The other night, when Trump was indicted and had his mugshot taken in Atlanta, Joy Ann Reid said this on MSNBC. I haven't heard this from anyone else, and I thought it was one of the more astute things I've heard about him:
Can we just for a moment ruminate on the irony of Donald Trump? What he always wanted to be was respected in Manhattan. What he wanted to be was a celebrity. The people he wanted to be around were rappers. He wanted to hang around Samuel L. Jackson and golf with him. He hung around Uncle Luke. He wanted to be around Hillary and Bill Clinton, he wanted them to come to his wedding. He wanted to be around famous people.
What he ended up with was a cult of the kind of people he's never respected. Donald Trump has never cared about the kind of working class, blue-collar white guy that adores him. He liked the fact that they would buy his stupid Trump steaks, he liked being able to grift them into buying his video game and his book...
But the kind of pathos of Donald Trump is he never actually achieved what he really wanted to be, which was a person that MSNBC viewers would respect and admire. He wanted to hang around Hollywood, for Hollywood to revere him. He wants to be respected and loved by the very people his voters loathe. He wants the "woke" people to love him. And all he's got now is a kind of twisted cult of personality that I think is not his goal.
Later in the evening, Reid remembered being a Black teenager in New York City when Trump called for the death penalty for the Central Park Five (the now Exonerated Five), which he, of course, has never apologized for. He (and Giuliani), she said, painted a target on the backs of her friends and relatives, and they did it with glee.
There should be more moments on television when Black people get to say what it's like to live in white supremacist America. When you get to see one, you realize how few there are.
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