Thursday, August 11, 2016

Trump is crazy in small ways, too

Note that Donald Trump isn't just crazy in big ways, like suggesting that gun nuts kill his political opponent. He's crazy in small ways, too. He's petty in small ways. He's unhinged in small ways, not just the big ways.

Here's a little more about that elevator incident in Colorado. This, too, shows what kind of person Donald Trump is:
Last month, Donald Trump thanked a Colorado fire marshal who rescued him and his entourage from a stalled elevator by accusing him of intentionally keeping supporters out of his rally.

What Trump didn't divulge was that a member of his entourage apparently fiddling with an elevator bypass key got the group stuck in that elevator in the first place, internal emails obtained by local TV station KMGH and published Wednesday revealed.

Yeah, this was even crazier than it seemed at first, since Donald Trump's 'entourage' apparently caused the problem in the first place!

I'll skip the details here - read the whole article if you want - because I want to include this part:
Though Trump and his companions were evacuated through the top elevator hatch by members of the fire department, the incident resulted in Trump arriving an hour late to his rally on the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs campus (UCCS).

Upon arrival, Trump proceeded to criticize the fire marshal for keeping some of his supporters out of the venue.

"We have thousands of beautiful, wonderful, great people outside, and we have in the room next door over 1,000 people,” Trump said at the rally. “They won't let them in. And the reason they won't let them in is because they don't know what the hell they're doing."

The emails obtained by KMGH indicated that the fire department, UCCS and Trump campaign all had been in communication about the exact number of people allowed in the main hall and overflow room. The limits allowed for 1,500 people in the event center and 1,000 in the overflow room.

Lacey expressed his frustration in an email to his friend.

"We had worked with UCCS of which we have a great relationship with and their security.. (University Cops)…. And our PD… and worked out the event loading on Thursday,” he wrote, as quoted by KGMH. “All was well.. until they wanted more people… Secret Service were butts too… wanted me to let more people in because he (Trump) was threatening to leave the room.. and they hadn’t secured the other location. I communicated to them that my problem was the public.. theirs was their candidate."

Lacey also wrote that it wasn’t his “problem” that the campaign allegedly “dispersed 10K on-line tickets for a 2500 load event.”

KMGH also obtained a contract the Trump campaign signed with UCCS promising to comply with the facility rules “prescribed by the Fire and Police Departments.”

Contacted by the news station about that new information, a Trump spokesperson said the campaign had no interest in keeping that particular story alive.

Yeah, I'll bet. Of course, with Donald Trump, no story stays alive for long, because he always follows up with something even crazier the next day.

And note that Trump didn't just accuse the fire marshal, Brett Lacey, of being incompetent (immediately after being rescued by the fire department from a screw up Trump's own people caused), but actually accused him of having a political motive for following the rules that Trump's people had agreed with ahead of time.
Within an hour, The Denver Post noted, the GOP presidential nominee was bashing the fire marshal at his rally.

“So I have to tell you this. This is why our country doesn’t work,” Trump said from the stage at his Friday rally, which began nearly an hour late as a result of the mishap. “We have plenty of space here. We have thousands of people outside trying to get in. And we have a fire marshal that said, ‘Oh, we can’t allow more people.’

"The reason they won’t let them in is because they don’t know what the hell they’re doing.

“Hey, maybe they’re a Hillary person. Could that be possible? Probably. I don’t think there are too many of them," Trump said.

Trump isn't just crazy in big ways, in dangerous ways. He's also crazy in the most petty ways you can imagine. And that's the guy Republicans have nominated to be our next president, with the control codes to the world's largest supply of nuclear weapons.

It's hard to imagine, isn't it?

2 comments:

Mary said...

This no longer surprises me and the people who support him don't surprise me either. I'm glad I'm old!

What luck for rulers that men do not think... Adolph Hitler


We are in the process of creating what deserves to be called the idiot culture. Not an idiot sub-culture, which every society has bubbling beneath the surface and which can provide harmless fun; but the culture itself. For the first time, the weird and the stupid and the coarse are becoming our cultural norm, even our cultural ideal.
Carl Bernstein, U.S. journalist. Guardian (London, June 3, 1992)



We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe.
Johann von Goethe






Bill Garthright said...

I'm not that pessimistic, Mary. Trump is new, but his supporters are not. We've always had them.

Indeed, we almost certainly have fewer of them today than we ever have. They are louder now, angrier (because they're losing), and all in the same political party (which gives them more power than they used to have, split between the parties).

Think about it. Even our conservative party doesn't support racial segregation or argue that black people shouldn't have equal rights (officially, at least).

Even our conservative party supports the right of women to vote and hold office. As much as they hate Hillary Clinton, they don't come right out and say that women shouldn't be president - the vast majority of them, at least.

We make progress. It's slow. It's frustrating. But we do progress, and those conservatives come with us, dragging their feet, kicking and screaming all the way.

The worst of human nature is certainly depressing. But it's nothing new. We've progressed despite that, and we'll continue to progress if we just keep fighting.