MSNBC’s Joy Reid brought out all the usual pejoratives on Tuesday’s edition of The ReidOut as she sought to explain why anyone would support Donald Trump. Reid came to the conclusion that it has to be because they are a racist, sexist, tax-hating rich guys who claim to be a Christians while longing for the days when there were no child labor laws, and Trump is simply their “useful scary clown.”
After playing a clip of Trump’s “bloodbath” remarks where he was clearly talking about trade policy, Reid tried to make herself sound smart by using some Latin, “As dangerous and clearly deranged as Trump is, we have to start asking not just what's wrong with a society that produces so much support for this chaos theater, but also who is it that so badly wants Trump to be president, not just at the bottom, but at the top. There's a term in Latin, cui bono, it means ‘who benefits?’”
As Reid tells it, sure, there are those “angry masses who want to luxuriate in the punishment of migrants, women, trans kids, and black collegians,” but “the real beneficiaries would be the ones the late, great comedian George Carlin called the owners of the country, men of great wealth.”
These men allegedly “have long sought to return to a time where people like them didn't pay income taxes or face regulation over their businesses and didn't have to worry about labor unions, workers’ rights, or competitions from women or blacks. They could employ child labor or work their employees way past a 40-hour work week and reap unlimited profits and leave vast estates to their heirs tax free.”
Lumping in opposition to the estate tax with racism, sexism, child labor laws, or 40-hour work weeks is logically absurd, and no amount of Latin can change that.
Unfortunately, Reid was not done, “They could call themselves good Christians and never think twice about dirty words like diversity, history, accountability, or equity. These are the men behind organizations like Project 2025, the Claremont Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and whatever Leonard Leo is up to at any given time. Trump, in many ways, is just their useful scary clown.”
If anybody knows anything about being a useful clown, it is Joy Reid.
Here is a transcript for the March 19 show:
MSNBC The ReidOut
3/19/2024
7:43 PM ET
JOY REID: As dangerous and clearly deranged as Trump is, we have to start asking not just what's wrong with a society that produces so much support for this chaos theater, but also who is it that so badly wants Trump to be president, not just at the bottom, but at the top. There's a term in Latin, cui bono, it means “who benefits?”
Because beyond the angry masses who want to luxuriate in the punishment of migrants, women, trans kids, and black collegians, the real beneficiaries would be the ones the late, great comedian George Carlin called the owners of the country, men of great wealth, who have long sought to return to a time where people like them didn't pay income taxes or face regulation over their businesses and didn't have to worry about labor unions, workers’ rights, or competitions from women or blacks. They could employ child labor or work their employees way past a 40-hour work week and reap unlimited profits and leave vast estates to their heirs tax free.
They could call themselves good Christians and never think twice about dirty words like diversity, history, accountability, or equity. These are the men behind organizations like Project 2025, the Claremont Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and whatever Leonard Leo is up to at any given time. Trump, in many ways, is just their useful scary clown.
