Trump On Judge Curiel: It’s Worse than You Think

UPDATE: Less than 24 hours after I originall posted this, Trump chillingly validated my analysis. From Politico.

Donald Trump escalated his attacks on the federal judge presiding over a civil fraud lawsuit against Trump University on Thursday, questioning his impartiality in handling the case because his Mexican heritage is “an inherent conflict of interest.

Less than six hours after securing the endorsement of House Speaker Paul Ryan, the presumptive Republican nominee said that U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel had “an absolute conflict” due to his ethnic background, adding, “I’m building a wall. It’s an inherent conflict of interest,” according to a interview in The Wall Street Journal.

In other words, Trump is arguing that no American of Mexican descent can be impartial.

When Donald Trump decided to turn his Orange Opprobium to Judge Gonzalo Curiel (the judge presiding over the lawsuit against Trump University), much of the reaction focused on Trump’s decision to call His Honor “Mexican.”

That led to some quick refutation – at least in the eyes of many. Reason has a good example of the conventional reaction.

“It is a disgrace. It is a rigged system,” Trump said about the class-action lawsuit currently unfolding against Trump University in federal court. “I have a judge who is a hater of Donald trump. He’s a hater. His name is Gonzalo Curiel. And he is not doing the right thing.” In fact, Trump told the crowd, Judge Curiel “happens to be, we believe, Mexican.”

Trump also attacked the federal courts for allowing the civil suit against him to proceed in the first place. “I am getting railroaded by a legal system, and frankly they should be ashamed,” Trump declared. “But we will come back in November. Wouldn’t that be wild if I am president and come back and do a civil case?”

This is vile stuff. Not only is Trump peddling racist conspiracy garbage about a federal judge (Curiel was born and raised in Indiana), Trump is using the bully pulpit to try to intimidate the courts to rule in his favor.

Damon Root (author of the Reason piece) echoed the opinion of many that Trump was claiming the judge was not born in America. I don’t think that’s what Trump meant, however, which means he won’t stop using the line.

More importantly, Trump was doing something far worse than discussing the judge’s birthplace.

Given that it’s 2016, most analysts, reporters, and pundits can be forgiven the instinct of imposing 21st Century interpretations on Trump’s utterings. The problem with that is more obvious for those of us who have known of him since the 1980s: Trump is very much a 20th Century figure – not just the policies, but the mannerisms, the lingo, and everything else. I noted this in a post several months ago, but John Podhoretz (New York Post) did a much better job of it last week.

It’s remarkable how his mannerisms, his speech patterns and his general mien precisely reflect the ring-a-ding-ding heyday of Frank and Sammy and Dean — the hippest cats in show business, circa 1962.

Like them, he’s not Jewish but speaks an English comically inflected by Yiddish — which made sense at the time, as the Rat Pack took over the world during the American-Jewish cultural moment when Jewish writers and performers were suddenly as cool as Lin-Manuel Miranda is right now.

When Trump, speaking in front of massive audiences in Indiana, rolled his eyes and dismissed his rival by saying, “That Ted Cruz — oy,” he wasn’t reading words written for him by his Jewish son-in-law; he was channeling Francis Albert.

Even the insult comedy he brought into American political discourse seems to date back to a Rat Pack show at the Sands — to Joey Bishop or Don Rickles, the only two men ever allowed to tease Sinatra about his mob ties. Trump has some of those too.

Or, in Podhoretz’s short version from the same column, “Everything about the man screams 1963.”

Now, back then, the myriad of ethnic groups that make up New York City didn’t hyphenate themselves. There was no need to attach “American” to their descriptors. So they were “Irish”, “Italian”, “Polish”, “Puerto Rican”, “Cuban”…

…and, yes, “Mexican.”

So when Trump goes off on someone being “Mexican”, he’s not throwing up a conspiracy theory about birthplaces. He’s claiming that whole swaths of Americans with a similar ethnic background should be disqualified from the public square.

This not the nativism that has angered Shaun Kenney and others here at BD, even though it gets misinterpreted as such because Trump speaks in a 20th Century dialect few recognize today.

This is something far, far worse. It is rank racialism of the first order – if not outright racism itself.

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