Trump isn’t even sworn in yet, and it seems that John Lewis seems to have already figured out how to beat him at his own game. In a magazine interview just days before Martin Luther King day, Lewis said: “I don’t see this president-elect as a legitimate president.”
Lewis was referring in particular to the role that Russia played in hacking our election, but I would like to think that he had correctly predicted what Trump’s response would be. That response, no surprise, was to attack and belittle John Lewis.
Of course in civil rights circles, attacking and belittling John Lewis is kind of like attacking and belittling Mahatma Gandhi or Martin Luther King himself. To anyone who actually knows anything about the record of the person in question, the attacker just ends up looking like an idiot.
I realize that we are long past the point where Donald Trump cares whether he comes across as an idiot. After all, this is the guy who just days ago equated the right of the Press to ask him questions with Hitler.
[Note: Rereading the above paragraph, I am amazed that we live in a world where something like that actually happened. Before this year, if you were to read a political novel in which the author had a fictional president-elect compare the fourth estate to Adolph Hitler just because reporters insisted on asking him questions, you would probably have just rolled your eyes and stopped reading.]
Still, Donald Trump saying of John Lewis (of all people) that he is “All talk, talk, talk – no action or results,” just makes Trump look like he has no idea what is going on in the world around him.
I wonder whether Lewis has finally found the proper strategy to combat Trump: Since Trump will reflexively attack anyone who pokes at him, without exercising any judgment or moderation, his opponents can easily goad him into attacking ever more inappropriate targets, leaving him looking like a more irrelevant fool with every tweet.
Trump will no doubt keep piping up with those weird nasty little comments, spraying venom in random directions. But after a while, very few people will still be listening.
Not caring whether he looks like an idiot is actually Donald Trump’s super power.
Sure it is, but does it give him infinite license? Is it possible that he will get overconfident and go too far? What if he says or does something so offensive that even his supporters won’t go there with him?
I am not saying it will happen. He might actually be impervious to self immolation.
But it is a question worth asking.
All tweet, tweet, tweet – no action or results