Has Trump finally met his match?
Coarse, egotistical, undisciplined, and a disgrace to the dignity of the office:
"I think President Trump has met his match," Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib told Detroit WDIV-TV, after calling Trump a "m‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑."
Tlaib, the Democratic Socialist from Detroit, became almost as world-famous as House speaker Nancy Pelosi on just her first day in Congress, thanks to a video of her cussing like a gangbanger. The left found it precious, while lots of Republicans echoed Trump's comment that her behavior was disgraceful.
Someone with Trump's vocabulary probably should have just let it go by, and of course, someone's already dug up a video of Trump using that word toward China in 2011, although his audience, presumably, comprised grownups. Nor did he talk that way on Inauguration Day.
This is one area where Tlaib and Trump don't exactly match. It's widely reported that the freshman congresswoman's vulgar "promise" to impeach Trump was made to a crowd of MoveOn supporters. In fact, she was only repeating for that crowd – boasting about – what she had said to one of her own sons, both of whom are still children:
"And when your son looks at you and says, 'Mama, look, you won. Bullies don't win.' And I say, 'Baby, they don't. Because we're gonna go in there and we're gonna impeach the m‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑.'" (The Huffington Post chose to close the single quotation marks after "Baby, they don't," perhaps to make it appear that Tlaib used the MF-word only with the crowd and not with her son. It's clear from the video that Tlaib, who describes herself on her Twitter page as a "mama working for justice," was talking to her son.)
She justified it later by saying her deceased grandmother would have said it the same way. That, and talking that way is all part of being born and raised in the "incredibly beautiful, urban community" of Detroit, where "[w]e say colorful things in interesting ways." Her uncouth outburst was neither colorful nor interesting, especially since the left's been using cuss words to shock and disgust opponents since at least the early sixties. I also was born and raised in Detroit (it was a city then, not an "urban community"), as were both my parents. Believe me: I'm no stranger to the MF word, but I never heard it from my parents or grandparents, and they certainly didn't talk to me that way. Tlaib should leave Detroit out of it.
Like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, her sister in democratic socialism, Tlaib is a publicity-hungry grandstander, minus Ocasio-Cortez's video appeal. Tlaib, to publicize herself as a champion of the "movement," does things like getting herself arrested at minimum wage demonstrations and getting herself dragged out of the Detroit Economic Club after disrupting a Trump speech. Last week, she had a column in the Detroit Free Press calling for Trump's immediate impeachment, a subject on which she appears to know almost nothing. For one thing, she's repeatedly said her run for Congress was mainly "about electing the jury that will impeach [Trump]," emphasizing that she "would be a heck of a juror!" If she'd been elected to the U.S. Senate, the chamber that sits as jury in impeachment proceedings, rather than the House, she might actually be eligible. And aren't the best jurors those who don't prejudge a case?
No doubt, Trump's downside is that he can be an egotistical, ill-mannered loudmouth, which is why Republicans shouldn't be tsk-tsking over Tlaib's gutter talk. But being a loudmouth isn't what got Trump elected, and it's not what keeps him popular with his base: that would be promising the right things and then keeping those promises. On the flip-side, the left's current love affair with Rashida Tlaib – her upside – has nothing to do with her being a woman or one of the first two Muslims elected to Congress, but with her being an egotistical, ill mannered loudmouth who can get attention with a shocking attack on Trump using her kids as props.
No one cares, if hardly anyone knows, that Tlaib got where she is now with a great deal of support from Muslim Brotherhood fronts like CAIR, the Islamic Society of North America, and the Muslim Public Affairs Council. It's not so well known that, as Marina Medvin at Townhall describes it, Tlaib "stated that she supports a one-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that would eradicate Israel and replace it with an Islamic totalitarian state for the Palestinians." In short, as David Harsanyi writes, "[s]he's unhappy that the Jewish state exists." On Monday she attacked senators for introducing a pro-Israel bill aimed at the BDS movement, a movement Tlaib supports, tweeting that "[t]hey forgot what country they represent." She must have forgotten how she "cloaked herself in a Palestinian flag to celebrate her U.S. election night victory."
With Republican Senator Mitt Romney publicly attacking his party leader's character, a calculating Nancy Pelosi passing out holy cards with her own portrait on them, and an anti-Semitic Hamas-sympathizer showing off her crack house dialect – and all of them sworn to undo the 2016 presidential election – the 116th Congress is off to an inspiring start
T.R. Clancy looks at the world from Dearborn, Michigan. You can email him at trclancy@yahoo.com.