By MARSHA MERCER
We’re coming up on a milestone, of sorts.
On March 23 four years ago, the first hopeful Republican
contender entered the 2016 presidential race.
“The answer will not come from Washington,” he said. It
will come “when the American people stand together, and say, `We will get back
to the principles that made this country great.’”
Sound familiar? Not exactly. It was Ted Cruz, in a
speech to cheering students at Liberty University.
That was in the B.D. era – Before Donald.
As more Democrats line up to run for president, it’s
worth remembering what happened when 17 Republicans competed for the presidential
nomination.
We know who won. How many of the others can you still
name?
Time’s up. They were: Jeb Bush, Ben Carson, Chris
Christie, Carly Fiorina, Jim Gilmore, Lindsey Graham, Mike Huckabee, Bobby
Jindal, John Kasich, George Pataki, Rand Paul, Rick Perry, Marco Rubio, Rick
Santorum and Scott Walker.
When Donald Trump jumped in nearly three months after
Cruz, he vowed at Trump Tower to “make our country great again” and “have
Mexico pay for the wall.”
He also gave a sour taste of things to come when he
gratuitously belittled his opponents at their campaign launches.
“They didn’t know the air conditioner didn’t work.
They sweated like dogs. They didn’t know the room was too big, because they
didn’t have anybody there. How are they going to beat ISIS?” Trump said.
Trump was making a fallacy of false cause argument --
trying to establish cause and effect between unrelated things. Someone’s not
knowing the air conditioning was broken at a venue shows absolutely nothing
about how he’d do at fighting ISIS. It’s absurd, but catchy.
Trump laid waste to once-viable candidates one disparaging
nickname at a time: “Lyin’ Ted” Cruz, “Liddle Marco” Rubio and “Low Energy” Jeb
Bush.
In Cruz’s case, Trump also claimed Cruz’s father was
associated with Lee Harvey Oswald before the JFK assassination. Cruz called the
allegation nuts and kooky.
“You know, you
have to brand people a certain way when they’re your opponents,” Trump said before
the Florida primary in March 2016, explaining how to call out Cruz: It’s “Lyin’
Ted,” he said, “L-Y-I-N-apostrophe.”
“We can’t say it the right way,” he said. “We’ve got
to go, Lyin’! Lyin’! Ted!”
Moving on to Rubio, he spelled out “L-I-D-D-L-E.
Liddle, Liddle, Liddle Marco.”
Trump has an uncanny knack for finding a rival’s soft
spot and choosing a nickname that sticks.
He famously labeled Democratic presidential nominee
Hillary Clinton “crooked Hillary,” called her “such a nasty woman” in a debate,
and at rallies beamed as his supporters chanted, “Lock Her Up.”
Trump’s ad
hominem attacks were stupid, wrong and creepily effective.
Now, the 2020 Democratic presidential hopefuls are his
target.
He reportedly thinks Elizabeth Warren will be the
Democrats’ pick and early on dubbed her Pocahontas for her claim of Native
American heritage. She has struggled ever since, finally apologizing for saying
she was Native American.
Lately, Trump watched Beto O’Rourke’s video announcing
his candidacy March 14 and picked up on his expansive hand gestures.
“I think he’s got a lot of hand movement. I’ve never
seen so much hand movement. I said, `Is he crazy, or is that just the way he
acts?’” Trump told reporters.
It’s only March 2019. O’Rourke has time to tone down
the splashy gestures. Not all the Democratic candidates are even in the pool.
Joe Biden is said to enter the race soon. Virginians
Terry McAuliffe and Mark Warner are among those weighing a bid.
Meanwhile, Trump is warming up his attack machine. He
called Biden Monday “another low I.Q. individual.”
As we saw in 2016, he shut down his rivals before they
could introduce and fully define themselves through their actions, ideas and policies.
Trump will try again to set the tone of the
presidential campaign with his personal-attack brand of politics, but he
doesn’t set the rules.
Voters should pay attention to policies and hold all candidates
accountable for glib fallacies and falsehoods.
We can tune out slurs and nicknames for what they are:
petty, malicious noise.
And, most important, we can vote.
©2019 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.
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