From Seven Days in May (1964), one of my very favorite movies: a speech by the President Jordan Lyman (Fredric March), as he is about to speak to Gen. James Mattoon Scott (Burt Lancaster), who planned to stage a coup and take over the government:
He’s not the enemy. Scott, the Joint Chiefs, even the very emotional, very illogical lunatic fringe, they're not the enemy. The enemy is an age. A nuclear age. It happens to kill man’s faith in his ability to influence what happens to him. And out of this comes a sickness, a sickness of frustration, a feeling of impotence, helplessness, weakness. And from this, this desperation we look for a champion in red, white and blue. Every now and then a man on a white horse rides by and we appoint him to be our personal god for the duration. For some men it was a Senator McCarthy. For others, it was a General Walker. And now it’s a General Scott.
We could rewrite this now, substituting an age of terrorism for a nuclear age, and substituting Donald Trump for General Scott.
Amen. Better than any of the other Repub contenders, Trump not only knows his audience -- ultra-conservative racists -- but he acknowledges and plays to them. He knows as president he couldn't get such extreme immigration legislation passed, but at this point he's just gaining support for his nomination and every time he says that racist crap folks just pile on his bandwagon because that's where we are as a country. More racist than fear of terrorism. I'm not sure Trump is a racist, but he's giving an Academy Award performance playing one because he knows there's a huge audience for that and they vote.
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