Losers? Suckers? Terrorists? Anarchists? Meet the Real Folks Behind Trump’s Insults

But is it so hard to believe? Really?

In nearly four years in office, and on the campaign trail before that, Trump has smashed through one norm after another. He mocked the appearance of former GOP presidential candidate Carly Fiorina, saying “Look at that face! Would anyone vote for that?” He referred to onetime White House aide Omarosa Manigault Newman as a “dog.”

He’s called Mexican migrants “rapists.” He’s invented a playground nickname for each of his political rivals. He’s used a racial epithet to refer to Sen. Elizabeth Warren. He once mocked a disabled New York Times reporter.

Trump, who has never served, trashed former Defense Secretary James Mattis as “the world’s most overrated general.” Former National Security Adviser John Bolton was alternately “incompetent,” a “wacko” and “a disgruntled boring fool who only wanted to go to war,” according to the Los Angeles Times.

So is it really inconceivable that Trump, who has compared avoiding sexually transmitted diseases to fighting in Vietnam, and who derided the late Sen. John McCain, who endured unspeakable torture during his time as a prisoner of war, would really talk that way when he thinks the world isn’t listening?

Destiny Brown doesn’t look like an anarchist or looter. But if Trump saw the grandmotherly Black woman in the bright yellow Black Lives Matter t-shirt, that might well be how he’d describe her.

After all, he’s done it before.

“Look at what happened in New York, look what happened in Chicago. All Democrats. All radical left Democrats,” Trump said during a rally in New Hampshire last month. “You know what I say about protesters? Protesters, your ass. I don’t talk about my ass. They’re not protesters, those are anarchists, they’re agitators, they’re rioters, they’re looters.”

“We’re not violent,” Brown told me emphatically. “It’s so sad with race and how it is in the world now.”

Brown says she’s looking to Biden to heal a badly fractured country. Biden, she says, “will smother the flames.”

“I believe the president that’s in there now, he’s responsible for it,” Brown adds.

She’s not wrong. Try as he might to shift blame, that’s Donald Trump’s America.

Copyright 2020 John L. Micek, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. An award-winning political journalist, John L. Micek is Editor-in-Chief of The Pennsylvania Capital-Star in Harrisburg, Pa. Email him at jmicek@penncapital-star.com and follow him on Twitter @ByJohnLMicek.