“Were the collective nerve endings of the electorate not so frayed and numbed by now, we might be even more alive to the ugliness of this message from the White House.”

Writes David Remnick in “The Floodgates Open on Trump” (The New Yorker).

The “collective nerve endings” that matter are the nerve endings of Trump haters, and they are “frayed and numbed” and insufficiently “alive” because they’ve received so many “ugly” messages that they can’t feel the ugliness anymore. And yet supposedly, the ugliness has been dammed up. I guess the “dammed-up” image is useful (metaphorically) because it suggests a vast quantity of ugliness that hasn’t got out yet and so there’s potential, if the “floodgates” open, to batter the near-dead nerve endings and finally, at long last, get the reaction against Trump that Remnick is so sure he deserves.

The particular ugly message to which the collective nerve endings were insufficiently alive, was Trump’s reaction to Congressman Schiff’s satirical restatement of Trump’s Ukraine phone call:
“Rep. Adam Schiff illegally made up a FAKE & terrible statement, pretended it to be mine as the most important part of my call to the Ukrainian President, and read it aloud to Congress and the American people. It bore NO relationship to what I said on the call. Arrest for Treason?”
Some of us in the electorate have nerve endings sensitive enough to have felt the ugliness of what Schiff did and we may have enjoyed Trump’s vigorous pushback, but Remnick (unsurprisingly) sees Trump as the ugly one here. Trump’s suggestion that Schiff be arrested for treason is over-the-top, but Schiff was stating false facts and relying on the people’s ability to hear and process satire and that’s the same cover Trump claims.

But, sure, it’s unseemly, by conventional standards, for the President of the United States, the head of the executive branch, to be speaking comically about the deployment of the prosecutorial power.

This post gets my “civility bullshit” tag, because Remnick is adamant that Trump should not be talking like that, but he gives Schiff a pass.

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