Unless you’ve spent the entire weekend in the woods somewhere, you know what happened to Vice President-elect Mike Pence at a performance of Hamilton on Friday night. But was this whole thing a cunning plan by President-elect Trump and his team to deflect from the Trump University settlement news? Jay Willis of GQ magazine offered an interesting take.
‘Crazy Like A Fox’
In GQ, Willis posits that the Trump team may have, in essence, chosen to “throw Pence under the bus” on Friday night. After all, the news of the day was Trump’s $25 million settlement in the Trump University fraud case. Willis writes (emphasis his):
“This is where a little theater trip can go a long way. If Bannon and company are at all worried about Trump voters seeing any of these stories and having second thoughts, throwing Pence under the bus for a night is a clever, tidy solution. On the off-chance that Pence is received politely, Trump can triumphantly cite it as evidence that reports of national discontent and his movement’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. If the crowd boos lustily, he can simply jump on Twitter and caricature the left as frenzied, petulant, childish aggressors. He gets to draw an outrageous false equivalence between his appointment of terrifying bigots to key policy positions on the one hand, and a guy being booed at a play on the other. Suddenly, any of his supporters who were getting fidgety about this whole ‘President Trump’ thing are freed up to feel the righteous, indignant fury that compelled them to vote for him in the first place.”
Willis is not the only one out there who noticed that this whole event seemed planned. Asa Bennett of the Telegraph tweeted the graphs showing how Google searches changed over the course of the day, with the Hamilton news quickly taking the lead.
A look at the last 4 hours on Google shows how fast Trump forced his Hamilton spat to the top of the agenda instead of Trump U @robfordmancs pic.twitter.com/0nqZqICvgt
— Asa Bennett (@asabenn) November 19, 2016
And after Trump tweeted about Hamilton AGAIN in the wee hours of Sunday morning, Politico‘s Ben White tweeted:
"Sir you just settled a $25M fraud suit and your Cabinet is looking racist."
"Don't worry I'll distract em all with dumb #Hamilton tweets."
— Ben White (@morningmoneyben) November 20, 2016
Dissent Is Good
We are a country built on dissent. Hell, we exist as a country because we revolted against British rule. We cannot allow Herr Trump to silence that.
Trump, of course, took to Twitter in an attempt to shame the cast of Hamilton. As Jay Willis writes:
“The president-elect is learning to use healthy dissent to his advantage, and that’s terrifying.
[…]
Mike Pence attended a show that prominently and proudly features talented performers that he would send to gay conversion therapy if he had his way. Those plaintively protesting that the vice president-elect deserves more ‘respect’ than this are conflating respect with dissent and repudiation of bigotry. Many, many people do not care for Donald Trump and Mike Pence, and the fact that the pair won the election does nothing to eviscerate anyone’s right to make those feelings clear.”
Terrifying is right. It’s also highly troubling that the President-elect of the United States decides to tweet — two times in less than 10 minutes and then again today — demanding an apology from people who are legitimately frightened, yet has said nothing other than a half-hearted “Stop it” to the people who are carrying out violent acts in his name.
Herr Trump – you’re going to need some thicker skin. Because we’re all just getting started.
Tonight, VP-Elect Mike Pence attended #HamiltonBway. After the show, @BrandonVDixon delivered the following statement on behalf of the show. pic.twitter.com/Jsg9Q1pMZs
— Hamilton (@HamiltonMusical) November 19, 2016
Featured Image via screenshot from YouTube video
