Donald Trump continues to be Donald Trump. Republican audiences continue to love him for it, the press continues to be baffled by his obvious lunacy, satirists continue their mood swings between giddiness at the material and dark gin-assisted depression at the success he's having, and Donald Trump
just keeps rolling along.
“We have to build a wall,” he said, provoking a thunderous standing ovation and chants of “Trump! Trump! Trump! Trump!”
“The wall will be big,” Trump declared. “It will be powerful.”
His only sales pitch: He is smart, and everyone else is dumb.
“I want free trade,” he said. “The problem with free trade: It only works when you have really smart leaders. When you have leaders who are incompetent, it’s a disaster.”
And the crowds believe him, because Donald Trump's whole plan, to the extent that he has one, has been to court only voters who are dumb enough to find gold-gilded braggadocio compelling.
He suggested health care savings accounts as an alternative to Obamacare and finally revealed his plan to get Mexico to pay for a wall on its border with the United States: through a tariff.
I'm someone who had to suffer through the abject moronity of "health savings accounts" for years. It is not so much a healthcare plan as it is a paperwork-based Guantanamo interrogation technique. You want to stop people from coming across the southern border? Forget the wall, just offer them all health savings accounts.
Asked at the press availability about an incident in which Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders [...] ceded his microphone to two Black Lives Matter protesters who stormed the stage at an event this past weekend in Seattle, Trump called it “disgusting.”
“I would never give up my microphone,” he said. “It showed he was weak.”
I would pay good money to see someone try to get between Donald Trump and his microphone.
[M]any of the attendees said they would not hesitate to support Trump if he ran as a third-party candidate.
And so Donald Trump rolls on and on. The Republican Party has finally been whittled down to a base that craves spectacle, has no policy beliefs whatsoever other than that the people they don't like are wrong, cannot function without a steady supply of strange conspiracy theories hatched from God-knows-where, and is uninterested in the subtle racism of dog whistles compared to racism shouted through a megaphone. All the Ted Cruzes, the Louie Gohmerts, the Michele Bachmanns, Steve Kings, Inhofes and Cornyns and Kobaches and Brewers have paved the way for this. The tea party, as a movement, was direct precursor to this. And Fox News has sculpted a national audience tailored just for this, an audience that has been told for years that only extremism will do and that whoever is shouting the loudest is the one who is right. It is the ultimate expression of reality-bending, fact-denying, contentless and proudly contrarian f--k-you-all populism, proudly led by The Richest Celebrity On TV.