Trump: “I’m the least racist person in this room”

Commentary

Trump, White Men and yet another plot to assassinate Joe Biden. Yes, Sondheim, “It could drive a person crazy!”

At last night’s Presidential debate, Donald Trump declared that he was the “least racist person in the room.” He then doubled down, saying, “It makes me sad because I am the least racist person, I can’t even see the audience because it’s so dark, but I don’t care who’s in the audience, I’m the least racist person in this room.”

I don’t know about you, but I’ve never heard of a “racist grading scale.” If there is one, is it based on alphabetical grades (A,B,C,D,F) or numerical (0-100)?

And what’s the criteria? I can perhaps agree that a white man in a hood burning crosses on the lawns of homes in Black neighborhoods might be a criteria for the “most racist person” in the room. But the least racist? I can’t even begin to imagine what that means.

And talking about white men, as I was pondering the grade-scale question, the following headline flashed on my screen”

What if Only White Men Voted?

The headline is from an opinion piece that will run in The New York Times Magazine this weekend by Michael Sokolove, a contributing writer for the magazine.

Sokolove’s sub-head reads:

We’d have elected a white supremacist and an accused child abuser to the Senate, and we’d have four more years of Donald Trump. The gender gap, explained.

In the lead up to his explanation, Sokolove writes,

Think about what the political map would look like if just white men voted.

We’d have a Senator Roy Moore representing Alabama, where 72 percent of the state’s white male voters (and 63 percent of the white women) cast their ballot for a man who was accused of sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl — and who faced sexual misconduct allegations from multiple other women related to incidents they said occurred when they were underage. (He has denied the accusations.)

We’d likely have a Senator David Duke from Louisiana. The entire U.S. Senate would look far different — with Democratic senators from just a handful of the bluest states. And there would never have been a President Barack Obama.

Polls in advance of Nov. 3 reveal a huge gender divide. The electorate as a whole seems ready to cast out President Trump by a big margin. But not men. The most recent poll by The New York Times and Siena College shows 48 percent of men backing the re-election of Mr. Trump, compared to 42 percent backing Joe Biden. For women, it’s 35 percent for Mr. Trump, and 58 percent for Mr. Biden. Broken down by race, the latest poll from Pew Research has Mr. Trump leading Mr. Biden among white men by a 12- percentage-point margin — 53 percent to 41 percent.

I’ll leave it to you to read the rest of Sokolove’s analysis by clicking on this link to the article:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/23/opinion/gender-gap-2020-election.html.

Or the PDF for those of you who don’t subscribe to the Times.

As for me, I’m not sure what to make of it…except the embarrassment I feel as a white man. And I’m not sure what I can do about it. I can’t change my complexion. I’m not getting a sex-change operation. So all I could think of is perhaps I should start wearing a button like this:

And then this. Before I even could begin proofing what I had written, another headline arrived in my inbox:

A 19-year-old with a van full of guns and explosives plotted to assassinate Biden, feds say

The article, written by Timothy Bella in The Washington Post, reads in part:

As it was becoming clear in March that Joe Biden would be the Democratic presidential nominee, Alexander Hillel Treisman started to map out his plot to assassinate the former vice president, federal authorities say.

“Should I kill Joe Biden?” Treisman wrote in a caption to a meme he posted in April.

It didn’t appear to be an idle threat, the feds say.

The 19-year-old searched online for Biden’s home address and for night-vision goggles, and purchased an AR-15 in New Hampshire, according to federal court documents first reported Thursday by WBTV. At one point in May, Treisman ended up at a Wendy’s within four miles of Biden’s home in Delaware. And when he was arrested later that month in North Carolina, police searching his van found four rifles, a 9mm handgun, explosive materials, books on bomb making, and $509,000 in cash that’s believed to be his inheritance.

As evidenced by the photo above, Treisman is, alas, a white man. And, based on his name, Alexander Hillel Treisman, possibly, God help us, a Jewish white man!

As I finish writing this column, it is 10:30 am EDT on Friday, October 23. What a morning! What a country! Oy gevalt!

All this is enough to drive a person crazy, it’s enough to drive a person mad!!!!!

And in this case, take mad as meaning – angry, furious, irate, raging, fuming, incensed, livid….