UNEXPECTEDLY: Morning Hate Speech: David Frum Compares Trump To Mass Murderer Charles Manson.
The Trump = Hitler analogy is getting old. We’ve been in desperate need of some fresh material! How jejune.
Unsurprisingly, Trump-loathing journalist David Frum appeared on CNN This Morning today to supply it.
Frum dug up, and approvingly quoted, this line from Republican consultant Mike Murphy — or to be completely up to date, “Republican Voters Against Trump” consultant Mike Murphy.
“Asking Donald Trump to talk about policy, it’s like teaching Charles Manson to foxtrot. He can manage a step or two, but then he’s going to put a pencil in your eye, because he’s Charles Manson. And Donald Trump is Donald Trump.”
Frum went on to call Trump an “insult comic” who “knows how to abuse and denigrate and humiliate and demean.”
The irony was apparently lost on Frum that whereas he trashed Trump for denigrating people, he himself had just analogized Trump to Charles Manson—the personification of pure evil. Maybe Frum could serve as the warm-up act for Trump’s next insult-comic appearance.
Even with the “Trump is Manson” comparison, I don’t think Rolling Stone is going to go for him. As Joe Hagen wrote Sticky Fingers, in his 2017 biography of Jann Wenner:
As the 1960s kept ending, the next installment was the arrest of Charles Manson and four of his followers for the horrific murder of five people, including actress Sharon Tate, wife of Roman Polanski, at a luxury mansion north of Beverly Hills. When Manson’s trial began in 1970, Wenner leaped at the story with an idea for the headline: “Charles Manson Is Innocent!”
Wenner’s headline was less insane than it sounds to modern ears. Manson was already an object of media obsession, a former Haight-Ashbury denizen who drifted to L.A. and collected hippie acolytes for LSD orgies and quasi-biblical prophecies. While the straight world viewed him as a monster, much of Wenner’s audience saw him, at least hypothetically, as one of their own. The underground press of Los Angeles, including the Free Press, cast him as the victim of a hippie-hating media. Manson was a rock-and-roll hanger-on. Wenner was convinced of Manson’s innocence by his own writer David Dalton, who had lived for a time with Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys, a Manson believer. “I’d go out driving in the desert with Dennis, and he’d say things to me like ‘Charlie’s really cosmic, man.’”
And I doubt Weather Underground member-turned-Obama booster Bernadine Dohrn will, either:
Dig it! First they killed those pigs. Then they ate dinner in the same room with them. Then they even shoved a fork into the victim’s stomach! Wild!
Best stick to rehabbing Woodrow Wilson’s reputation then, David.