Trump seems to intuitively understand that these cheap shots don’t cost him with his base, which applauds his corrosive moxie. In 2020, the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg reported that behind the scenes, Trump called them “losers” and “suckers.” Debbie Dingell, also a Michigan Democrat supporting the Trump impeachment even though he had approved the lowering of flags for the late member of Congress.) And he’s never been sentimental about America’s war dead. (Trump was irate about Dingell’s wife, Rep.
John Dingell, then only 10 months dead, was “looking up” from hell. In 2019, Trump suggested that the former Michigan Democrat Rep. John McCain for months after he died in 2018. Trump continued to verbally assault political rival Arizona Republican Sen. The Powell incident doesn’t mark the first time Trump has dug up a corpse and danced it around to win the spotlight and score a few political points.
His grandstanding shouldn’t work after all this time, but it still does. Shouting through a megaphone to reach the cheap seats is also a technique he uses in court, too, filing ridiculous lawsuits against Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, to overturn election results or to punish his niece Mary Trump. Wicked mugging like this may look brainy and calculating, but it’s a good bet that, for Trump, swinging wildly when nobody pays attention to him has become his first instinct. Without Twitter, without chyron-to-chyron coverage from Fox News and without a pulsing presidential campaign to boost his messages, Trump depends on his shock-jock skills to elbow his way into the public sphere and onto the front page. But it did help explain something true about Trump. So the postmortem smear didn’t illuminate Powell. In one of the “statements” he issues in hopes it will be reposted on Twitter - from which he is permanently banned - and become Topic A in the media, Trump blistered Powell as a “classic RINO” who dragged us into the Iraq war and slagged the press for treating him in death “so beautifully.” Trump’s sulfurous elegy worked as designed, as the media chorus united to scold him for violating the no-speaking-ill-about-the-newly-dead conventions of modern manners and meta-analyses, like this one, assembled themselves to explain the former president’s strategy. In Trump’s formulation, Powell wasn’t a hero, he was a fool. In a classic bit of counterprogramming, Trump took the position that no other prominent commentator wanted to go near. Of course Donald Trump rained on the Roman triumph parade the political establishment and the combined houses of major media convened this week to honor the memory and accomplishments of warrior, diplomat and leading citizen Colin Powell on the occasion of his death on Monday. Jack Shafer is Politico ’s senior media writer.
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