Why Trump's pathologies make this election unlike any other Lying, demonisation and bigotry - are

[niyad]

Why Trump’s pathologies make this election unlike any other

Lying, demonisation and bigotry – are being actively, openly and relentlessly encouraged by a political leader


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Donald Trump delivers remarks at a Make America Great Again rally in Fort Wayne, Indiana, on Monday. Photograph: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images

Three weeks before the midterm elections the first of several mail bombs started arriving at the homes or workplaces of Donald Trump’s critics, including the media, and kept coming for a week. The devices appear to have been sent by an unstable man radicalized by Trump’s rhetoric. A few days after the first mail bomb was found, an armed man tried to break into a black church in Jeffersonstown, Kentucky. When he found the door locked he went to a nearby supermarket and shot dead two elderly black people. When a white passerby with a gun challenged him he reportedly said: “Whites don’t kill whites.”
The next day an antisemitic gunman entered a synagogue in Pittsburgh and shot 11 people dead at prayer. The gunman was at least in part motivated by the notion that, through its support of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (Hias), the synagogue backed the caravan of Central American asylum seekers and immigrants coming through Mexico. Shortly before the attack he wrote: “Hias likes to bring invaders in that kill our people. I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.” When he entered the synagogue he allegedly shouted: “All Jews must die.”
Sign up for the new US morning briefing That afternoon, after a morning of carnage and a week of terror, Trump addressed a crowd in Murphysboro, Illinois. “This,” he said, “will be the election of the caravans, the Kavanaughs, law and order, tax cuts, and you know what else? It’s going to be the election of common sense, because most of it is common sense.”


But nothing much about this election makes any sense at all. It is unlike every other election here I have covered (this is my 10th) for three main reasons. First, a range of pathologies – lying, demonisation, incitement to violence, bigotry – are being actively, openly and relentlessly encouraged by a political leader. Second, the much-anticipated consequences of those pathologies, including mass murder, is actually unravelling during the campaign itself while the polls are open. And third, it is not even remotely obvious that either of those things will have a decisive impact on the result. The polarisation and the sense everything that America stands for is at stake is not new. While travelling the country in 2004 I met Pam and Patrick Devaney in Derry, New Hampshire, who described their shyness to go knocking on doors in search of progressives. “Our democracy is at stake. This is the most important election in my lifetime,” said Pam. A few days later I met Burton Kephart, in Franklin, Pennsylvania, whose son Jonathan was killed in Iraq. “I fear for this country if [John] Kerry [the Democratic presidential candidate] wins,” he said
. . . .



Trump has dropped all appearances, not just on race, but on everything. On the first day the mail bombing came to light he made an effort at being presidential. “Those engaged in the political arena must stop treating political opponents as being morally defective,” he said. In the following week he insulted many who who had received a bomb threat. He branded Tom Steyer, “a wacky, crazy, stumbling lunatic”; repeated the claim that Maxine Waters was “the most corrupt member of Congress” and claimed “it would be the beginning of the end” if the Democrats won and branded the media: “The true enemy of the people”.'
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Voters cast ballots at a polling station in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Photograph: Kerem Yucel/AFP/Getty Images


. . . .





The assumption had always been that with an increasingly diverse electorate such a strategy would soon be unviable. Trump’s narrow victory suggested otherwise. Now they are doubling down. The economy is good, their man has delivered on taxes, deregulation and the supreme court. The polls are close. “We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term,” Senator Lindsey Graham said in 2012. Tonight we’ll find out if he was right.https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/nov/06/midterm-elections-trump-pathologies

[Wintryjade]

1. Yes.

[better]

2. Friendly neighborhood facebook image link corrector...

[niyad]

3. thank you. images from Guardian have to be viewed at link, at least for me.

[better]

4. I think it's any image that includes querystring arguments in the URL

The query string arguments are the part of the URL following the ?, and one of them is a timestamp (in the case of facebook, anyway) without which the image does not get served.

What you can do is paste the complete link (with the QS args) into tinypic.com, having selected URL as the input type, and then copy the direct link output to paste into DU.