The Favor Trump Has Done for the Politically Correct

The controversy surrounding ugly and profane remarks Donald Trump allegedly made in a meeting with a bipartisan group of senators has had a longer half-life than the average Trump-linked contretemps, perhaps because so many appear willing to throw themselves under its treads.

When the scandal broke, the usual suspects immediately volunteered as tribute in defense of Trump’s honor. Many claimed that the president’s alleged assertion—that certain equatorial regions of the world were blighted cesspits—was an empirical fact. The president, they averred, was guilty only of describing these fetid nations with his trademark “authenticity.” Then, when Trump emerged about 14 hours after the scandal broke to insist he had never made the comments attributed to him, his defenders pivoted on a dime and echoed the president’s assertion.

This scandal might not have damaged the credibility of so many of Trump’s allies if the White House had not responded to it with such lethargy. At first, the White House press office didn’t even bother denying claims made by the meeting’s attendees. According to reporting in outlets like the New York Times and by conservative columnists like Erick Erickson, Trump initially did not see much of a scandal at all. “His base loved what he said,” the Times dispatch read, “a refrain he repeated in phone calls over the holiday weekend.” Finally, after nearly a week, the administration’s clean-up crew got around to defending their principal in a reasonably convincing way. Their line of defense will, however, have lasting and damaging consequences for the conservative movement.

“Look, no one here is going to pretend like the president is always politically correct. He isn’t,” said Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders. “He tells things like they are sometimes, and sometimes he does use tough language.”

Do Republicans recognize what an irresponsible mishandling of their agenda these comments represent?
The president is credibly accused of contending that skilled immigrants primarily originate from European nations like Norway and, perhaps, East Asia. They do not come from places like Haiti or Sub-Saharan Africa. This is factually inaccurate; these countries produce more assimilative and better-educatedimmigrants than Europe does, and the nations the president derided as “s***holes” are usually more enthusiastic American values than are their European counterparts. It’s no coincidence that Trump enjoys some of the strongest approval ratings abroad in places like Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania, and Ghana.

There is a word that describes the assumption that skilled and assimilative immigrants can only come from certain countries, and it’s not “un-PC.” Compared to the outright racial hostility underlying the sentiments expressed by Donald Trump in what amounts to only his latest racially-tainted controversy, the stuff we used to consider “politically correct” is downright quaint.

As Robert Novak demonstrated in his 1995 essay on political correctness in American newsrooms, offenses against PC dictates were once limited to phrases like “Indian summer,” “Welshed on a bet,” and going “Dutch” on a check. More recently, descriptive phrases like “radical Islamic terrorism” and even gender-specific pronouns are under attack. When conservatives objected to PC culture, they did so in defense of clarity and concision. Too often, politically correct language obscured and obfuscated under the pretense of being both precise and civil.

This is why what Donald Trump and his Praetorians are doing by appropriating anti-PC crusaderism in defense of his unenlightened racial effrontery is so reckless. In pursuit of a quick and painless way to get the president out of the latest mess he’s created for himself, Trump’s defenders are blurring the lines between opposition to censorious liberal culture warriors and bigotry. Trump is not winning any converts to his crusade; this White House preaches to the converted. In the end, the president’s conduct may instead ratify political correctness as a necessary check on those inclined toward racial antagonism. If Trump’s fans think “telling it like it is” amounts to presuming people cannot contribute meaningfully to the American bottom line due only to their places of birth, they’ll soon find that Americans have no appetite for that kind of candor.

No amount of evidence will convince pro-Trump partisans of their totem’s flaws. The president’s historically low approval ratings despite a strong economy at home and peace abroad haven’t done it. The slaughter of Republicans in the off-year elections didn’t do it. The drubbing Republicans are about to take in the midterm elections won’t do it. For them, Trump’s political success is self-justifying. He threw out all the rules, ran what should have been a radioactive campaign, abandoned the GOP’s post-2012 prescriptions, and won. Nothing will convince them of the error of Trump’s present course until it is far too late to mitigate the damage.

If one of Trump’s legacies is to taint anti-PC culture with the stain of racism, it will do American discourse a great disservice. Trump will have demonstrated to a critical mass of persuadable Americans that the PC crowd was right all along; they were all that kept the hateful bigotry of a bygone age from reemerging from the shadows. But the costs of the Trump era will only become clear in hindsight, when they are intractable 
features of the political landscape. Today, there are tax cuts to celebrate.

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/politics-ideas/favor-trump-done-politically-correct/

interesting article
while I largely agree
I think it was already the way before Trump, but Trump is cementing the link between racists and anti-PC and showing that they are basically the same people.

The truly right-wing mind is eager to submit to someone who seems like a strong authority figure, and they don't take much convincing. It goes back a long time in America, to at least the Reagan era (and probably before that).

They said Obama was weak because to them, he was -- he rarely talked tough and even when he did, he stayed pretty low-key and understated about it. (Of course, this was to avoid being taken as anything besides utterly reasonable, but the true right-wing America doesn't have much concern for the non-America parts of the world.)

Besides Trump, I can list just off the top of my head, Sarah Palin, Joe the Plumber, George W. Bush, Carrie Prejean and Reagan himself as deeply flawed public figures or leaders who the American right at least briefly decided were their new hero.

All Trump has to do to lose them is prove, convincingly, that he hurts their movement (whatever that might be) more than he soothes them, and they'll put him in front of the firing squad. Just like how they never mention any of those other former heroes today, besides Reagan.

Ben Reilly wrote:The truly right-wing mind is eager to submit to someone who seems like a strong authority figure, and they don't take much convincing. It goes back a long time in America, to at least the Reagan era (and probably before that).

They said Obama was weak because to them, he was -- he rarely talked tough and even when he did, he stayed pretty low-key and understated about it. (Of course, this was to avoid being taken as anything besides utterly reasonable, but the true right-wing America doesn't have much concern for the non-America parts of the world.)

Besides Trump, I can list just off the top of my head, Sarah Palin, Joe the Plumber, George W. Bush, Carrie Prejean and Reagan himself as deeply flawed public figures or leaders who the American right at least briefly decided were their new hero.

All Trump has to do to lose them is prove, convincingly, that he hurts their movement (whatever that might be) more than he soothes them, and they'll put him in front of the firing squad. Just like how they never mention any of those other former heroes today, besides Reagan.

Both wings want authority figures. That's why both wings are statists. The left loves rules limiting what they can do and what they can own.

The only difference is the kind of things we are talking about.

The right doesn't want people smoking pot, the left doesn't want them owning guns. The right doesn't want gay people getting married. The left wants to force people to serve gay people. It's always about force with the left and the right.

Maddog wrote:

Ben Reilly wrote:The truly right-wing mind is eager to submit to someone who seems like a strong authority figure, and they don't take much convincing. It goes back a long time in America, to at least the Reagan era (and probably before that).

They said Obama was weak because to them, he was -- he rarely talked tough and even when he did, he stayed pretty low-key and understated about it. (Of course, this was to avoid being taken as anything besides utterly reasonable, but the true right-wing America doesn't have much concern for the non-America parts of the world.)

Besides Trump, I can list just off the top of my head, Sarah Palin, Joe the Plumber, George W. Bush, Carrie Prejean and Reagan himself as deeply flawed public figures or leaders who the American right at least briefly decided were their new hero.

All Trump has to do to lose them is prove, convincingly, that he hurts their movement (whatever that might be) more than he soothes them, and they'll put him in front of the firing squad. Just like how they never mention any of those other former heroes today, besides Reagan.

Both wings want authority figures. That's why both wings are statists. The left loves rules limiting what they can do and what they can own.

The only difference is the kind of things we are talking about.

The right doesn't want people smoking pot, the left doesn't want them owning guns. The right doesn't want gay people getting married. The left wants to force people to serve gay people. It's always about force with the left and the right.  

Bullsheit. The RW represents special interests. The LW represents the general interest. Look at this new Tax Act, supported by Republicans, opposed by Democrats.

They lowered taxes on the rich, and raised taxes on the common folk to pay for it.

Original Quill wrote:

Maddog wrote:

Both wings want authority figures. That's why both wings are statists. The left loves rules limiting what they can do and what they can own.

The only difference is the kind of things we are talking about.

The right doesn't want people smoking pot, the left doesn't want them owning guns. The right doesn't want gay people getting married. The left wants to force people to serve gay people. It's always about force with the left and the right.  

Bullsheit.  The RW represents special interests.  The LW represents the general interest.  Look at this new Tax Act, supported by Republicans, opposed by Democrats.

They lowered taxes on the rich, and raised taxes on the common folk to pay for it.

Most Americans will get a raise. Even the common folk.

Less taxes, less force.

Maddog wrote:

Original Quill wrote:

Bullsheit.  The RW represents special interests.  The LW represents the general interest.  Look at this new Tax Act, supported by Republicans, opposed by Democrats.

They lowered taxes on the rich, and raised taxes on the common folk to pay for it.

Most Americans will get a raise. Even the common folk.

Less taxes, less force.  

Bullsheit. They just gave out candy for a couple of years only. Even at that, they left carried interest and took away deductions for state and local taxes, mortgage interest, and student loans. They still left a bulge in the deficit to the tune of $1.5-billion.

Their fookin' liars, and you fall for it.

Original Quill wrote:

Maddog wrote:

Both wings want authority figures. That's why both wings are statists. The left loves rules limiting what they can do and what they can own.

The only difference is the kind of things we are talking about.

The right doesn't want people smoking pot, the left doesn't want them owning guns. The right doesn't want gay people getting married. The left wants to force people to serve gay people. It's always about force with the left and the right.  

Bullsheit.  The RW represents special interests.  The LW represents the general interest.  Look at this new Tax Act, supported by Republicans, opposed by Democrats.

They lowered taxes on the rich, and raised taxes on the common folk to pay for it.

How about this Right winger?

Seems to side with Ben on some things here?

Oh his quote on George Orwell is wrong mind. He never said that.

Good speech though

Maddog wrote:

Ben Reilly wrote:The truly right-wing mind is eager to submit to someone who seems like a strong authority figure, and they don't take much convincing. It goes back a long time in America, to at least the Reagan era (and probably before that).

They said Obama was weak because to them, he was -- he rarely talked tough and even when he did, he stayed pretty low-key and understated about it. (Of course, this was to avoid being taken as anything besides utterly reasonable, but the true right-wing America doesn't have much concern for the non-America parts of the world.)

Besides Trump, I can list just off the top of my head, Sarah Palin, Joe the Plumber, George W. Bush, Carrie Prejean and Reagan himself as deeply flawed public figures or leaders who the American right at least briefly decided were their new hero.

All Trump has to do to lose them is prove, convincingly, that he hurts their movement (whatever that might be) more than he soothes them, and they'll put him in front of the firing squad. Just like how they never mention any of those other former heroes today, besides Reagan.

Both wings want authority figures. That's why both wings are statists. The left loves rules limiting what they can do and what they can own.

The only difference is the kind of things we are talking about.

The right doesn't want people smoking pot, the left doesn't want them owning guns. The right doesn't want gay people getting married. The left wants to force people to serve gay people. It's always about force with the left and the right.  

@ Maddog :

You're only looking at the extremes of both sides with your inflexible "black and white" statements there...

While ignoring that 70 -- >> 80% between the centre-left and centre-right, and the moderates in the middle, who are mainly interested in getting on with their lives, taking care of business, and more often than not with as little harm as possible..

Oh, and the extreme "dry" and nasty right-wing cabal really is a bigger and nastier gang than those extreme left-wing whackos.