The Washington Posts‘s Greg Sargent has an interesting hypothesis that he proposes in a post called “We Should Thank Donald Trump For His Service To This Country.”
So Donald Trump isn’t running for president. But let it not be said that his flirtation with a presidential run had no consequences. In reality, Trump exits the race with a major accomplishment under his belt: He single-handedly did more damage to the right’s ongoing campaign to paint Obama as culturally suspect and vaguely alien than anyone else in American politics today.
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But Trump was committing what has to be one of the most catastrophic cases of bad timing in American political history. Trump succeeded in pushing the right’s narrative about Obama to an unsightly and extremely high profile denouement at precisely the same time that Obama and his national security team were putting the final touches on the plan to kill America’s number one terrorist foe — accomplishing one of this country’s principal national security objectives of the last decade.
Even putting aside the killing of Bin Laden, a high visibility huckster/reality TV star like Trump was the perfect agent to reveal the cheap fraudulence and vacuousness of birtherism and its underlying implications. But beyond that, you couldn’t have asked for a more striking and revelatory contrast than the sight of the media freak-show surrounding Trump’s bluster and Obama’s release of his long form certificate — followed only days later by the President somberly announcing to the nation that he had given the order to kill this country’s and the world’s most wanted man. We can’t fully appreciate yet just how much damage this has done to one of the right’s primary narratives about Obama. And it wouldn’t have happened at all without a showman of Trump’s ability to command media attention for literally any claim, no matter how insane or transparently self-serving.
I do agree with Sargent’s hypothesis here, but I don’t think the timing was accidental. Trump had been building a head of steam for about a month and had taken the lead in national polling right before Obama released his birth certificate. Obama knew that the bin Laden mission was coming soon and the WHCD speech was being prepared. The WHCD speech was absolutely devastating to Trump and the OBL mission sealed his fate. There was no coming back from that. I don’t know how much of this was coincidental timing but Obama’s not going to lose his reputation for playing 11-dimensional chess from this incident.
I also agree with Greg Sargent that the birther smack down should put a stop to the Obama-as-other attacks. Not that the RWNJs will stop but they will be pushed to the fringes where they belong. One thing the OBL killing and aftermath have taught me is how strongly invested the right was in the Obama is weak worldview. They flailed around for two weeks before finally deciding it was all about manly torture.
What do you think? Has the Trump smack down changed the effectiveness of Republican attacks on Obama?