Racist Town Hall Guy Didn’t Hurt Donald Trump — He Saved Him

In the least-surprising twist since Peter denied Jesus a third time (who saw that coming?), Republican frontrunner Donald Trump is under fire because of something racist. This time, the media is going after Donald Trump for failing to correct a guy at a New Hampshire town hall meeting when the guy said President Obama is a Muslim and “not even an American.”

Disturbingly little attention is being paid to the questioner’s actual question, which was how do we “get rid of” the Muslim “problem” in this country, which Trump said he’d look into:

Yes, Donald, why don’t you get back to us with your final solution to that?

The ever-original minds of mainstream media news organizations have all taken to comparing Trump’s non-response to that time in 2008 when Senator John McCain had to tell a woman at one of his rallies that then-Senator Obama was not an Arab, but rather a “decent man” who is a citizen. What they’re forgetting is that earlier in that same rally, McCain had to quiet the nerves of another quaking racist, and the crowd nearly heckled McCain off the stage for saying they didn’t have to be afraid of Obama:

The premise is that John McCain set a shining example that Donald Trump should have followed. There are just a couple of problems with that.

The first is that, while McCain does deserve a measure of credit for finally doing the right thing, it was only after weeks of demagoguery by him and Sarah Palin resulted in stuff like this happening at McCain’s rallies:

That’s someone in the crowd shouting “Terrorist!” right before McCain makes a face like someone just ripped one on an elevator. All of this happened the week after McCain released an ad called “Dangerous,” which opened with the sinister question “Who is Barack Obama?”

So, yes, McCain did the right thing there, but only because he and Palin had spent weeks hardening all those racist nipples in the first place.

The second problem is that the mainstream media seems to have forgotten the rather important detail that McCain lost. Those attacks on Obama came after McCain had already relinquished his last polling lead on Obama, but the gap did narrow between the time they began and when McCain corrected that woman. Had McCain been in a primary fight the way Donald Trump is, his onslaught on Obama might have actually worked.

Trump’s campaign is having its racist cake and eating it, too, by claiming Trump didn’t hear the question, while simultaneously attacking President Obama on religious grounds. The people who think Trump should have corrected that guy obviously have not been paying attention, because you know who else wouldn’t have corrected that guy? Eighty-six percent of Republican voters. That’s why so many of the Republican candidates have been rushing to Twitter to denounce Trump’s failure to do so. At last count, only cellar-dwellers Lindsey Graham and Chris Christie had weighed in.

In polls taken since Wednesday’s debate, Trump’s support has either remained steady or increased, but Fiorina was seen as the clear winner, and her support has increased accordingly. The debate increased voters’ confidence in Ben Carson’s ability to win the nomination, but his support has actually slipped since then. The media narrative has picked up on Fiorina’s success, and on a performance by Trump that was a wash, at best.

That’s where Town Hall Guy really did Trump a favor, though, because not only has he blotted out the prevailing narrative about Donald Trump’s poor debate performance (especially relative to Carly Fiorina’s), he has also made certain that every other Republican candidate will be asked how they would react in that situation. For 86% of Republican primary voters, there’s only one right answer to that question: buy him a beer and make him Secretary of State. None of them are going to openly out-racism Trump, so the best that they can hope to do is not lose support by defending President Obama too strongly.

For some reason, the media is still not able to process the fact that people like this Town Hall Guy are the Republican Party now, and as their own comparison to 2008 clearly demonstrates, have been for a very long time.

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This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.