Another exciting week in the 2016 Trump Presidential Spectacular and another week of political obituaries predicting Donald Trump’s imminent demise.
Serious question: How many political obituaries have these people written about Mr. Trump since he descended into the fetid American political swamp on a glass escalator last summer?
But this time they really mean it!
Yeah, these people are about as credible and reliable as President Obama drawing red lines in Iran or Syria.
And just as we are learning that women and children in Syria were gassed with chlorine that may or may not have been funded with $400 million in laundered ransom cash President Obama had flown into Tehran in an unmarked cargo plane, the American political media was seized with the notion that somehow Donald Trump is crazy.
Well, if gassing children and sending my hard-earned tax money to the world’s largest theocratic sponsor of terrorism is sane, then please tell me where the hell the line for crazy is!
It was widely speculated in every corner of the media last week that Mr. Trump suffers mental illness. His campaign staff has turned “suicidal.” He is “unfit” to serve, according to the current president who is overseeing the gassing of children in Syria and sent our tax money to the terrorists in Tehran.
If another campaign had begun such unfounded and scurrilous rumors, it would be a “dirty tricks” scandal. But when the media foments such unfounded and scurrilous rumors, it is called “reporting.”
Since the beginning, politicos have wagged about how Mr. Trump lacks the “temperament” to be president. That is a code word for he isn’t “one of us.”
These people are mostly country club types, and it is the same thing they used to say about those people they didn’t want in their country clubs. Strange last name. Talks funny. Most unusual hair. Wrong church. Wrong color.
But, once again, Donald Trump — amid all the smug ridicule — outsmarted them all. He pulled off yet another Media Houdini Act — and they are all too stupid to even know it!
Last week began with a truly Trumpian scandal where The Donald got into a war of words with the Gold Star family that Democrats had trotted out at their convention in Philadelphia because the family was Muslim and of Pakistani descent.
Accusations that Mr. Trump had gone mad reached infernal temperatures. The Republican nominee had finally gone around the bend, off his cracker with complete madness.
Instead of the traditional politician kissing a baby, the media reported, Donald Trump threw a baby out of a campaign event. He mocked a supporter, it was reported, who gave him a fake Purple Heart. (Both of these stories, it would later be revealed, were entirely fabricated.)
Undeterred, CNN — which has dropped all pretense of fairness and embraced its slur as “Clinton News Network” — dispatched its staff shrink to analyze Donald Trump for signs of insanity. Actually, it is unfair to use the word “News” in the name anymore.
Clinton Network dismissed “sociopathy” because Mr. Trump has had so many marriages and such nice kids. The shrink also warned against narcissistic personality disorder, since it would be hard to find anybody running for president who doesn’t suffer from that.
Ultimately, the network felt most comfortable diagnosing Mr. Trump with “hypomania” and bipolar disorders. Good news here is that never again can anyone cry foul when serious questions are raised about all of Hillary Clinton’s alarming ailments (cough, cough, fall, fall.)
The real thing that launched last week’s media hissy fit about Mr. Trump’s mental stability had nothing to do with his spat with the Gold Star family, though it was good to finally find a Gold Star family that Democrats and the media don’t hold in utter disdain. Nor was it about a baby or a Purple Heart.
Mr. Trump’s great transgression was his refusal to endorse House Speaker Paul Ryan in his primary fight back home. Here along the muddy waters of the Potomac River, this is akin to a complete and utter mental breakdown. The media went nuts.
Mr. Trump, of course, fully understood that nobody and nobody but the most invested political gasbags — not his core supporters — cares one way or the other about Paul Ryan or his primary fight. But Mr. Trump did want to move on from the Gold Star controversy.
So he let it be known that the Republican nominee for president just wasn’t quite ready to support the incumbent Republican speaker of the House in his own primary. It was like pressing a button. The entire media flipped out.
By week’s end, Mr. Trump “relented” and flew to Wisconsin to deliver an endorsement of Paul Ryan that even Mr. Ryan’s opponent managed to applaud. Mr. Trump carefully read the endorsement as if reading aloud a statement that was part of some ransom demand. It was truly hilarious.
The press, of course, gloated over Mr. Trump’s “reversal.” But, at least, they were not talking about the Gold Star family anymore.
Now, tell me who’s crazy.
• Charles Hurt can be reached at charleshurt@live.com; follow him on Twitter via @charleshurt.
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