Donald Trump went to Kenosha yesterday over the strong objections of its Mayor and Wisconsin’s Governor, both Democrats (https://www.apocryphalpress.com/2020/08/31/as-usual-trump-says-all-the-wrong-things-about-portland-oregon-and-about-kenosha/).
We can only imagine how much money it cost to protect him, and his Band of Secret Service agents — while he was there. So who’s gonna pay for it? Wisconsin voters? Kenosha residents?
If Trump doesn’t win Wisconsin on November 3, he loses. Period.
He went there esssentialy for a photo-op with Law Enforcement, and they appreciated it.
Trump’s really good at photo-ops — e.g., when he walked over to St. John’s Episcopal Church, just off Lafayette Square — to hold somebody else’s Bible up — to show his occasionally devoted evangelical followers that he Means Business (he was, is, and always will be, a Businessman, and a businessman who had never been elected to anything, and who had never been a war hero, had never been a General, like Ike, or President Zachary Taylor).
Trump said it was a hard thing for Jacob Blake’s family that Jacob was killed, by Kenosha police, but that was about it.
And at his hastily arranged roundtable, two Black pastors — pastors for Jacob Blake’s mother — were asked by a reporter whether they think that Systemic Racism is an issue in police departments — but Trump wouldn’t let them answer.
Given that he Knows Everything, he answered the question: nope, no such thing, in his mind, as nasty nasty racism in police departments (https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/01/politics/donald-trump-pastors-systemic-racism/index.html).
So we here at AP were struck by the wisdom of presidential biographer Joseph Ellis, who has written excellent biographies of George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson.
Joseph Ellis has appropriately noted that Donald Trump is a
Demagogue — a creature that our Founding Fathers, including Benjamin Franklin — were very concerned about (https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/01/opinions/2020-election-would-terrify-founding-fathers-ellis/index.html).
As CNN relates it, in early September, 1787, “...a group of husky prisoners from the Phiadelphia jail were carrying Benjamin Franklin on a stretcher back to his quarters after attending the last session of the Constitutional Convention.
“The grandfather among the Founding Fathers was afflicted with a serious case of gout, but he attended every session during that steamy hot summer [note: no air conditioning — that only came about much later, because of American Ingenuity].
“A well-dressed Philadelphia matron spied America’s elder statesman and asked, ‘Mr. Franklin, what have you done?’
“ 'Given you a republic, if you can keep it.’
Ellis goes on to say that Donald Trump is a Demagogue.
Evidence of his demagoguery is everywhere — from his blatant retweeting of factless conspiracy theories — to his desperate attacks on Joe Biden’s mental acuity.
While Trump was in Kenosha, associate solitary reporters Mary Knowlton, a native of New London, Wisconsin — and Bob Dilworth, a Professor Emeritus of Economics at Edgewod College, in Madison, Wisconsin — covered his quick in and out in Wisconsin’s fourth largest city.
They asked him whether he would like them to make special arrangements for him to meet Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17-year old boy from nearby Illinois who took it upon himself to show up in Kenosha as a MilitiaMan to protect private property, and courteously shot to death two people, and seriously injured a third.
Rittenhouse, for reasons we have yet to understand, adores Donald Trump.
As our hard-core subscribers know, associate solitary reporters are gifted with special talents, among which are the ability to teleport themselves to wherever the action is.
“Of course I wanna meet Kyle,” Trump told them. “And give him the Presidential Medal of Freedom — the same thing I gave to my close personal friend Rush Limbaugh — ‘cause there’s nothing nearer and dearer to my heart than protecting and enhancing the Second Amendment — which, you see, to me, is a much more important part of the Constitution than the First Amendment.”
“And when the voters choose me to keep my job after January 20, I’m gonna tell Mitch McConnell to get legislation to me asap to repeal the First Amendment, and put in its place the Second Amendment.”
“After all, we in America are a freedom-loving people — and that includes the freedom to open carry weapons of mass destruction.”
“Without the support of my close personal friend at the NRA, Wayne LaPierre, I never woulda gotten this job in the first place."