When Hillary Clinton gave a speech on Trump’s affinity for the alt-right, the Republican nominee decided to respond by calling her a bigot. At the time, I noted that he was following in Karl Rove’s footsteps with the use of projection as a political strategy. It worked like a charm. Major media headlines reported it as a “he said/she said” trading of barbs.
Since then, Trump’s use of projection has reached amazing heights. For example, he:
* said that Clinton could shoot somebody and not be arrested,
* accused Clinton of running a “hate-filled” campaign, and
* said Clinton is running with “no policy, no solutions and no new ideas.”
We have fact-checkers to document the lies. Do we need to start a new “projection-check?” Here you go:
* No one but Trump is talking about shooting people and getting away with it.
* Documenting the real hate-filled campaign could fill an entire speech (as Clinton demonstrated). Here’s the summary version:
* A simple set of numbers demonstrates who is running a campaign devoid of policies.
Here’s the stat I just shared on TV: Trump’s site has 9,000 words of policy proposals. Clinton’s site: 112,735 words https://t.co/6czlLDNPCg
— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) September 4, 2016
Frankly, I don’t know whether Trump does this kind of thing as a knee-jerk response to criticisms of him that hit the mark, or if he has actually spent time laying out a strategy to accuse Clinton of all the things for which he is guilty. Perhaps he is simply too lazy to come up with his own challenges to Clinton and so he merely parrots back the ones coming at him. In the end, it doesn’t really matter. The important thing is to be clear that he is simply throwing mud to deflect attention away from the fact that he is imminently unfit to be president.
