Well, first of all, what I hate about politics: the same thing that everyone hates about politics: that politicians are full of b.s.
The entire game is played with coded language, in which no one ever tells the truth.
Now, I'm not saying that Donald Trump tells the truth. But he uses a different code.
And that's refreshing. Even if the content of what he is saying is approximately equivalent to what that guy with the orange hair who killed all those people in Colorado a few years ago says.
We all have that little guy with the orange hair inside us. Trump just happens to also have billions of dollars, so he gets to stay out of the mental hospital and parade his orange hair in public.
And, as we all know, the ravings of a lunatic can sometimes reveal the truth.
For instance, in this latest kerfuffle about saying John McCain is not a war hero.
For your average politician, who lives in a coded universe of what is "acceptable" or not, this is a gaffe of enormous proportions. You can't say John McCain is not a war hero! It's one of those Gotcha moments that puts you out of the game, like being caught sleeping with an intern or posting pictures of your dick on Twitter. And all the conformist, careerist, fat cat pundits smile their knowing smiles and say, oh, well, that's it - he's gone.
But the great thing about Trump is, he reminds us that politics is not actually a game of avoiding saying the wrong thing. It is a game of intuiting the emotional state of the electorate and reflecting it back to them.
That's what's dangerous about demagogues. They play the game on a deeper level than the bureaucrats and functionaries who stamp our passports and pass our laws.
In this case, the emotional electorate in question is Republican.
The reporters and political people who got very excited when Trump said McCain was not a war hero don't understand the Republican mind-set. From their knowledge of the chessboard, bashing a war hero is a fatal error. Rick Perry said Trump had disqualified himself from the race. Mitt Romney tweeted that the difference between McCain and Trump was that Trump shot himself down.
Trump replied that Rick Perry should be forced to take an IQ test before he could run. And that McCain was a dummy who'd finished last in his class at Annapolis.
And, though the media sicced its' meanest dogs on this supposedly-meaty bone, Trump remains at the top of the polls for the Republican nomination.
The political tea-readers, who play by the rules of Washington, were wrong. What disqualified Trump from playing in their little game of conventional politics did not disqualify him from playing in the larger game of knowing how to push the Like button in America's lizard brain.
So, what I like about Trump is that he's a poet.
A poet among politicians.
Yes, his poetry is ugly. But so was Charles Bukowski's.
Like all great poets, from Shakespeare to Hitler, he is changing the landscape of our brains. He has the ability to translate our darkest thoughts into fantasies of power.
Demagogues are geniuses who fuse politics and poetry.
Most politicians think they've got their poetry asses covered when they come with a little schtick about how they grew up in a log cabin, or how their mothers raised them while holding down two jobs, or how they were captured by enemy forces and refused to be released until every other POW was released.
And it's true, this is usually good enough to win amongst a field of mediocrities. In mediocre times. Avoid enough gotchas and you win by default.
But when the occasional rock star comes along, look out. If you're lucky, you get Roosevelt. If you're not, you get Hitler.
What's going to save us with Trump is that we are still living in mediocre times. His hot rhetoric will eventually flame out. America in the 21st century is not Germany in the 1920's. We're still so rich, fat and happy, even after Viet Nam and Iraq, we can just enjoy The Donald as a cautionary jester.
But keep your eyes open: Trump is following the Mein Kampf handbook to the letter. All this talk about the mystical greatness of the American People and the scapegoating of minorities - if the US was still a majority white country, this schtick might actually work.
In the end, it's not really the predator billionaires like Trump we need to worry about, but the wolves-in-sheep's clothing who are just as venal, but hide their teeth in filed-down smiles.
So, for now, I appreciate the feral poetry of Donald Trump, like I enjoyed Goodfellas and The Sopranos. And the poetry of Charles Bukowski. They expose an underbelly of America that I can't help but find fascinating. I should probably talk to my shrink about why I find this nasty stuff so hard to resist.
Truth be told, we should all probably talk to our shrinks about why we find this stuff so fascinating.
It might help us the next time we fall in love with some tough-talking Tony Soprano-type.