World's greatest troll strikes again: The sole point of the Arpaio pardon is ''liberal tears''

[DonViejo]

MONDAY, AUG 28, 2017 05:00 AM EDT

World’s greatest troll strikes again: The sole point of the Arpaio pardon is “liberal tears”
Pardoning racist "Sheriff Joe" will backfire eventually. But if it pisses off liberals, the Trumpers are stoked

BOB CESCA

It ought to make perfect sense now. For several years, I’ve been comparing Donald Trump’s online behavior to that of an online comment-section troll, or, more specifically, a Twitter troll who’s managed to build a political movement around the concept of deliberately jabbing political opponents simply to watch them freak out. But now, after 221 days of the catastrophic Trump presidency, it should be abundantly obvious that he’s setting policy and making decisions based exclusively on trolling both Democrats and “Never Trump” Republicans.

After all, a significant chunk of Trump’s reputation is wrapped up in his obnoxious Twitter habit — a habit that seems to be partly inspired by the tone and content of “Fox & Friends,” mixed with his desperate need for constant attention. Just about everything he does is geared toward fluffing his rally supporters, including the tormenting of liberals. For example, his desire to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act wasn’t about constructing a better health care system; it was about crapping all over the legacy of his predecessor, Barack Obama, and especially Obama’s supporters. It was about revenge. And his people don’t seem to care that their health coverage would’ve been among the first to be rescinded if one of Trump’s many replacement bills had passed. They didn’t care because Trump’s obsession with repealing Obamacare pissed off liberals.

While there have been many other examples of Trump’s trolling beyond the confines of social media, the most recent example has been the pardoning of racist and convicted criminal Joe Arpaio, the disgraced former sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona. The close proximity between Trump’s horrendous comments about the Nazi terrorist attack in Charlottesville and the pardoning of Arpaio isn’t mere coincidence. I’d wager that Trump made the decision to pardon the controversial Phoenix sheriff as payback against his political opponents for criticizing Trump’s remarks in which he appeared to sympathize with the white supremacists, KKK members and neo-Nazis who gathered in Charlottesville.

We already know that Trump was furious about the response to his response to the chaos in Charlottesville. We also know that Trump’s response has damaged his poll numbers and seemed to amplify discussions about his precarious mental health and the possibility of impeachment. Pardoning Arpaio sounds like a great big “screw you” to critics of his three ill-fated attempts at public remarks about Charlottesville, and saving Arpaio from a prison sentence was his way of punishing the opposition by running to the rescue of a notorious birther and anti-immigration racist. And we know that Trumpers love to stir up what they call “liberal tears.”

Confirming Trump’s intentions, Kurt Schlichter, an occasional Fox News analyst, Townhall.com writer and Trump supporter, tweeted on Saturday:

Link to tweet

more
http://www.salon.com/2017/08/28/worlds-greatest-troll-strikes-again-the-sole-point-of-the-arpaio-pardon-is-liberal-tears/

[Squinch]

1. Kurt Schlichter looks like a guy well into his middle age, communicates like an 11 year old.

[TheBlackAdder]

2. There's another who used the government after a poor undergrad selection. Now a Colonel in NG.

[RhodeIslandOne]

3. Someone on Larry O'Donnell's show called him "President of the Comments Section"

Great take.....

[JDC]

4. I have yet to see a tweet like this not come back to haunt the twatter

[SharonClark]

5. Guess the 'brilliant" mind of DT didn't see the backlash from republicans, either.

He just keeps digging that hole deeper.

[Orsino]

6. "Occasional Fox News analysts" who use the word "bitches" aren't qualified...

...to understand what the "sole point" of a presidential action might be--particularly when they are lying to cover presidential complicity in Arpaio's crimes, and most especially when Arpaio hasn't even accepted the pardon, and can't.

Maybe Schlichter felt like gloating, but otherwise his tweet is content-free.