Like millions of Americans, Donald Trump spent Christmas with loved ones, sharing gifts and attending church services on one of his faith tradition’s most important holidays.
No, I’m just kidding. The former president actually spent Christmas publishing a series of hysterical tirades to his social media platform. The Republican also became the first major-party White House hopeful in American history to honor Christmas with a message in which he wrote, in reference to his perceived political foes, “MAY THEY ROT IN HELL.”
A day later, as The Hill reported, he continued to use his online platform in provocative ways.
Former President Trump on Tuesday shared a “word cloud” from a recent poll showing the former president’s political plans to be most associated with the terms “revenge” and “dictatorship.” The word cloud, originally posted Tuesday by Daily Mail to visualize the results of their latest survey, shows voters most frequently described Trump’s political plans for a second White House term with words including “revenge,” “dictatorship,” “power” and “America.”
For those unfamiliar with word clouds, the basic idea is that a polling outfit will ask respondents an open-ended question. In this case, it was The Daily Mail, a prominent publication in the U.K., which conducted a poll in which likely voters were asked for one word to describe what Trump would want from a second term.
People weren’t given a list of words to choose from; they simply volunteered answers.
The publication then collected the responses and created an image to reflect the results: The more frequently a word came up, the larger it appeared in the word cloud.
And in this case, many likely voters, when asked about a second Trump term, responded with the word “revenge” most frequently. “Power” and “dictatorship” were also volunteered quite a bit, and “corruption” and “dictator” were among the other common answers.
The front-runner for the GOP nomination apparently wasn’t bothered by any of this. On the contrary, he promoted the word cloud, as if it were worth celebrating.
weird flex but ok pic.twitter.com/teitFFKHl2 Or put another way, Trump seemed rather comfortable being associated with words such as “revenge,” “power” and “dictatorship.” It comes on the heels of the former president repeatedly saying — out loud and in public — that he has ambitions of creating a temporary dictatorship on the first day of his second term in the Oval Office. It also dovetails with recent polling that found many Republican voters embracing Trump’s authoritarian-style rhetoric — including phrasing that echoed Adolf Hitler. In other words, the presumptive GOP nominee isn’t embarrassed by the aforementioned word cloud, because as far as Trump is concerned, there’s nothing to be embarrassed about. The public might expect him to pursue a revenge-driven dictatorship, to which the former president has effectively replied, “Yep, that’s what I’ve been promising to do. I’m glad people have noticed.” Trump has never bothered with a platform in his previous national campaigns, but it’s increasingly obvious that he has one now. It’s just not the kind of platform Americans have ever seen before in a competitive candidate for national office.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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