Zeeshan Aleem: The GOP is acting like it doesn't know what Trump's call for 'protests' really means.
Instead, when it came to discussing Trump’s calls for protests, McCarthy’s remarks were head-spinning. “I don’t think people should protest this, no,”
. “I think President Trump, if you talk to him, he doesn’t believe in that either. I think the thing that you maywhen President Trump talks, when someone says that they can protest, he’d probably be referring to my tweet, ‘educate people about what’s going on.’ He’s not talking in a harmful way. And nobody should.”
There are a couple points to note here. First, McCarthy is preposterously claiming Trump “doesn’t believe” what he has literally called for on his personal social media platform. Telling the public that they’re “misinterpreting” Trump’s language is gaslight-level denialism.
The best way for the GOP to guard against destructive behavior is to admit Trump’s history of using vague, combative language to encourage such actions — and unequivocally condemn any use of it. Trump deliberately calibrates his language to incite his most hardcore supporters while maintaining an escape hatch of plausible deniability. We saw it when Trump promised supporters that Jan.
This is Trump’s whole game, and when McCarthy says that the media is misinterpreting Trump, McCarthy is helping him play it. The reality is you can’t disentangle Trump’s rhetoric from political militance at this juncture. The GOP can’t pretend to be guarding against the latter without strongly rejecting the former.Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for MSNBC Daily.
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