Could The Resistance here in America learn something from their counterparts who took to the streets to protest Donald Trump during his visit to London this week? That was the suggestion from AboveTheLaw.com editor Elie Mystal on this Saturday's Up with David Gura on MSNBC.
During a panel discussion on Trump's blatant “delusion and deception” surrounding the protests, with Trump pretending hadn't seen any protests and lying on Twitter that there were “tremendous crowds of well wishers and people that love our Country,” as opposed to the reality that there were actually tens of thousands of anti-Trump protesters flooding the streets of London, Bloomberg's Tim O'Brien explained that this is nothing new for Trump:
This has actually worked for him as a business person. He did it as a celebrity. He's now doing it as president, which is essentially to create his own script in real time about reality and then relentlessly push that onto the public. And often, especially with his base, it works.
So while we're either shocked by it, or amused by it, there's a nefarious part of this that's about propaganda and real politic, in which this stuff gets traction in the world. I think that people are getting more hip to that strategy around Trump.
And I think when you have events like London where he's saying I don't see any protest and you cut to the video, it gets a little harder for him to play that game.
After Gura read from a portion of Susan Glasser's recent column in The New Yorker, where she discussed Trump's embarrassing trip to the UK and that fact that “At any other moment in American history, this exhausting drama would have seemed unthinkable, nutty, and deeply mortifying for a country that still counts itself a global superpower. In the future, it may very well seem so again. But, for now, this is what counts as a good week in the Trump Presidency.” Gura asked Mystal whether he agreed, and how his trip comports with trips other presidents have taken so far.
Mystal tore into Trump for making the 75th anniversary of D-Day all about him, and wondered why more people aren't taking to the streets here in the U.S.
What I think though, is that the resistance needs to learn something what we saw in London. Look at how those people showed up. Those people were there on a Tuesday! Trump saw something because there was a 20-foot float of him on a toilet!
And like, we need our like creative geniuses, right? We need the people who make all those beautiful floats for the Rose Bowl parade, we need to put them to work on this kind of stuff, right?
Like, the resistance in this country, we talk a lot. I talk a lot. I like to talk, I like to tweet, you know. But I'm not out there in the streets like these people. We need... Trump is planning this grand military parade --
GURA: July 4th.
MYSTAL: -- to ruin our 4th of July. Where is the counter-protest to that? Where is our American version of what they're doing to him in London? Because London is embarrassing us in terms of their vocal resistance to Donald Trump.
Trump would just dismiss them as "fake news" if we follow his advice, but as Tim O'Brien discussed, that reality continues to get harder for Trump and his propagandists to dismiss each and every day. His Fox-watching base won't care, but thankfully they're not a majority of the country.
