The Trump = Hitler analogy is getting old. We've been in desperate need of some fresh material! How jejune.
Unsurprisingly, Trump-loathing journalist David Frum appeared on CNN This Morning today to supply it.
Frum dug up, and approvingly quoted, this line from Republican consultant Mike Murphy -- or to be completely up to date, "Republican Voters Against Trump" consultant Mike Murphy.
"Asking Donald Trump to talk about policy, it's like teaching Charles Manson to foxtrot. He can manage a step or two, but then he's going to put a pencil in your eye, because he's Charles Manson. And Donald Trump is Donald Trump."
Frum went on to call Trump an "insult comic" who "knows how to abuse and denigrate and humiliate and demean."
The irony was apparently lost on Frum that whereas he trashed Trump for denigrating people, he himself had just analogized Trump to Charles Manson—the personification of pure evil. Maybe Frum could serve as the warm-up act for Trump's next insult-comic appearance.
CNN host Kasie Hunt quoted from Frum's latest diatribe in The Atlantic, where he mocked Trump's "Kamala's a dummy" spin: "For all his jibes at her intellect, Harris is managing the mystery appeal effectively." This is what Frummy calls avoiding the press? "Managing the mystery appeal?"
If Frum wanted to employ an analogy to suggest that Trump can't resist his worst impulses, he might have used the fable of The Scorpion and the Frog. But Frum couldn't resist going for the real-life mass murderer comparison.
Note: While praising JD Vance for staying more on message than Trump, Kasie Hunt claimed that Vance had criticized Tim Walz "for leaving the military after 24 years to run for Congress." Wrong. Vance criticized Vance for lying about serving in a war zone and leaving the military knowing that his unit was soon to be deployed to Iraq.
Here's the transcript.
CNN This Morning
8/14/24
6:00 am EDTKASIE HUNT: Trump vice presential pick JD Vance has criticized Walz for leaving the military after 24 years to run for Congress. Vance replying on social media, quote, Hi Tim. I thank you for your service, but you shouldn't have lied about it. You shouldn't have said you went to war when you didn't, nor should you have said you didn't know your unit was going to Iraq. Happy to discuss more in a debate.
Vance does seem to be a bit more on message than the top of the ticket that he's running on. In an interview with Univision, Donald Trump continuing his personal attacks against Kamala Harris.
DONALD TRUMP: We're going to get rid of inflation. Inflation has hurt the Hispanic population so badly, but it's hurt everybody. She's never going to do anything about inflation. She has no idea. She doesn't even know what it means, the word means.
And she is, she's forced to go with my policies. You know, I came out a long time ago with no taxes on tips, and two days ago she said no taxes on tips. She doesn't even know what it means.
HUNT: Doesn't even know what it means. It's that piece of the approach that many Republicans want, to not want to see Trump take in this reset race that has clearly moved in Kamala Harris's favor.
NIKKI HALEY: And the one thing Republicans have to stop doing, quit whining about her. We knew it was going to be her. But the campaign is not going to win talking about crowd sizes, not what race Kamala Harris is. It's not going to win talking about whether she's dumb. It's not, you can't win on those things. The American people are smart. Treat them like they're smart.
. . .
HUNT: David Frum, you capture it this way in your latest piece in The Atlantic, you say that Trump's campaign, you call it the Trump campaign's please shut up phase. You write this. This is Trump's problem. For all his jibes at her intellect, Harris is managing the mystery appeal effectively, whereas Trump, who endlessly congratulates himself on his MIT professor uncle's brains, is fast arriving at the, will you please shut up phase of his political descent.
DAVID FRUM: Mike Murphy, the Republican campaign consultant, a decade ago or nearly a decade ago, said that asking Donald Trump to talk about policy is like teaching Charles Manson to foxtrot. He can manage a step or two, but then he's going to put a pencil in your eye, because he's Charles Manson.
And Donald Trump is Donald Trump. And as you just said a minute ago, I mean, it's astonishing. Of course, he's an insult comic. That's what he is. He doesn't know, he knows less about policy than anybody probably ever run for high office ever.
But what he does know is how to abuse and denigrate and humiliate and demean. That's what he does. If you don't like that, he's not your guy. And if he is your guy, don't pretend he's not like that—because he's like that.
