After two hours of Donald Trump saying that America’s great and he wants to make it greater so that everybody can have a great life and by the way here are some amazing heroes, former CIA officer Abigail Spanberger appeared on television to I don’t know what. You can watch it here, if you want to see an illustration of the metaphor about someone being “lost at sea.” Hit pause right at the 11:34 mark, because I want to say something about that moment before you watch it.
Spanberger said that Trump is corrupt, and that he’s destroying America, and that everything is horrible. If you don’t hate how horrible everything is right now, just wait: America will become more dark and cruel and miserable and rotten. It was a sad trombone sound effect come to life. Here’s something bad, and here’s something else bad, and also, here’s some more bad things. Trump equals darkness, a message she pounded home with roughly the subtlety of Creed doing that halftime show.
“His reckless trade policies.”
“Small businesses have suffered, farmers have suffered.”
“They’re making your life harder. They’re making your life more expensive. They’re even making it more difficult to see a doctor.”
Doom, doom, doom.
Also, as she laid out this catalog of darkness and horror, she smiled a lot. This starts to give you some hints about the substance of the message.
Now, did you hit pause right at 11:34? Go play that part. She tells us that George Washington warned us — this is another dark moment, a thing that’s meant to convey threat — about “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men rising to power.” As she finishes this dark, threatening message, she’s smiling again. Hit pause at 11:40 and stare at that image. I’ve used it to illustrate this post.
Scary message / happy face. As I just said about Gavin Newsom’s new campaign trail, Andrew Dice Clay character, Spanberger is pretending. She’s not righteously angry or scared and speaking about her deeply felt sense of threat. She’s casting around for something to hit an opponent with. Her demeanor doesn’t match her words, because she doesn’t mean any of it.
You could hate Donald Trump and see this point: Democrats are guessing, because they have no idea. They don’t know who they are, they don’t have a positive vision, they don’t have a message. They have doom, they have some more doom, and then they have some more scary doom. And, uh, big smile?
