This borefest is just another entry in the genre of conspiracy-minded conservatives attempting to explain "what progressives think" via rambling, tendentious arguments and examples that are "known" to be true mostly because they keep appearing on forwarded emails from your strange uncle. The whole of it is not worth a response—having a Marco Rubio advisor attempt to describe progressivism is a bit like a blind man attempting to describe an elephant by shoving his head in a rhino's behind and extrapolating. It was boring when Jonah Goldberg did it, back when anyone gave a damn about Jonah Goldberg, and no better here.
The overall premise, however, is that "the left" created Donald Trump, in that the Republican presidential race, party, and totem of ideas has been put through a wood chipper by Donald Trump and his fellow extremists only because the left goaded an apparently brick-stupid Republican base into it. The left, you see, tries so hard to be Gallant that it can't be helped if fed-up Goofus eventually starts setting fires and eating people's skins just to get attention. Or something—it gets a bit sketchy.
But if we are not interested in having a pedantic conservative Marco Rubio advisor explain "the left," we should be more than willing to accept that a pedantic conservative Marco Rubio advisor knows conservatism, and therefore knows a thing or two about why conservatives are so enamored with the man proposing mass deportations, government mandated religious tests, and various other disembowelings of our ostensibly much-valued freedom. Explain away, then.
[P]rogressives are the champions of every minority group’s grievance, so Trump gives voice to white grievance. Progressives are suspicious of truth claims, except their own. Trump makes sweeping statements with firmness and conviction, tenaciously holding on even when they are proven false—which is attractive to Americans who are sick of progressives’ self-serving narrative about how everyone is wrong except them. Progressives are suspicious of all authority, except when they wield it. Trump refuses to grant the progressive divine right to rule and flaunts his autocratic personae. Progressives are fixated on welcoming everyone, even to the point of abdicating routine border control and endangering national security. Trump feeds on fear and suspicion of outsiders.
So conservatives like Donald Trump because he gives voice to white grievance, and because he is an unapologetic liar even about easily provable things, and because he is an autocrat who doesn't give a rat's ass what the laws and Constitution say, and because he flat-out doesn't trust brown people. There you go.
I don't think we on the left could argue with any of that, though in combination it looks from here more like pathology than political movement.
What's curious, as always in these things, is the assertion that the left tricked the conservative movement into supporting a lying, authoritarian blowhard that conservatives don't actually like. Everything about the man is abominable:
Progressives, in their overreach, provoked their opposite. Their hypocrisy, double standards, and ruinous public policy have created a thirst for something, anything that looks and feels and smells different. Trump’s ideology is different but, with its nativism, bellicosity, and celebration of jack-booted big-government, it is also at least half-fascist.
... and yet there is no satisfying explanation for why Mr. Half-Fascist and his accomplices—the man who calls Hamas “Hummus” and the woman whose lies about a video she claims she and she alone has seen has helped give the Republican race a civilian body count—are handily leading the polls while bastions of true, non-tainted conservatism like Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush or Chris Christie struggle to keep some semblance of relevancy in the race. Only that it is because the left has made conservatives feel bad, and God help the world when conservatives feel bad.
The conservative base doesn't want to stage a mass deportation on the order of the expulsion of Jews from Germany, you see, but if the alternative is "abdicating routine border control"—something the left apparently wants, evidence of this be damned—then they'll ready the trains. The conservative base doesn't really want to bar all Muslims from the United States, awkward polling on the subject aside, but if it is a choice between instituting such an explicit religious litmus test or doing what the left wants, which when last we checked had something to do with Jade Helm and WalMart tunnels and replacing every true patriot’s ammunition supplies with Twizzlers, then a government-administered religious test it is.
And certainly, Donald Trump is a huge liar who doesn't give a damn whether his words on the campaign trail are true or violent-minded propaganda, almost all dedicated to the utter demonization of non-white foreigners—but hey, what better way to stick it to the man, where the man is the omnipresent leftist presence that floats in lazy circles around every true conservative's noggin like the ghost of Joseph Stalin's cat.
This is the serious conservative explanation for Trump’s rise in the Republican Party, despite all the sterner voices in the Republican Party tut-tutting that he doesn’t really represent them. I don’t dare ask what the un-serious explanation might be.