New Yorker Editor David Remnick’s Rant on “Race-Baiting,” “Irrepressible Jackass” Donald Trump

The media at large has been, too put it mildly, a little frustrated with Donald Trump and his various birther/affirmative action/book-writing conspiracy claims. President Obama‘s release of his long-form birth certificate today showed that the frustration has reached its peak, and people just can’t take it anymore. The time for politely biting one’s tongue and waiting to see the fallout is over. The floodgates have been opened, and just watch: Sideshow Don is about to get slammed, even more so than before.

New Yorker editor David Remnick unloaded this rant against Trump in the New Yorker‘s news desk blog today, revealing a quietly building fury toward the bombastic reality TV star:

What is there to say anymore about Donald Trump? That he is an irrepressible jackass who thinks of himself as a sly fox? That he is a buffoon with bathroom fixtures of gold? Why bother, after so many decades? There is no insulting someone who lives in a self-reinforcing fantasy world.

Let’s say what is plainly true (and what the President himself is reluctant to say): these rumors, this industry of fantasy, are designed to arouse a fear of the Other, of an African-American man with a white American mother and a black Kenyan father…

Let’s be even plainer: to do what Trump has done (and he is only the latest and loudest and most spectacularly hirsute) is a conscious form of race-baiting, of fear-mongering… The shame is that there are still many more around who, in the name of truth-telling, are prepared to pump the atmosphere full of poison.