Donald Trump continued on Thursday morning to use his Truth Social platform to lash out at anyone who mentions who hints that he may be indicted as the result of multiple criminal investigations, this time attacking a popular black New York Times columnist who recently wrote the former president can't seem to leave his past in the past and it is catching up to him.
Earlier in the week Charles Blow wrote that the former president, by virtue of his Waco speech, remains "dangerous" and "He hasn’t grown much, personally or politically, since then. He’s more sure of himself and more vulgar, but narcissism is still his engine. Ultimately, if his legal issues don’t do him in, his inability to grow beyond nostalgia and negativity could."
That seems to have set the former president off, who went on a tirade on Thursday, calling Blow "Blowhard' due to his fondness for nicknames that seem to amuse his fans.
"Racist Columnist Charles Blowhard of the Failing New York Times, a sick degenerate who doesn’t like our Country or the values that made it great, prior to its massive FAILURE over the last two years, writes that I should be prosecuted by Radical Left, Soros Backed Lunatics, even without evidence, because I’m WHITE," the former president wrote despite the lack of commentary by Blow on Trump's race.
He then added, "What has our Country come to? With Blowhard’s racist words and innuendo, dumb as he is, bad things happen, and we are now a Nation in Decline being stupidly led into Workd (sic) War lll."
CNN host Kaitlan Collins on Thursday appeared to be surprised by Murdoch's blunt assessment of Trump and his actions after losing the 2020 presidential election.
"I mean, these aren't just low level people were talking about, this is Rupert Murdoch, who is emailing, saying that what Trump did... he's he called it pretty much a crime," she said. "I mean, that was the most striking part of the email to me."
CNN reporter Oliver Darcy also said it was striking that Murdoch thought convincing a quarter of the country of bogus election fraud theories was "pretty much a crime" without reflecting on the role his own network's hosts played in helping push these falsehoods.
"Rupert Murdoch, at the end of the day, is responsible," he said. "He is responsible for what his hosts went on air and said. Many of them went on air, they lied to Americans, they lied to their viewers about the election results."
Writing for the Orlando Sentinel on Thursday, columnist Scott Maxwell blasted the direction of Republican leadership in Florida.
"We make headlines for alligator attacks, radioactive sinkholes and bricks of cocaine that fall from the sky. Heck, if a guy’s strolling naked down the street in Key West, nobody calls the cops. They call it a parade," said Maxwell. But now, GOP leadership from Gov. Ron DeSantis on down are taking the Sunshine State "from quirky to full-on nuts."
Maxwell named a litany of stories humiliating the state, from a school principal in Tallahassee being forced to resign for showing students the "pornographic" Statue of David, to another school in St. Petersburg being forced to pull a civil rights documentary about Ruby Bridges, to GOP lawmakers threatening to pull all funding from St. Petersburg over contributions to an abortion-rights group.
Perhaps most absurd, argued Maxwell, is that DeSantis is now considering naming state Rep. Randy Fine the president of Florida Atlantic University — a man who, in Maxwell's words, is "absurdity incarnated."
"The Brevard County Republican called a school board member he disliked a 'whore' and got into a spat with the Special Olympics after the nonprofit group didn’t invite him to a party at a local Chick-fil-A," wrote Maxwell. "He once threatened to show President Joe Biden 'why the Second Amendment was written' and boasted on Facebook that, if anyone asked him for his pronouns, he’d reply: 'You / Are / A / Fu&$ng / Moron/.' (Just the kind of scholarly debate tactics you’d crave from a university leader.) Fine once called for shutting down the state’s largest university, the University of Central Florida. And he accused local school employees of 'child abuse' — only to have cops determine Fine was wrong, that the photos he cited as evidence had been staged and that the stepfather who’d first reported the 'abuse' had lied to officers. (Fine never apologized. In fact, he doubled down.)"
All of this, Maxwell said, is making him reconsider his long-held position, as an independent voter, that extremism doesn't define the Republican Party.
"I still disagree with my far-left friends and readers who believe there are no sensible and decent conservatives out there. I know there are. Some are my friends," wrote Maxwell. "But unless more of them start speaking up and saying: 'I’m tired of my state looking like an absurdist, rights-trampling joke,' we’re going to keep seeing more of it. Absurdity will continue to be our new norm."
