake his contempt for the American experiment for their deep disappointment in it.
He has measured their intelligence by his heavily leveraged net worth and found them hilariously lacking. We are all the subcontractors who build his indomitable ego for him and, as such, he can stiff us according to his customary business plan. His campaign long ago became a sickening charade performed by a grotesque charlatan.
I had enough, finally. I left the hall.
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