the non-stop logorrheic rainbow of horror constantly shooting from Trump’s mouth........ all of this was just one more step in the long, absurdist slog of the Russianization of this campaign......
When Trump and his acolytes accuse protestors of being well-organized, paid saboteurs, I hear echoes of Kremlin television accusing people who came out in Moscow’s Bolotnaya Square to protest for democracy in 2011 of working for the U.S. State Department. When Trump lies and injects conspirological plots into the mainstream, when I hear his supporters echo them back to me as gospel because “it’s on the Internet,” I feel like I’m back in Russia, listening to people tell me about George Soros and his nefarious plots. And then I hear about George Soros from Trump supporters who tell me that he has both created the Black Lives Matter movement and hacked American voting machines.
When Trump talks about regulating the “dishonest” press or about jailing Clinton, these echoes become deafening.
But when Trump questions the peaceful transfer of power, when he, essentially, says that he will only accept the election results if he wins, when his supporters talk of assassinating Clinton if she becomes president, and of blood flowing in the streets if Trump doesn’t, the moment I’m transported to is not a Russian one, but an American one.
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