Thank you. It does haunt me. I dream about it. It makes me terribly sad, because as @The_Librarian correctly states, they can’t have “ignored” it. I use the term because it is so painful to make sense of watching the parents I grew up with having been so entirely co-opted by right-wing Faux “News” garbage.
They literally chose to move further away from me in their twilight years instead of closer, as we had all agreed for decades they would, because they couldn’t stomach their perception of our politics here in Oregon. Instead, they moved to one of the Trumpiest places on the planet. They did this without telling me. Lots and lots of stupid excuses, but we know the real reason: Trump.
But don’t you see? That’s just as bad — arguably, worse! To not take one’s responsibility as a voter seriously enough to consider any one of the hundred clear reasons to not vote for Trump … wow. At least I have a little respect for the self-aware fascists racists that took at least two minutes to listen to Trump, and say, “I like that!”
I don’t know who you’re representing with “we”, but this thread is full of comments asserting quite insistently and angrily that every person ought to have known exactly everything about Trump even before he was a serious candidate:
(which, to be fair, you backed off of later in the thread)
@Eonwe Sorry, I mixed up my dates! Replace “early 2020” with “early 2016” (when the primaries were heating up) in each of my recent posts.
I hope it’s very clear that I do not accept “but I was fooled!” as an excuse for anyone who voted for Trump in 2016 (at the VERY LATEST, they knew what he was about by February of that year*)…and, even more obviously, anyone who voted for him in 2020 couldn’t have been “fooled,” ipso facto.
I think “we” are among the many posters in complete agreement in this thread.
*Yes, I did initially make a case for “Americans knew what Trump was about for MANY YEARS BEFORE 2016.” I later realized I’d overstated this, though there’s still some truth to it.
I never said anything close to “every person ought to have known exactly everything about Trump.” I suggested that you didn’t have to be extremely well-informed to know about one thing – the birther conspiracy.
Fair enough. I think that coverage of the campaign and reporting on the candidate during the campaign made Trump’s general direction pretty clear (though I still think it was reasonable and un-surprising if folks took in everything in and voted for him anyway because of party affiliation or vague senses of “likeability” or whatever. It happens in decision making all the time, but just typically with less impact than a presidential election).
But, folks in this thread are speaking specifically about knowledge that people “should have had” about a random celebrity prior to his becoming a political figure. I say that’s nonsense.
Ok. I think you’re wildly incorrect about that. Again, why should anyone, even if they caught that detail about a celebrity’s take on “birtherism” if/when it blipped periodically in the news cycle, have remembered it?
In an effort to declare what others “ought” to have known and understood, you and others demonstrate a gross misunderstanding about how people access and remember trivia. And that’s what Trump’s tweets about birtherism were prior to his becoming a candidate for president. Trivia. Trivial.
If I understand, you admit that many people KNEW about this, but found it “trivial.” Trivial at the time (2012) — that’s bad (IMHO). Trivial in 2016, when they could add this memory to all the other things they were then learning about Trump as an actual candidate…even worse.
I hesitate to use the word “woke,” with all the baggage it’s acquired, but maybe it comes down to that. In 2012, someone (as most did) finds out there’s this guy from The Apprentice who’s trying to enter politics, by claiming Obama is un-American, and should not be President because he’s lying about where he was born.
If your reaction is “that’s some racist shit,” you get it. You get Trump. You hate it. And you vote for Clinton four years later.
If your reaction is “hell yeah!,” you get Trump. You love it. You vote for him, four years later.
If your reaction is “that’s trivial”…well, I would argue you simply don’t get it. You are very much un-woke. You probably vote for Trump four years later.
Should I sympathize with this third voter? Believe me, I’ve tried. I get the demographics and cultural change and all that crap. But in the end, they have failed. Failed.
Trivia?? The media that push Trump into their brains heavily promoted that “Birther” crap almost every fucking day. Downplaying this fact just doesn’t cut it.
I’ll point out that to reassure voters concerned about his clinging to the birther conspiracy, Trump admitted it was incorrect during his presidential campaign.
Of course, being the insane asshole he is, he blamed Hillary for starting it all,
But for those who were only concerned about that controversy, it might have been enough to reassure them.
Of course, the New Fact that low-info voters got in 2012 wasn’t that “the Apprentice guy said Obama is Kenyan-born, so maybe it’s true.”
Rather, the New Fact they got was “The Apprentice guy is ballsy and ‘real’ enough to go there.”
That impression doesn’t go away, retraction be damned.
It’s a preview of the 2020-21 “stolen election” crap, of course. It’s not that someone actually believes it (though some did)…it’s that they admire how Trump goes there.
I’m saying that what it means to “know” something is not well defined. If I learned something once, is there something wrong with forgetting it? How many and which people’s opinions on birtherism is it “bad” to have not cared much about in 2012? Is it bad to not know or have retained information about what John Cusack or Stanley Tucci or Leonardo DiCaprio or Natalie Portman thought about Obama’s birth certificate? Is it ok to not know what Trump thought about supply side economics in 2012?
My point is that it is only because of the aftermath of 2016 that anyone is positing that it was an ethical or intellectual failure to not have known this particular (or even a small set of particular) opinion of this particular celebrity.
I knew so many things in 2012 that I probably forgot within months, let alone two, three, or four years down the road. At that moment in 2012, not being able to predict the future, could you identify which things it was important for me (and for most people in America) to retain and which it was not?
I remember how disgusted I was by that display. No apology to Obama or display of maturity at all, instead deciding to throw yet more mud, baselessly.
And (correctly, as it happens) treating his supporters as absolute morons.
But I hadn’t thought about it in years, as it got eclipsed by so many other disgusting episodes.
I don’t think it was ever brought up again, at least from what I can find from searching the news. Once he dropped it, most other people did too. He was saying so much other bullshit that I doubt many people cared about that old news anymore,
He did reportedly later admit to using the race card as a weapon. That he knew it was bad, but did it anyway. He’s well aware that he’s being harmful but doesn’t care as long as it gets him what he wants.
Morning Joe co-host Mika Brezizinski said that she and co-host Joe Scarborough confronted Trump about pushing the birther conspiracy theory that questioned whether former President Barack Obama had been born in the United States.
“We said it’s bad, it’s wrong, and he said in a low voice, ‘I know it’s bad but it works,’” Brezizinski said. “Racism in his mind, works. That’s what he told us.”
Fair enough. As I said repeatedly, for me (and you, too, if I understand correctly), “ignorance is no excuse” clearly kicks in in early 2016. Before that (including 2012), it’s a valid excuse…but it still irks me that anyone would find “the Apprentice guy” an attractive choice for President, whatever one’s political leanings.
Again, I admit this is a bit of my snobbery showing through. One of my favorite books has long been the Sterns’ Encyclopedia of Bad Taste (all Dopers would love it!). It was published in the mid 80s. If it had been published just a few years later, Trump would surely have been honored with a long chapter — lovingly and sympathetically researched and written, like all the other chapters.
This is obviously a loosing argument here, and maybe a hijack, but I’ll say a last time: how much news is there? Which of it sticks and which of it doesn’t?
I’m not suggesting that the facts aren’t there to find. I’m only suggesting that there was no obvious incentive or reason to consider the opinions of Donald Trump as something worth filing away as important information in 2012. It rises only slightly above the significance of any other piece of celebrity gossip for the average American at that point.
Today, which celebrities’ political opinions today am I given a pass for not knowing and which celebrities’ political opinions (and which opinions) am I responsible for knowing two years from now?
There was(and still is, to a slightly lesser extent) a shit-ton of right wing “news” out there pushing Trump and his insane ramblings. This isn’t a matter of “The public might have stumbled across a bit of this sometime over the course of the election campaigns but, golly, who knows if they remember any of it?” . This was a concentrated campaign shoved into our faces every fucking day, so quit trying to downplay and trivialize it.
