Trump's "Racist Carnival" and The Sell Out Washington Post

First, an apology for not posting. The husband and I have taken many cruises on a number of cruise lines and never, ever have I had such absolutely horrible Internet service.  It has been so slow and unreliable, that it has been impossible to upload posts on Blogger, the platform I use, despite numerous efforts.  Trying to deal with office emails has been a similar nightmare.  Despite this, I have been following politics and events in the USA from Europe where most locals we talk with are appalled that Donald Trump is even a possible contender to return to the White House.  Most have sad that while America has made some grave mistakes in the past, overall it is viewed here as a positive force in the world and people ask "what has happened to America."  All of which brings me to Trump's Madison Square Garden rally where the only thing lacking was the crowd being dressed in KKK robes.  Politico (I can't give the hyperlink because of the crappy Internet) referred to Trump's rally as a "racist carnival"  and described it this way:

If Donald Trump loses on Nov. 5, the racist carnival he curated at Madison Square Garden could be remembered as the day that cost him this margin-of-error election.

As Kamala Harris visited a Puerto Rican restaurant in Pennsylvania, talking about her “Puerto Rican Opportunity Economy Task Force,” Trump was at Madison Square Garden, where Tony Hinchcliffe, the host of Kill Tony podcast, called the U.S. territory a “floating island of garbage.” It was a split screen the Harris campaign welcomed. Nearly half a million people of Puerto Rican descent live in battleground Pennsylvania, and lots more elsewhere were certainly absorbing the headlines.

And Harris won the day.

Trump entered Sunday with all the makings of a win: . . . . Even Melania Trump, who rarely appears with Trump on the trail, showed up.

Instead, speakers trafficked in racist and vulgar rhetoric. Punchlines targeted Black and Jewish people. Latinos “love making babies, there’s no pulling out, they cum inside, just like they do to our country,” Hinchcliffe said. David Rem, a Trump friend, called Harris "the anti-Christ.” Radio host Sid Rosenberg spoke of "fucking illegals." Another speaker suggested Harris had “pimp handlers.”

The campaign tried to beat back the comparison that Tim Walz drew earlier in the day to the infamous 1939 Nazi rally at the same venue. They even posted a photo of a Holocaust survivor in attendance.

But there was a lot of racism on the stage, while outside the Garden, a projection from Democrats read: “Trump praised Hitler.”

The rally — which felt in some ways like a Republican National Convention rerun, including some of the same speakers — seemed to backfire. Blowback was not only swift but bipartisan. Rep. Anthony P. D'Esposito, also of Puerto Rican descent, and one of the New York Republicans Trump's visit was supposed to boost, posted to X, “Stay on message.” Republican Rep. María Elvira Salazar of Florida called Hinchcliffe’s joke “racist,” while Republican Sen. Rick Scott of Florida said the joke was “not funny” and “not true.”

Trump’s campaign said Hinchcliffe’s “joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign.” Left untouched by the campaign, though: any of the former president's own long record of racist, anti-immigrant rhetoric.

But it all looked like a fiasco for the former president.

Back in Philadelphia, even before the rally, Harris subtly shifted her cautious tone — no longer was she talking about herself as an “underdog.” Instead, she said, "the momentum is with us."

Sadly, I have concluded that vile and open racism is what attacks the MAGA core - including a number of Republican "friends" and acquaintances - to Trump. 

Meanwhile other despicable billionaires were spiking editorial pages that would otherwise have endorsed Kamala Harris, including the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post where the publications' owners seemingly struck deals either to line their pockets or avoid retribution should Trump somehow win.   Like many others, I have cancelled by subscription to the Washington Post and will likely cancel my Amazon Prime account to send my own "f*ck you" to Jeff Bezos.  Even the Post notes the blowback:

For a time this fall, the mood in The Washington Post’s newsroom showed signs of lightening.

The buyouts of some 120 journalists at the end of 2023 were in the rearview mirror. Stories about the new publisher’s alleged involvement in a British newspaper phone-hacking scandal earlier in his career, an episode in which he’d vigorously denied wrongdoing, had fallen off the front pages. The paper was breaking news with its coverage of a once-in-a-lifetime presidential campaign, instead of being the subject of news stories.

And, crucially, subscription numbers, which had tumbled since the end of the Trump administration, were ticking up ever so slightly.

That momentum came to a halt over the weekend, after Friday’s surprise announcement by Publisher William Lewis that The Post’s editorial section would cease its long tradition of endorsing a presidential candidate — a decision he made public just 11 days before Election Day.

The outrage at the decision has been swift — from Post readers, journalism leaders, politicians and dismayed employees. A cancellation movement swept through social networks. Instead of using an internal analytics tool to check traffic to their own stories, some Post journalists used it to chart the soaring number of subscribers visiting the customer account page that allows them to cancel their subscriptions.

On social media, sharing screenshots of Post subscription cancellation confirmations became more than just a thing. It was a political statement primarily coming from the American left, enraged by reports in The Post and elsewhere that the newspaper’s editorial writers had drafted an endorsement of the Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, over her Republican opponent, former president Donald Trump.

The statements were also coming from within The Post. On Sunday, Michele Norris — the former NPR anchor and best-selling author who had been a Post reporter early in her career — became the second opinion contributor at the newspaper to resign in protest, following Friday’s resignation by contributing editor and columnist Robert Kagan.

The decision to end endorsements was made by owner Jeff Bezos, according to reporting by The Post and other news organizations.

Norris found that . . . . move is “a terrible mistake” in an “election where core democratic principles are at stake.”

Since Friday’s announcement, Lewis has sought to tamp down speculation that Bezos’s decision was meant to help Trump.

Within hours of Lewis’s announcement, 11 Post opinion columnists had co-signed a column that was published on the paper’s website condemning the decision as “an abandonment of the fundamental editorial convictions of the newspaper that we love. This is a moment for the institution to be making clear its commitment to democratic values, the rule of law and international alliances, and the threat that Donald Trump poses to them.” By Sunday, the list of co-signers had grown to 19.

One can only hope that the cancellation movement grows.  As for Lewis' pitiful explanations, they are consistent with the decline in the Post under his leadership.  He needs to go.