The Washington Post uncorked a pretty smarmy attack on the “typical” Donald Trump supporter on the front of the Sunday newspaper. The headline was “Finally. Someone who thinks like me.” Yes, the woman who thinks Trump thinks just like her was hospitalized for “homicidal ideation.”
Post reporter Stephanie McCrummen – best known as the smear artist who wrote the 2012 article on how Rick Perry had a rock on his hunting grounds with the N-word on it – but was painted over, but you could see it if you look really, really closely – is back on the smear patrol.
The first time she had seen him, at a rally in June, she was just beginning to realize how many people saw the world the way she did, that she was one among millions. At the time, her hips were still sore from a series of injections intended to calm her. She had gotten them in February, during a difficult time in her life, when she had been involuntarily hospitalized for several weeks after what she called a “rant,” a series of online postings that included one saying that Obama should be hanged and the White House fumigated and burned to the ground. On her discharge papers, in a box labeled “medical problem,” a doctor had typed “homicidal ideation.”
Melanie thought the whole thing was outrageous. She wasn’t a person with homicidal ideation. She was anxious, sure. Enraged, definitely. But certainly not homicidal, and certainly not in need of a hospital stay.
“It never crossed my mind that I’m losing it,” she said several months after her release, and a big reason for this conviction was the rise of Donald Trump, who had talked about so many of the things she had come to believe — from Obama being a founder of the terrorist group ISIS, to Hillary Clinton being a co-founder, to the idea that U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia may have been murdered in a White House plot involving a prostitute and a pillow.
The typical Trump supporter out in Flyover Country believes all kinds of crazy conspiracy theories. You can bet the Post would never attempt this kind of investigative smear on a Bernie Sanders supporter and how Wall Street is entirely based on fraud. That doesn't sound kooky at all. But heeeeere's Melanie:
She was a 52-year-old woman who had worked 20 years for the railroad, had once been a Democrat and was now a Republican, and counted herself among the growing swath of people who occupied the fringes of American politics but were increasingly becoming part of the mainstream. Like millions of others, she believed that President Obama was a Muslim. And like so many she had gotten to know online through social media, she also believed that he was likely gay, that Michelle Obama could be a man, and that the Obama children were possibly kidnapped from a family now searching for them.
“So beautiful,” Melanie said as Ivanka Trump walked onto the convention stage to introduce her father, and soon the soaring score of the movie “Air Force One” was blasting through the TV. Melanie sat up straighter. This is what she had been waiting for.
“Here comes Big Daddy,” she said, clapping. “The Donald. Big Daddy.”
Kevin was snoring.
“Here he is, babe,” she said. “Donald’s here, babe.”
The "glory" of the election for her subject (suspect?) was in creating a parallel world of reality, wrote McCrummen:
To Melanie, this was the glory of the 2016 presidential election. The truth about so many things was finally being accepted, from the highest levels of the Republican Party on down to the grass roots of America, where so many people like her didn’t care what some fact-checker said, much less that one day Trump would suggest that Obama wasn’t born in America, and on another say maybe he was.
More and more, she was meeting people who felt the same as she did, joining what amounted to a parallel world of beliefs that the Trump campaign had not so much created as harnessed and swept into the presidential election. As Melanie saw it, what she had posted about Obama was no different from what a New Hampshire state legislator and Trump campaign adviser had said about Hillary Clinton, that she “should be put in the firing line and shot for treason.”
“If it’s time to lock me up, it’s time to lock up the world,” Melanie remembered thinking when she had heard that.
And so when she was released from the hospital with instructions to “maintain a healthy lifestyle,” she did what seemed to her not only healthy but also patriotic. She began campaigning for Trump.
