Follow LA Observed on Twitter here
In the midst of another bizarre night of tweets from Donald Trump's account, Los Angeles City Council member Jose Huizar dropped a little bomb of his own. A t-bomb, you might say.
We have tyrant as the President-elect. If we acquiesce to his falsehoods, we fall victim to tyrannical government. We should not let up.
— Jose Huizar (@josehuizar) November 29, 2016
Far as I can find, this is the first time that Huizar has called the president-elect a "tyrant." He's only saying what a lot of Americans (and by now, probably some Trump voters and many foreign observers) fear the most about the erratic future leader. But still, this is coming from an elected official in the city of Los Angeles, one of the cities that seems most destined to clash with Trump's administration, whoever turns out to be actually running it in the long run.
Mayor Eric Garcetti, for instance, was on CNN tonight with Don Lemon talking about LA and Trump.
In the short run, I have to expect Huizar will be in for some ugly immigrant-baiting from the angriest men among the Trumpists. That's what they do. The liberal Democrat from Boyle Heights who represents the Eastside and downtown was first elected to the City Council in 2005 and reelected in 2007, 2011 and 2015. He was on the school board before that. As his bio notes (in English and Spanish), Huizar is an immigrant to America.
José Huizar was born in Zacatecas, Mexico and received a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of California, Berkeley, a Master’s degree in Public Affairs and Urban Planning from Princeton University and a Juris Doctorate from UCLA School of Law. He is the first Mexican immigrant elected to the City Council in Los Angeles’ history and in 2004, he became the first Latino to serve on the Princeton Board of Trustees.
Huizar lived in the village of Los Morales in the municipality of Jerez, and immigrated with his parents at the age of three. He grew up here in Boyle Heights.
Meanwhile, Trump himself posted five tweets tonight pushing his voter fraud claim, again without offering supportive evidence. Instead, he quotes the angry tweets of Trump supporters -- one of them a 16-year-old kid. Included in Trump's programming for tonight was this bit of child-like desperation, demanding that CNN prove a negative: "what PROOF do u have DonaldTrump did not suffer from millions of FRAUD votes?"
What unhinged Trump this time was apparently something on CNN, because he sputtered in his final tweet of the night (for the record, the 34,046th tweet of Trump's long and odd Twitter career):
.@CNN is so embarrassed by their total (100%) support of Hillary Clinton, and yet her loss in a landslide, that they don't know what to do.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 29, 2016
This all elicited a right-on-point retort from Chicago Tribune reporter Dawn Rhodes:
It is genuinely confounding the president-elect is having the same meltdown over the election results we expected him to have if he'd lost.
— Dawn Rhodes (@rhodes_dawn) November 29, 2016
There's been a lot of analysis the past few days of the recent Trump twitter mania. James Fallows at the Atlantic is conducting an ongoing discussion that centers this week on the question: "A man who will literally have life and death power over much of humanity seems not to understand or care about the difference between truth and lies. Is there any way for democratic institutions to cope?"
It all seems to call for the New Yorker cartoon that's been going around.
Show me on the doll where the media hurt you.
And because I always like pics of Los Angeles politicians on horseback, here is Huizar at this past weekend's East Los Angeles Christmas Parade. From his Facebook page:
