October 22, 2016

Those die-hard Trumpsters just can't help themselves, can they?

I have to give credit where credit is due, the Trump surrogates who get booked on the cable news talk shows really are good at filibustering and pivoting segments to what they want to talk about. So it goes with Peter Navarro, an economic professor at UC Irvine and apparently the muse behind Donald Trump's economic theories (along with Larry Kudlow and Stephen Moore), who made his MSNBC debut on "PM Joy".

Host Joy Reid started the segment by asking Navarro if he was frustrated by the fact that the economic plans he has helped craft for the very low energy Trump were overshadowed by his Airing of Grievances in Saturday's Gettysburg policy speech. Navarro turned the tables on Reid by declaring that he has decided to only answer the questions he wants, which involve policy. In fairness, I wouldn't want to have to rationalize that fifteen minutes of temper tantrums either.

Reid tries again, but Navarro is not playing. So she decides to go to Joan Walsh. And that's when the latent misogyny and condescension that lies beneath the entire Trump campaign bubbles to the surface. Navarro tries to filibuster Walsh's response and then deigns to offer her $100 to "talk policy". Because, you know, there's nothing intelligent professional women enjoy more than being propositioned with $100. You can see my friend Joan try to keep cool at the patronizing condescension that a guy who's backing literally the worst presidential candidate since George Wallace bestows. At that point, Reid loses control and there's just a ton of crosstalk, all led by Navarro. Anything to prevent having to confront being one of the last rats on a sinking ship, right?

For what it's worth, part of me wishes that someone on these shows would talk policy with these Trumpsters and stop letting them lie. Navarro's ideas on trade are antiquated and wrong. Frankly, all this talk about trade and renegotiating trade deals ignores that we are no longer a manufacturing economy, but a service economy. Those manufacturing jobs are never coming back. And Trump's favorite trade deal to demonize (since Bill Clinton signed it, though it was negotiated through GHW Bush's term), NAFTA? It's really not the "tremendous disaster" that Trump or Navarro insist it is either, believe me.

I got a $100 for Prof. Navarro to speak to that.

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