As Hurricane Florence bore down on the Carolinas, Donald Trump tweeted that Democrats had unfairly blamed him for the 3,000 Puerto Ricans who died after two hurricanes destroyed the island last year and the federal government failed to provide adequate aid and infrastructure repairs after the storm. Trump says you only die from a hurricane if it happens that day. But that’s not how disasters unfold.
Trump: You Only Count as Dead if It Happens Right Away
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication and WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a contributor to Centerclip and co-host of "The Final Countdown" talk show on Radio Sputnik. He is a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "2024: Revisited."
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Same-o, Same-o.
Over a million people have died in the Muddle East since our illegal invasions of 2001 & 2. But hey, they only count if they were shot directly by one of our troops – in which case they were terrorists anyway. Infrastructure collapse, disease, etc – that’s not our fault. “I didn’t kill anybody. All I did was set fire to the building – it was their own fault for living there in the first place…”
Ever since Trump was elected, I have been fed a steady diet of stories about how he’s days away from being removed from office. He’s always just about to lose his mind or pitch over dead or be removed by force. The wheels are always, always, just about to come off the wagon. Oh, and let’s talk about his spelling mistakes. Lookit me on Twitter. I’m being snarky. My snark is fleek.
The reality is this: Trump knows how to manipulate people. He knows how to distract. He is, like it or not, highly effective at taking advantage of his opponents’ inability to behave like rational players. And one way he does it is through paralogia. Here’s one example:
A hurricane hits Puerto Rico. The whole island pretty much goes to hell because the infrastructure is crumbling. (By the way, make a note on your calendars. The same thing will start happening in the mainland U.S.; we’ve ignored lots of our infrastructure for decades. How much longer before bridges start collapsing, just like the engineers have been warning for years?) People start to die because they can’t get to hospitals. (Reminder: The same thing happened in New York City a few years back when the city was paralyzed for several days due to severe snowfall. Ambulances couldn’t get through the snow-packed streets.)
At this point, the Dems should start running the narrative. “PR’s infrastructure has to be fixed. Now. This cannot happen again.” (And that narrative would need to become part of the national platform. Oh, if only a candidate would advance that as a platform position. What? Bernie Sanders did? But, but, but, the DNC rigged the primaries against him because $12/hr Hillary was inevitable. Anyway, that’s a discussion for another time.)
Trump, however, realizes that he can’t win on that argument of infrastructure repair because it means the death toll really is 3,000. (His own private 9/11.) So he PARALOGICALLY argues that the “real” death toll was only a few people. Technically, he’s correct, but his argument completely ignores the bigger picture and the secondary and tertiary issues that arise when discussing even relatively simple issues. But that’s all it takes to trigger the Twitter effect. Highly manipulable people who are emotionally easy to activate turn it into a trend (just like with Trump’s misspellings). The media jumps right on it because all the people like me who keep insisting that the media should be slower and more deliberate have been pushed out the door in favor of these six weird superfoods the government doesn’t want you to find out about (number 3 is really a jaw-dropper).
The Dems, mostly run by rich old fools who think that Twitter somehow equals votes (“My greatgranddaughter uses Twitter. That’s how we’ll get the youngsters.”), follow the same Twitter-driven simplified narrative. An article about Maxine Waters, for instance, recently had her explaining how she’ll go after Trump if the Dems retake the House.
Suuuuuure. And Trump will simply put out something misspelled on Twitter and everyone will be distracted and drawn into a debate on some nothing issue. Waters will go back to her crossword puzzle or raising funds for her next election cycle, and Trump will simply laugh his ass off during the commercial breaks on “Fox and Friends.”
If a person, acting behind the corporate shield, downsizes a corporation’s workforce, and the downsized lose their health insurance, and are then denied healthcare, and die well before they would have died otherwise, one might think the premature death was a murder as a consequence of profit taking.
The CCCP (the Central Committee of the Capitalist Parties), aka the three constitutional branches of government, most likely will not see it that way.
But an aggrieved party may stubbornly hold that that death is a death by murder, the taking away of what one needs to live.