Trump was on a hot roll Friday night, November 4th, during a rally in Hershey Pennsylvania when he launched into a fervent recasting of events earlier in the day in Fayetteville, North Carolina.
He was complaining bitterly about Obama’s behavior towards a Trump protestor at a Clinton rally that afternoon.
“If I spoke the way Obama spoke to that protester, they would say, ‘He became unhinged!’” Trump told supporters at a campaign rally in Hershey, Pennsylvania on Friday night.
“He spent so much time screaming at this protester and frankly, it was a disgrace.”
Trump also bizarrely claimed that the president, a Democrat, should not be campaigning for his party’s nominee Hillary Clinton.
He accused the broadcast media taping the event of being more favorable toward Obama than the GOP nominee by not panning cameras to capture the protester.
“They wouldn’t put the cameras on him,” Trump said. “They kept the cameras on Obama.”
The crowd ate it up. Another perfect example of how the media lies about Trump, coddles Obama and Clinton, and generally disrespects all those who support Trump, like themselves.
Except.
Except there was videotape of the entire episode. So we have a direct visual comparison of what Obama said and did compared to what Trump, who wasn’t in North Carolina and had no first hand knowledge whatsoever, misremembered in his own fertile imagination and then recalled for the adoring crowd.
Here’s what actually happened, from two different sources.
The first is a report from Time Magazine:
When a protestor interrupted President Obama’s afternoon rally for Hillary Clinton in North Carolina on Friday, the crowd was not having it. The Fayetteville crowd attempted to drown the heckler out with chants of U-S-A and boos.
Obama, however, said, “hold up.”
“Everybody sit down and be quiet for a second,” the President said. “You’ve got an older gentleman who is supporting his candidate. He’s not doing nothing. You don’t have to worry about him.”
The crowd, for a while, wouldn’t listen and only chanted louder. Yet Obama continued to come to his defense and eventually got the crowd quiet enough to lay out reasons why the man deserved the respect of the crowd.
The scene wasn’t unfamiliar given the tumultuous nature of the 2016 campaign. At rallies across the U.S., protesters have interrupted candidates and surrogates on both sides of the aisle.
But on Friday, instead of calling for the man’s removal or heckling him back as he’s done in the past, the Obama told the crowd he deserved their respect and urged them to vote instead of boo.
“First of all—hold up—we live in a country that respects free speech. Second of all, it looks like maybe he might have served in our military and we gotta respect that. Third of all, he was elderly and we gotta respect our elders,” Obama said. “And fourth of all, don’t boo. Vote.”
The Fayetteville stop was the first of two Obama was scheduled to make in North Carolina on Friday. The commander-in-chief has morphed into the campaigner-in-chief with days to go before the election, recently making appearances for Clinton every day. All of the stops have been in states where the race is looking close, and his pitches have been aimed at his coalition of voters, including millennials and black voters.
And the second report is from Huffington Post:
The disruption at the campaign event for Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton began when a man in military attire stood up with the sign supporting the Republican presidential nominee. He was escorted from the venue shortly after.
People began shouting as Obama repeatedly told the crowd to “hold up.”
“Everybody sit down and be quiet for a second,” Obama said.
“You’ve got an older gentleman who’s supporting his candidate,” he added. “He’s not doing nothing. You don’t have to worry about him.”
Obama told the crowd that it appears the man was a veteran, and they should respect his service.
“We live in a country that respects free speech,” he said. “Don’t boo, vote.”
Hold up, Wait just a darn minute. The evidence I have just offered is from media reporters on the internet, just the sort of dishonest scum Trump is always warning genuine Americas to distrust.
If it were true that there is such a fine grained and universal web of conspiracy against Trump and his doings, it would have to be the most enormous conspiracy against one man in the History of the Universe. It is not. Frankly, Trump is not really all that important, wither to the rest of the world,or to history, and certainly not to the Universe (God’s Universe).
The coup de grace for Trump audio fantasy hallucination is the fact that there is complete video of the entire incident posted before Trump got ramped up on his attest rant.
It is complete, unedited, and runs about 2 minutes.
Thus, it turns out that, yet again, Trump is spinning a fairy tale that exists only inside his own head to yearning supporters. He seems unashamed and undeterred to just make stuff up, truth be damned.
Obama didn’t scream or yell at the protestor. Watch it again, if you must. He calmed down some shouters in the rally crowd who were upset at the protestor. Obama brought the volume down in the arena and delivered a little Presidential homily about American values: the man was exercising his first amendment right of free speech, he wasn’t a threat to anyone there, he deserved respect as a U.S. veteran, and he deserved respect as an older person.
Then he delivered the most Presidential and peaceable American values line of all about how to handle the situation: “Don’t boo. Vote.”
So, Trump made up a fictitious sound track, he invented bad actions he tried to lay on Obama, and then he tried to claim he was being slighted by the media.
As a bonus, Trump flat out lied about the cameras. There were plenty of cameras aimed at the protestor. Otherwise, dear friends, how would we have pictures of the man standing among the Democratic crowd. See for yourself.
Solo Trump Protestor at Fayetteville NC Clinton Rally !!/4/16
For the less observant among you, please note that the Trump supporter is not being crowded, or surrounded, or having his personal space invaded. Nor is anyone pushing him, or attempting to grab his arms or wrestle him to the ground, Nearly everyone near him is just sitting calmly, not even staring at him. Some threatening crowd that is.
This fixed camera routine is one of Trump’s more shopworn and tiresome jokes on his own supporters. As he well knows (being an entertainment pro), there is always one media Pool Camera at a public event during the Presidential campaign, whose only job it is to focus 100% straight ahead at the podium and on the speaker exclusively, no matter what else happens in the room. That way there is always a continuous complete video record of what the speaker says. This leaves every other media camera in the room free to move around and film whatever else strikes their fancy: image the crowd, zoom in on a particular visitor, focus on protesters, or whatever else is potentially interesting.
Recently Katy Tur of NBC revealed in an on air interview that Trump not only knows this media fact-of-life very well, that he privately jokes with the reporters covering him about how he uses his frequent misrepresentation about fixed cameras to rile up his crowds, and get a rise out of them for dramatic effect.
So, Trump is playing a double reverse whammy joke on his own followers, and then laughing at them behind their backs with the ‘enemy’. His fake outrage is all for show, folks. Even Trump doesn’t mean it.
More red meat for the frustrated.
We don’t even need to mention Trump’s oft-repeated lament that in the good old days, authorities knew how to handle protestors, in a pretty rough physical way, and no one stopped them. Trump has, on more than one occasion, offered to pay lawyer expenses, if a supporter took out a protestor and then got in any legal trouble over it.
The contrast illuminated in this small incident is stark. One man acts in a reasonable Presidential way and upholds American values. The other, quite literally, makes up stuff that never happened, and then encourages others to act towards fellow Americans like the thug he has proven himself to be since childhood.
Guess who?
The Trump Political Time Machine Paradox
In a strange way Trump is a victim of the time we all live in now. He would have been a great political candidate in the 1950’s and 1960’s.
We had national television networks, but only two or three. There was no cable TV, n internet, no cell phones with cameras, no fax machines, or inexpensive jet fares for crisscrossing the country.
Politicians running for national office routinely took advantage of these potent time and distance barriers to set up two or three or even four versions of their deeply held political position on every issue imaginable, depending on jet where in the country they were speaking on a particular day.
They could and did have one position on farm subsidies in rural areas, and quire another for the inner city. You could support civil rights in New York and Massachusetts, and preach in favor of states’ local authority in Alabama and Georgia. You could be for military spending in South Carolina, Texas, and California, and against it in Vermont or West Virginia. where there weren’t too many defense jobs and contractors to worry about.
You could hold contradictory positions, several at the same time, with a straight face, unapologetic, and unlikely to get caught or called out on it. Today is a communications revolution apart different. Not only is everything recorded for posterity, whether you like it or not, the recordings are available nationwide via the internet for comparison at virtually the speed of light. This double check on blatant hypocrisy chastens nearly all politicians and helps reduce the total Pinocchio score by a good bit.
Trump is in more than a bit of bind with this situation. He is daily caught out fudging, misrepresenting, and lying about plain facts that require no special skills to interpret. On the other hand, Trump seems unfazed at the numerous instances in which he is caught flat out denying the incontrovertible facts of his own personal words and actions. He acts as if he can suddenly magically wipe the away the events, and no one will remember.
Back To The Future DeLorean: Man & Machine
He operates as if he has a better time machine than the 1981 DeLorean DMC-12 in all three Back to the Future movies combined. For the longest time (since 1973) he has been able to mainly bluff it out. Now the accumulated weight of his obvious falsehoods has begun to retard his forward progress. He has more trouble hitting the 88-mph time travel barrier.
Back To The Future DeLorean: On the Streets of Modern Manhattan
Trump pines for the good old days when America was Great. It must be before 1980 because that’s when Ronald Reagan first invented and used with Trump’s current recycled campaign slogan (MAGA).
Trump Wants to Restore the Time When America Was Great
Trump has been rather vague about just exactly when that time might have been, but a good guess might be the decade from 1955-1965, say 1962 or 1963.
Not everyone reading this can recall those times clearly from direct personal experience. But tens of millions can. Most of us who remember those times from our own life experiences have decidedly mixed overall feelings about those golden days in victorious Post-War prosperous America.
In the good old days, women knew their places in the Home, didn’t prattle on about going to work, and did just what their men told them do, and right quick about it. Women in the workplace outside the Home were by definition looking for it, and frequently got it too.
In the good old days, non-whites knew their places too, kept to themselves, crossed to the other side of the street, and sat in balconies and at the back of the bus, if they knew what was good for them.
In the good old days, only the right sort got to vote on Election Day, and uppity types got to take a Literacy Test before they could vote that would likely stump a Harvard graduate, much less one from University of Pennsylvania.
In the good old days, you didn’t ever talk back to the cops if you were half-smart, and if they told you to do something, you had better do it, or you could end up beaten, broken, and arrested, white or black. Now that was decent respect for authority.
In the good old days, if your skin was brown, or your accent funny and Un-American you kept your damn head down and were grateful for any job or crummy place to live someone might offer, unless maybe your accent was Teutonic, your looks were Nordic, and you were a rocket scientist
In the good old days, if your religion was not Christian (America’s own), you could forget about an even shot for your kids at the best schools, you couldn’t play golf or swim at the club with your regular neighbors, and you better embrace Christmas for public consumption.
Don’t you all just want to restore the Good Old Days, as soon as next Tuesday?
Fayetteville, North Carolina and Hershey, Pennsylvania on November 4, 2016. A study in contrasts.
One With Class and One Who’s An Ass.
Take notice America. This is just the continuation of a 16 month long deliberate and unshakeable pattern of deception for those who desperately want to believe in Trump’s goodness and fitness for high office
There is still 2020 for Republicans to get their protest about the situation in America right. Unfortunately, Donald J. Trump is not the secular vessel of deliverance they seek and pray for.
Here is a nationwide map of Election Day Poll Closing Times by State for November 8, 2016 (courtesy of Daily Kos’ talented graphics folks). Use it well to make your vote count.
The election is just four days away. Please Vote. Please Vote early, if you still can. Talk to your friends, and get them to Vote too to defend our Democracy in America.