Republican presidential candidate and former Governor of Texas Rick Perry had this to say about Donald Trump's increasingly objectionable and increasingly popular campaign:
"He offers a barking carnival act that can be best described as Trumpism: a toxic mix of demagoguery, mean-spiritedness and nonsense that will lead the Republican Party to perdition if pursued," Perry charged during an address at the Willard Hotel in downtown Washington. "Let no one be mistaken: Donald Trump's candidacy is a cancer on conservatism, and it must be clearly diagnosed, excised, and discarded."So, Rick Perry's charge is that Donald Trump is mean and divisive, and Perry makes this point by calling Trump a "cancer" that must be eliminated. Um.
..."Donald Trump, the reality television star, is a great generator of ratings. But Donald Trump the candidate is a sower of division, wrongly demonizing Mexican-Americans for political sport," Perry said. "He has piqued the interest of some Republican voters who have legitimate concerns about a porous border and broken immigration system. But instead of offering those voters leadership or solutions, he has offered fear and sound bites. This cannot stand."
Luckily no one has ever accused Rick Perry of being self-aware, or they'd be feeling pretty foolish right now!
Perry thinks that Trump has "piqued the interest" of voters "who have legitimate concerns about a porous border and broken immigration system." Except, the thing is, I have legitimate concerns about how porous our southern border is and how broken our immigration system, for reasons that have nothing to do with xenophobic fears about undocumented brown workers who will take all the jobs from white people while simultaneously being master criminals, or whatever.
My concerns are more about how we're throwing asylum-seeking children and vulnerable adults into cages guarded by people who assault them, and employers who exploit undocumented workers, and the small percentage of people who do enter the country with nefarious objectives. Which means that none of the Republican candidates have any solutions to offer to address my concerns.
The people who are interested in Trump's nakedly racist and contemptible rhetoric about immigrants is because they are interested in naked racism and contempt for marginalized people. Across a number of social issues. They are explicitly in favor of what Rick Perry is condemning, and nothing indicates that Perry is more aware of that than the fact he's using the exact same cruel and shitty language in order to scold Trump.
Trump isn't a cancer on modern mainstream conservatism. He is its most obvious inevitability.
Mean and divisive is entirely the point. The only thing Rick Perry has to be angry about is that he didn't think to be so blunt about it first.
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