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Wednesday
Hope springs eternal in the hearts of certain journalists and political moderates when it comes to Trump. For years they told themselves he would grow into the presidency, and now they are hoping that his recent brush with death will soften him up. For instance, journalist Elliott Ackerman recently wrote in an Atlantic piece, “Trump has called his enemies ‘bad people’ in the past, but now he’s suffered a near death experience. Sometimes, that changes people.”
To which Digby of the blog Hullabaloo, referring to the Alan Sorkin television series about an idealized president, sarcastically replied, “I loved the West Wing so much.”
And then there’s this from Axios:
[H]e could unify America. Imagine he gave a speech featuring something he rarely shows: humility. Imagine him telliing the nation that he has been too rough, too loose, too combative with his language–and now realizes words can have consequences, and promises to tone it down and bring new voices into the White House if he wins.
After all we’ve seen of Donald Trump, to think that he would suddenly put country first is delusional. He’s more likely to respond like Hitler, who after the bomb attempt on his life just became more erratic, paranoid, and unhinged. The literary passage that comes to my mind when encountering such fantasizing is the attempt to reform Pap in Huckleberry Finn.
Pap is back in town after learning that Huck and Tom have chanced upon a treasure and is threatening to “cowhide” Huck “till I was black and blue.” Judge Thatcher and the Widow Watkins go to the local judge to see if one of them can become his guardian, but the judge is a “family values” kind of man. (He’s reminiscent of Trump’s V-P pick, who believes that women should remain in abusive marriages.) Being new in town and not knowing Pap, he states that
courts mustn’t interfere and separate families if they could help it; said he’d druther not take a child away from its father. So Judge Thatcher and the widow had to quit on the business.
The new judge then follows up his decision with action, determining to “make a man” of Pap:
So he took him to his own house, and dressed him up clean and nice, and had him to breakfast and dinner and supper with the family, and was just old pie to him, so to speak. And after supper he talked to him about temperance and such things till the old man cried, and said he’d been a fool, and fooled away his life; but now he was a-going to turn over a new leaf and be a man nobody wouldn’t be ashamed of, and he hoped the judge would help him and not look down on him. The judge said he could hug him for them words; so he cried, and his wife she cried again; pap said he’d been a man that had always been misunderstood before, and the judge said he believed it. The old man said that what a man wanted that was down was sympathy, and the judge said it was so; so they cried again.
Then we get Pap delivering his version of Trump’s promise to focus on unifying the country:
[W]hen it was bedtime the old man rose up and held out his hand, and says:
“Look at it, gentlemen and ladies all; take a-hold of it; shake it. There’s a hand that was the hand of a hog; but it ain’t so no more; it’s the hand of a man that’s started in on a new life, and’ll die before he’ll go back. You mark them words—don’t forget I said them. It’s a clean hand now; shake it—don’t be afeard.”
So they shook it, one after the other, all around, and cried. The judge’s wife she kissed it. Then the old man he signed a pledge—made his mark. The judge said it was the holiest time on record, or something like that. Then they tucked the old man into a beautiful room, which was the spare room…
So how does it work out? About as you’d expect:
…and in the night some time he got powerful thirsty and clumb out on to the porch-roof and slid down a stanchion and traded his new coat for a jug of forty-rod, and clumb back again and had a good old time; and towards daylight he crawled out again, drunk as a fiddler, and rolled off the porch and broke his left arm in two places, and was most froze to death when somebody found him after sun-up. And when they come to look at that spare room they had to take soundings before they could navigate it.
It appears that Trump isn’t doing much better. Two days after the shooting, he was on Truth Social giving his version of unifying the country–which is that everyone should do what he wants:
As we move forward in Uniting our Nation after the horrific events on Saturday, this dismissal of the Lawless Indictment in Florida [by judge Aileen Cannon] would be just the first step, followed quickly by the dismissal of ALL the Witch Hunts–the January 6 Hoax in Washington, D.C., the Manhattan D.A.’s Zombie Case, the New York A.G. Scam, Fake Claims about a woman I never met (a decades old photo in a line with her then husband does not count), and the Georgia “Perfect” Phone Call charges. The Democrat Justice Department coordinated ALL of these Political Attacks, which are an Election Interference conspiracy against Joe Biden’s Political Opponents, ME. Let us come together to END all Weaponization of our Justice System, and Make America Great Again!
As MSNBC’s Chris Hayes noted, “He appears to be once again calling E Jean Carroll a liar in his ‘unity’ statement.” Trump is already on the hook for $83.3 million for defaming Carroll.
One wonders whether fantasizing journalists will wake up to reality as quickly as Pap’s reformist judge does:
The judge he felt kind of sore. He said he reckoned a body could reform the old man with a shotgun, maybe, but he didn’t know no other way.
Given the current climate, I suppose I must add that the judge is joking. The only way to reform Donald Trump—or at least bring an end to his behavior—is to defeat him at the voting booth and hold him accountable in the courts.
