Happy anniversary to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Oh, what a year it's been.
On June 16, 2015, Mr. Trump stood in the pink-marbled lower lobby of Trump Tower, tossed out his planned remarks to deliver a diatribe against President Obama and the nations he believes are lifting unfairly from the United States, and promised to build a wall along the border with Mexico to keep out “rapists” and those bringing in “crime.”
All the signs were right there, from the beginning. He had a speech, but tossed it aside in order to list off the people and nations he considers to be Losers. He saved his harshest words for Mexican immigrants, who he considered "drug dealers" and "rapists." He held the event in his own branded building, either because it was the grandest venue he could think of or merely the one that would require the least effort on his part. He descended a golden escalator, surrounded by his own employees and summoned movie extras, and we all watched as the Donald Trump presidential campaign launched itself, already going downhill.
Needless to say, he's picked up speed since then.
We probably should have seen the rest coming. Of course the networks were going to fall over themselves to see who could cover him the most—disaster porn is the bread and butter of cable news, and Donald Trump has provided them a nationally touring, slow-motion plane crash. Of course he was going to gain the immediate support of the Republican base: Here was invective against immigrants and Muslims and a dozen other things that would not suffer being couched in a layer of deniability or dog-whistling. Instead, he stated the racist case bluntly and got rousing cheers from racists for doing it.
And of course the subsequent campaign of substance-free yelling and open xenophobia would easily top anyone in the party who couldn't or wouldn't match it. To think otherwise would be to presume there is an ounce of sense left in a Republican base gone completely loopy with conspiracy theories and hatred of a black American president, and heaven knows there's no poll that's been done in eight years that shows any evidence of that.
So happy anniversary, political career of Donald J. Trump, racist and xenophobe, bullhorn made human, proud ignoramus, pied piper of all the dark primate voices that scuttle out of the human mind when the door is left open just a crack. You may at long last be what the Republican Party has been working toward all these many years.