The Nightly Show’s Trevor Noah and Charles Pierce of Esquire Politics have some really good advice for the protesters at Trump rallies: Stay Out Of The Building. As Uncle Charlie says: Don’t become part of the show.
Stop being played for such suckers. Stop enlisting yourself in his bloody vaudeville. Stop giving him stuff to lie about at all the rallies that actually do end up happening. Stop making yourselves part of the show, because it’s not working. It doesn’t affect him at all. In fact, his campaign gains strength from it, like some science-fiction monster that absorbs the energy of whatever attacks it and then uses it to destroy. It doesn’t gain you any allies; as should be clear by most of the meeping responses from the elite political press, the best it can get you is lectures about how Both Sides in our politics should settle down and let cooler heads ponder impotently about How We Got To This Point. That discussion never quite comes around to the simple, obvious fact that the Republican Party ate the monkeybrains 30 years ago and that the prion disease it thereby acquired is now cascading through its higher functions. That there is even one allegedly serious person taking seriously the allegedly serious argument that the president is somehow at fault for how the Republican madness is acting out in public is a measure of how far the disease has progressed, and of the spavined state of our institutional immunity to it. [..]
In terms of tangible political gain, the disruption of Trump’s rally was a failure, which was obvious if you watched the coverage of his subsequent rallies in Missouri and Ohio. He feeds on this stuff, and so do his crowds.
My suggestion? Create a wave of non-violent protest outside the arenas. Close the streets. Fill the jails, if you must. Force the media coverage, which shouldn’t be all that hard at this point. But stay out of the buildings because you can do no good in there. It gives aid and comfort to the forces you are trying to defeat, and it gives a timorous elite political press an excuse to look the other way, and it gives the other candidates from a party that long ago descended into madness one more hallucination to justify why it’s eating bugs in public.Stay out of the buildings. Decline to audition for a part in the freak show. Silent witness can be the most powerful kind there is.
Trevor Noah echoed that same advice in his opening segment on Monday’s show:
Noah warned protesters — many of them vocal Bernie Sanders supporters — that their interrupting Trump’s rallies plays into the hands of Trump’s self-victimization, bolstering his narrative of P.C. leftists coming to shut down free speech and make America suck.
“Donald Trump didn’t just create an atmosphere for violence at his rallies,” Noah said. “He basically engineered it as carefully and deliberately as Matt Damon did when he was growing potatoes on Mars.”
“You’ve got to be careful. The narrative Trump tells his sympathizers is that they’re under attack, that “the nefarious, politically-correct, left, liberal force wants to silence them. So if you come in, and you actually try to silence them, it’s like trying to put a fire out by putting wood on to it.{..]
You’ve given Trump the villain that, up until now, he was making up.”
It’s like the internet advice about on line bullying and trolling, Don’t Feed The Trolls. Good advice.