Open Thread, May 6: Approaching the Event Horizon

Sorry for the interruption, I had a lot of gardening to catch up on. I also developed a theory that Donald Trump is a black hole of such massive proportions that reality itself is being stretched apart as it approaches his event horizon. The laws of political physics don’t apply anymore.

Today’s madness included another Rudy Giuliani TV interview in which he said half of what he said was rumors, and he only half-knows what he’s talking about. I haven’t checked his math, but so far his two cents’ worth hasn’t been worth face value.

Josh Marshall always digs up interesting nuggets, like this one about Trump hiring an Israel-based spy operation to find some sort of damaging information on Obama administration officials who negotiated the treaty with Iran. It’s the same firm Harvey Weinstein used to dig up dirt on the women who threatened to talk about him.

Coal baron Don Blankenship, West Virginia’s call and raise to Alabama’s Roy Moore, is supposedly rallying in the polls ahead of tomorrow’s Senate primary election, triggering a spending frenzy by backers of the two closer-to-sane GOP candidates. Good luck with that. Everybody in the state already knows Blankenship purposely evaded safety laws but did only a year on a misdemeanor conviction after coal dust exploded at Upper Big Branch and killed 29 miners. You can’t assassinate the character of a man who has none.

Uncle Joe Biden got prominent play in the New York Times story about the stream of visitors to John McCain’s retreat outside Sedona. You probably heard that he doesn’t want Trump at his eventual memorial service, but I didn’t know until this morning that he asked Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama to eulogize him.

Finally, especially for jason330: Leonard Pitts, the best newspaper columnist in the country, explains why he’s done with trying to understand Trump voters.

[A] nice lady who wrote me a nice email in which she spoke about the need to try to understand Donald Trump’s supporters. “We need to not close ourselves off to how the other side thinks.” It’s a sentiment I hear a lot from progressives, and it bespeaks a great generosity of spirit. But I couldn’t disagree more.

Is there really so much left to “understand?” Not from where I sit. Long before Trump even existed as a political force, many of us noted with alarm the rise of a backlash among right wingers deeply angry and profoundly terrified by the writing on the demographic wall. Said writing foretold — and for that matter, still foretells — the declining preeminence of white, Christian America. As several studies now show, a sense of alarmed displacement among white, Christian America is the soil from which the weed of Trumpism grew.

No compromise is possible here for a simple reason Trump followers seem to understand better than the rest of us: You can’t compromise with demography. But what you can do is seize the levers of power and change the rules of the game in hopes of blunting the force of that tide. That — again, look at the studies — is what Trump supporters elected him to do.

So while, it is admirable to think “understanding” can fix this country, it is also naive. Progressives should ask themselves: When’s the last time you heard any Trump supporters talking about the need to understand you? You haven’t — and that ought to tell you something.