By Luther
Ray Abel
Sunday,
August 13, 2023
Like Samson among the Philistines, some partisan jacka** got to using
his jaws in Des Moines the day before Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump visited the
Iowa State Fair to make their respective pitches to the Hawkeye State.
Adam
Wren and Alex Isenstadt report for Politico:
The night before the camps squared off at the state fair, an incident
took place between the two at a bar in downtown Des Moines. According to three
people who were at The Copper Cup, officials with the DeSantis-allied super
PAC, Never Back Down, got into a shouting match with a Trump backer not
affiliated with the campaign, wearing Trump garb. The exact nature of what was
said is disputed, though each side agreed that it centered on the Trump hats
some of the patrons were sporting.
Before
continuing, it’s worth noting that the article’s first sentence refers to
the Copper Cup as a “dive bar.” Language
matters, and the insinuation that these groups were beefing in a grungy
blue-collar establishment is gainsaid by the fact that the bar serves various
Mules made with name-brand spirits in, unbelievably, copper cups. Legitimate
dive bars don’t serve anything in copper cups, since the clientele would
probably walk off with them for scrap value and the ownership would have no
interest in poncey drinks or the clientele that insists on such a thing. The
classist undertones of the framing — that these are ruddy and cornfed
Allis-Chalmers mechanics going at it instead of college-educated
Excel-spreadsheet technicians — are a fictitious animadversion. Shame.
Anyhow,
the focus of the quarrel appears to have been what some Trump supporters were
wearing — baseball caps reading “Back to Back Champ” in Iowa. A play on
ever-popular “Back to Back World War Champs” merchandise, the hats in Trump’s
context are incorrect, since Trump lost to Ted Cruz in the 2016 Iowa caucuses,
though of course he did beat Hillary and Biden in the state in the general
election. So “back to back” with an asterisk. Whatever the case, someone
associated with the DeSantis-aligned Never Back Down PAC appears to have
initiated the tiff.
Politico reports, “According to two
witnesses, it was those hats that sparked a response from Erin Perrine,
one of the Never Back Down officials. ‘You know you lost,’ one witness recalled
Perrine saying.” A Trump supporter later made a lewd remark to Perrine, the
report says.
All of
this is extraordinarily dumb and could be chalked up to stiff pours and a slow
news day if it weren’t for further off-the-mark framing. For instance, another
paragraph suggests that Trump supporters heckled DeSantis into silence, saying:
At nearly every one of his stops on Saturday, DeSantis found himself
fiercely bracketed by Trump supporters, who seemed eager to not just disrupt
the Florida governor but to get a rise out of his team. Sitting down for a
fair-side chat with Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, DeSantis was drowned out by bells
and whistles. As he flipped pork burgers at the pork tent, a flock of Trump
supporters chanted “We love Trump” in his direction.
The
report fails to properly identify that the cowbells and whistles employed to
drown out DeSantis and Iowa governor Kim Reynolds were wielded by members of a
left-wing group called “B****es Get Stuff Done.” National Review‘s Dan McLaughlin mentions their antics in his
excellent coverage of the day:
DeSantis’s chat was much more eventful. Pro-abortion and LGBTQIA+
protesters (one in “Thank God for Abortion” attire) tried to disrupt the talk
with cowbells and whistles, and ultimately had to be carted away by Iowa state
troopers. This would be a theme of the day: DeSantis is a textbook case of the
guy who attracts flak because he’s over the target.
If the
DeSantis campaign is serious about winning, it cannot provide such a
target-rich environment for left-wing politicos to beat them up. Thankfully,
the spat turned out to be only harsh words exchanged in a yuppie bar. But the
unforced error, with Trump over 50 percent and the rest of the GOP
primary pack dragging him down — willing to take even the cheapest of
shots — is
madness. Put Mitt Romney in charge of the bar
expense account, or
else get comfortable in Tallahassee.
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