What is he talking about now? He’s not talking about “The Hunt,” is he?

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1159898201018834944

The consensus on social media is that he’s talking about “The Hunt.”

If you missed this post last night about the movie and the disingenuous attempts to spin it as biased against “deplorables,” dive in. Or watch the trailer below and see for yourself. As Seth Mandel put it, it’s basically an NRA recruiting ad. Calling this movie anti-populist or anti-deplorable is like calling “Red Dawn” anti-American/pro-Soviet because the Russians kill a bunch of Americans in the first half of the movie. It’s so wrong that it can’t be explained as a function of idiocy. No one’s that stupid. Only dishonesty explains it.

So here’s how this probably went down. Fox News heard there was a movie coming out in which the “deplorables” are hunted for sport. Then they watched the trailer and thought, “Oh, wait, the deplorables are the good guys and they rise up against the murderous rich.” But it’d be a shame to let a sweet-ass cultural grievance topic like “Elite Hollywood celebrates murder of salt-of-the-earth Americans” go by the boards, so they decided to just go ahead and pretend that that’s the takeaway from this movie. That’s how we ended up with the Laura Ingraham segment that I wrote about yesterday. Either Trump saw that segment or he saw some other Fox segment about “The Hunt” that repeated the lie that the movie is anti-deplorable, and since Trump receives the information he sees on Fox the way Christians receive Scripture, he went ahead and echoed their take on the presidential Twitter account — without even bothering to learn the name of the movie, apparently. That’s how little he cares about the culture-war fires he sets. Some movie or other whose name he can’t remember is inflammatory and racist because Steve Doocy or whoever told him so.

Where did he get the “racist” part, by the way? I count two nonwhite people in the trailer, neither one of whom speaks and both of whom look to be minor characters. The villain is a rich white woman. The hero is a blue-collar white woman. This is a movie about class, not race, and obviously so. Weird that a populist-nationalist who’s allegedly fighting for working-class Americans of all stripes would see a racial angle in a story about average people being hunted. Maybe he’s just recycling old grievances about Hollywood being anti-white…

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/305859333231616001?lang=en
https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/517293224831234048?lang=en

…or maybe he’s using this as an opportunity to polish up his “us versus them” 2020 campaign message to his white base even if it makes no sense in the context of “The Hunt.” If we can pretend that Hollywood’s glorifying the hunting of average Americans here to serve a political agenda, we might as well pretend there’s a racial element to it too.

Anyway, now that He Hath Spoken, there’s no going back. Trump doesn’t apologize so he’ll have to double, triple, and quadruple down on this take no matter how wrong it turns out to be. And of course it’ll be a matter of ideological duty on the right to defend his take lest a point be scored on the president. Exit question: Who is this movie going to “inflame”? Since it’s the elite who are being demonized as monstrous psychos, should we be worried about some mom from Beverly Hills getting angry and going on a rampage?