If you go back to the same rhetorical well over and over again, you’ll end up with less and less water each time. Someone apparently hasn’t told Democrats about this bedrock political reality.
For instance, take the claim that Donald Trump is an arrant racist. Please. This was suffering from diminishing returns on Sept. 9, 2016, when then-Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Rodham Clinton coined the infamous phrase “basket of deplorables” during a campaign speech.
You’d think that, after what happened there, Democrats would have learned a lesson. But, if they learned lessons, they wouldn’t be Democrats — which is why President Joe Biden’s campaign, almost eight years since “basket of deplorables” had its debut, is still trying to make “Trump be racist” happen, in spite of all available evidence that it’s not going to happen.
The latest attempt came via a video released Monday by the official Biden-Harris HQ account on TikTok, featuring a smarmy millennial/Gen Z’er of color trotting a claim by a former producer on “The Apprentice” that Trump used the n-word on tape.
According to the New York Daily News, the producer, Bill Pruitt, said he didn’t come out until now because his non-disclosure agreement recently expired. However, he also has a new tell-all book coming out (quelle surprise!) in what just so happens to be an election year (quelle surprise!²). I’ll leave the credibility of that one to your summary judgment.
But wait, there’s less! To buttress this claim, the Biden-Harris HQ went to “Donald Trump’s own former assistant” … “Apprentice” villain and tabloid fixture Omarosa Manigault Newman, who claimed in her own tell-all back in 2018 that she knew of a recording where he said the racial slur.
Despite the fact that Manigault Newman never mentioned hearing the tape for herself in her memoir, according to NPR, she claimed she heard the tape from some guy out in Los Angeles, as you can suss out from the short clip from “Meet the Press” included in the TikTok video.
“Anyone notice a pattern here?” our smarmy millennial-ish guide asked, before claiming, “This is the same man who called to execute innocent black men.”
The rest does not get any better, I can assure you:
@bidenhqwow…♬ original sound – Biden-Harris HQ
This would practically be laughable if the attempt to vitiate the racial climate of the American electorate over Donald Trump’s purported “deplorability” wasn’t a serious glimpse into the lengths that the Biden-Harris campaign is willing to go to in order to ensure that President Joe Biden keep his senescent behind in the Oval Office chair.
Thankfully, the comments section revealed why this wasn’t going to work.
Firstly, as for the supposed n-word tape, one response summed up why this is a non-starter: “Why don’t they post it?”
Well, because after nearly a decade of searching for it to discredit Trump — and they’ve searched for this about as hard as they’ve searched for the so-called “pee tape,” in case you’ve forgotten — it hasn’t turned up.
Are we to expect that NBC and the production team for “The Apprentice,” which is likely lousy with liberals, shielded Donald Trump from the tape being released? Of course not. Massive assertions posited without evidence can just as easily be dismissed without evidence, as well.
And, for the most part, the responses indicated that this wasn’t what the vast majority of American voters — yes, even those checking out the Biden-Harris HQ on woke social-media black hole TikTok — were worried about, as well.
“Why is my gas more expensive than my phone?” one respondent asked.
“Why are groceries so expensive?” asked another.
“Why is my rent expensive?” asked a third.
“Why can’t a find a job as masters prepared person?” one snarky commenter said.
“I can’t even afford a McNugget,” another noted.
Is inflation the most significant issue in the campaign?
And one user put it bluntly in just two words: “we’re broke.”
These were the bulk of the comments under the video, as well, not just a few cherry-picked to make things look bad. In other words, the jig is up, even on millennial-friendly tech platforms that should be firmly in the Biden campaign’s corner.
It’s yet another reminder that, in the nine years since Donald Trump took the escalator ride down to announce his candidacy, the Democrats have thrown every smear tactic in the book at him, particularly in regards to race.
It didn’t work even in 2016 and 2020, when most people weren’t dealing with soaring inflation and gargantuan piles of government debt. Now that we are, the racist card is going to be even less effective. When even the TikTok crowd turns against you, it’s a sign that it’s well past time to move onto substantive issues.
