Eric’s turn
These Trumps. Eric this time.
Eric Trump was talking up his father on Fox News on Wednesday morning when he was lobbed a friendly prompt from one of the network’s anchors.
During a segment that touched on Democrats’ calls for impeachment as well as the current success of the economy, “Fox & Friends” host Steve Doocy brought up the perception created by both Bob Woodward’s new book and the New York Times’s anonymous op-ed last week that the Trump administration is in chaos.
But they sure are getting a lot done, Doocy smarmed.
Trump then launched into an attack in the second person about someone who writes a “sensational nonsense book” and is rewarded with a CNN appearance, before making a remark that many interpreted as a racist dog whistle.
“It will mean you sell three extra books, you make three extra shekels,” he said. “I think people read through this. I know people read through this.”
Well that’s just normal US slang for money.
Nah it isn’t.
Although it is the word for the currency in Israel and an occasionally used slang term for money in the United States, it is also a common anti-Semitic trope on white-supremacist sites and in message boards threads about Jewish conspiracies, greed and supposed control of industries such as Hollywood, finance, media and publishing.
But surely Eric Trump doesn’t hang around on white-supremacist sites and message board threads about Jewish conspiracies, greed and supposed control of industries such as Hollywood, finance, media and publishing.
My instant impression was that he made a hash of referring to ‘pieces of silver’; i.e., that he was ham-fistedly referring to Woodward as some sort of Judas. But that doesn’t actually make any sense, since Woodward couldn’t’ve been seen as an apostle who could’ve betrayed Big Daddy T. I suppose he could’ve elided Woodward and the anonymous author of the article (whom I still maintain ultimately could well be Trump himself, or one of his canny allies, as a pretext for a purge of non-loyalists), which would give that excuse some veneer of credibility.
But, ultimately, such is the nature of dogwhistles; send the well-meaning and good-faith critics on a rhetorical snipe hunt while the intended audience understands immediately. Benjamine Wittes was a recent victim of this same sort of tactic during Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination—no single dogwhistle sniped him, but his pre-existing relationship with Kavvie blinded him to the dark undercurrents and balls-out hypocrisy on display during that process for anyone who cared to look, and he wound up publicly quitting Twitter over it. (Of course, I can’t really blame him, currently on my third self-imposed Twitter hiatus as I am.)
Who let the completely brainless son on tv?