So then: Donald Trump's nuclear proliferation ideas. Once a phrase I don't think any of us ever expected to have to use, it has suddenly become a bit urgent because he is very, very likely at this point to be the Republican nominee for the presidency. Which means he will be in charge of those things.
(As a side note: Yes, I am aware that many among us are quite tired of thinking about the short-fingered vulgarian currently scooping up the tattered remains of what used to be a national political party and stitching them back together into a grotesque near-parody of that old party's worst elements, but the collapse of one of the two main American political parties into, well, this is the defining political story of our time. This will be in future history books, kids, and which images are used to illustrate it are at this point entirely dependent on which side wins.)
Note that we said nuclear proliferation, not nuclear anti-proliferation, because Donald Trump's big national security idea is that more countries need to build nuclear weapons. You know, the good ones.
COOPER: Let’s talk about nuclear issues because you talked about this in a really interesting article in The New York Times.
TRUMP: One of the very, very big issues. I think maybe the biggest issue of our time.
First off, we see once again that everything Donald Trump sees or hears or thinks becomes, at that moment, "the biggest." It may never be talked about again, and never once talked about with any seriousness, but everything Donald Trump thinks about he thinks about the most, and everything he does he does the classiest, everything he cares about he cares about bigly. This man quite literally has the brain of a child, and not a very nice one at that. There is no evidence whatsoever that this man has the capability to walk from one end of the White House to the other without pilfering the candlesticks, much less run the nation, and it seems no matter how many television interviews the man gives a bigly chunk of the Republican base considers to be, somehow, impressed by it. This itself may be evidence that the American experiment has drawn to an untimely close.
COOPER: That’s what you said to The New York Times. You said you worried about the proliferation of nuclear weapons the most. You also said, though, that you might support Japan and South Korea developing nuclear weapons of their own. Isn’t that completely contradictory?
TRUMP: No, not at all. Look, you have North Korea has nuclear weapons. And he doesn’t have a carrier yet but he has got nuclear weapons. He soon will have. We don’t want to pull the trigger. We’re just – you know, we have a president, frankly, that doesn’t – nobody is afraid of our president. Nobody respects our president. You take a look at what’s going on throughout the world. It’s not the country that it was.
And there's the reliable second half of our little equation. Everything Donald Trump thinks is correct—and if you want him to talk about it for longer than ten seconds, nine of which smell like burning tires, you are out of luck. Nuclear proliferation is the "biggest issue of our time," and Donald Trump has the idea that maybe our non-nuclear allies need to start deploying some, which is kind of a big deal and definitely an idea that has raised hairs on the back of the necks of any and all foreign policy and military and nuclear experts to hear it, and Donald Trump has literally no explanation for this stance or details to offer for it more substantive than our president is bad.
This is Hucksterism 101. It's snake oil salesmanship, all bluster and quick-talk so that the mark can't get a word in edgewise and won't learn anything if he does, all geared to getting in and out of the conversation before the cops show up. It is the world's worst magician performing onstage, threatening to have the club’s bouncers bounce you if you see through the tricks. It's lunacy.
It doesn't get better. Cooper tries to press the point, and gets nothing better in return. In theory, Donald Trump wants South Korea and Japan to nuclearize because he believes that will allow America to cut and run from the region without having to spend so much dough keeping the erratic North Korea at bay; in practice this would seem to turn every potential conflict in the region into, by default, a nuclear one. If it's an idea worth having, though, it's an idea worth defending, and Donald Trump cannot do any of that because he has reduced Republicanism to its most primal elements, anger and bluster, and like the rest of the party expresses contempt for anyone who thinks maybe his details don't add up.
This isn’t substantively different from Paul Ryan pooh-poohing the great gobs of experts who note that his budget ideas are predicated on finding money-pooping unicorns, it’s just that Trump doesn’t even know the proper buzzwords to eject as chaff when some reporter gets too close to saying so.
The base, though, continues to love this stuff. They don't want nuclear expertise, they want a man who says the opposing president is bad. They don't want an immigration "plan," they want the man who says he'll just round up all the millions of people in question and put them on trains to the Texas border. They. Want. This. Because the last two decades of conservative punditry has primed them to believe Angry Shouting White Guy is the pinnacle of American political thought, and all the government experts and scientific experts and economic experts and so forth are merely obstacles Angry Shouting White Guy has to overcome in order to set things right around here.
They want this. They don't give a damn that Donald Trump clearly and quite dangerously doesn't know what the hell he is talking about. They want this.