Loud. Brash. Rude. Pig Ignorant. Neo-Fascist. Billionaire Skinflint. Racist as a mack truck with Confederate mud flaps. Generally these would be considered character flaws and completely disqualifying traits for someone who aspired to run a Dairy Queen, let alone the free world and the most powerful economy and military on earth. Not so with Donald John Trump.
He regurgitates bigoted conspiracy theories and lies like he has them on a permanent loop, yet his supporters do not recoil, they do not feel embarrassed, or shamed by many, many, many gaffes and outright lies that come flying out of his bilious pie-hole at just under sub light speed.
His fans feel validated by him. They feel that they finally and at long last have found the perfect candidate for them. One who “tells it like it is,” and gives a completely unrepentant verbalization to every paranoid delusion generated by the voices in their own heads.
Donald Trump is the candidate for unrestrained GOP id. He’s exactly the candidate that the GOP has needed to run for many years, and he’s exactly the candidate that the country needs to see finally go down in golden flames before it begins to break the fever swamp dreams that have bogged our politics down to a dead stop for just as long.
I actually wrote a diary called “Run Trump, Run!” four years ago.
But wouldn't it just be teh Awesome if this Know-Nothing Fact-Mangler were to actually RUN for President? He’d suck every microbe of air out right out of the GOP by mainlining the wildest, and I do mean WILDEST, screwball theories from World Net Daily like a Firehose. Check out this latest one from his a recent Run-On Interview with Fox (The Not A Factual News Network).
During an interview aired Friday night on Sean Hannity's TV show, Donald Trump branched out beyond his simple commitment to birtherism as a political issue -- and also advocated vigorously for another conspiracy theory regarding President Obama, alleging that Bill Ayers was the true author of Obama's 1995 book, Dreams From My Father! ... Look, he was born 'Barry Soetero.' Somewhere along the line, he changed his name," said Trump -- referring to the surname of Obama's mother's second husband, Lolo Soetoro, whom she married four years after Obama was born. "I heard he had terrible marks, and he ends up in Harvard. He wrote a book that was better than Ernest Hemingway, but the second book was written by an average person." "You suspect Bill Ayers?" said Hannity. "I said, Bill Ayers wrote the book," Trump replied.
Isn't that just like Golden?. "He was Born Barry Soetero?" Which means he was born four years after he was already born, doesn't it?
Bill Ayers was the real author of “Dreams from my Father.” Trump said that. Really. He did. It hasn’t gotten any better since then.
This week both the Washington Post and the New York Times have come out and publicly called Trump a “liar.” First the WaPo:
Let’s focus today on Trump’s lies. Trump’s claims about “thousands and thousands of people” in New Jersey celebrating the 9/11 attacks have already been debunked by both The Post’s Glenn Kessler and PolitiFact’s Lauren Carroll, so we don’t need to belabor them here. So let’s focus on the lies not covered in the above tweet.
The article then lists just a sampling of his more recent whoppers and concludes:
So to sum up: Trump has lied so many times about so many things during the past week that it’s difficult to keep track of all of them. But it doesn’t matter whether one focuses on Trump’s attitudes about crime or American Muslims or trade policy. He lies about all of these issues. And he will continue to lie as long as it works for him.
Then the NYT:
America has just lived through another presidential campaign week dominated by Donald Trump’s racist lies. Here’s a partial list of false statements: The United States is about to take in 250,000 Syrian refugees; African-Americans are responsible for most white homicides; and during the 9/11 attacks, “thousands and thousands” of people in an unnamed “Arab” community in New Jersey “were cheering as that building was coming down.”
In the Republican field, Mr. Trump has distinguished himself as fastest to dive to the bottom. If it’s a lie too vile to utter aloud, count on Mr. Trump to say it, often. It wins him airtime, and retweets through the roof.
This phenomenon is something I’ve seen before. I recognize it. Many, many years ago, when I was a young lad, I had a girlfriend who decided that she was going to become a devotee of Louis Farrakhan. It didn’t take long for that decision, along with others, to drive a stake through the heart of that relationship, but in the process I did get to listen to various and sundry speeches by Minister Louis and quickly discovered a pattern and strategy to them.
As we’ve all heard he would often say something during the course of his sermons that was quite inflammatory [“Judaism is a gutter religion”], if not outright bigoted. Typically lines such as these get repeated in the media, but what doesn’t get mentioned is that his criticism isn’t just for jews, he criticizes everyone, predominantly black people who let themselves be led astray, who fall into crime and drugs and fail to successfully manage their own lives. His message is, at its core, decidedly conservative.
What he argues is that there are forces in the world, white, jewish and even black, who strive to tear you down. These forces want you vulnerable and weak so they can prey upon you. They want you to suffer. You must be wary of them, you must be wiser than them. And you must trust that only he, only Minister Farrakhan will tell you truth about them, and about yourselves, and you will know he has told the truth as you see them attempt to discredit, discard and destroy Farrakhan. They don’t want you to hear his “truth,” they will bully and attack him for sharing it with you, that is how you will know who the forces who oppose you are. It’s a brilliant strategy.
He says something completely off the rails, people come down on him for it and he goes “See, I told you. They wanted to silence me to keep you in the dark.” It absolutely can’t miss.
And thus it works perfectly for Trump as well. He says something crazy like “Where is the president’s birth certificate and his college records,” feeding into the idea that he is some type of fraud, a chimera, a mirage, that can’t possibly, genuinely exist. “That guy really can’t be a smart, capable, and compassionate as he pretends to be—it’s a trick!” that is lurking in the back of the minds of millions of conservatives who filled the ranks of the tea party and voted for GOP representatives in Congress and our statehouses who have nothing but retrograde policy solutions from everything from women’s health to labor and religious “freedom” initiatives.
All of this is why the more the “liberal media” points out Donald’s endless litany of lies, distortions and delusions, the better he seems to do with his growing base. He’s telling them exactly what they want to hear, and frankly, already believe. He’s their filter, their muse.
A new Washington Post-ABC News poll proves what gut instinct was already telling you: The Donald Trump campaign’s success is built on the backs of racists. Or, if you prefer a gentler word that captures the immigrant-specific questions the poll asked, xenophobes. Either way, fear of foreigners coming to America to white people isn’t just driving the rhetoric of the Trump campaign, but it’s, quite predictably, shaping who his supporters are.
“Nearly half of GOP-leaning respondents in the poll — 47 percent — both support the deportation of undocumented immigrants and oppose accepting refugees from Syria and other Mideast conflicts,” the Washington Post reports. “If a GOP-leaning voter supports deportation, there is a 79 percent chance she or he also opposes Syrian refugees, compared with 54 percent if they oppose deportation.”
There was actually a full documentary made about Donald Trump nearly 20 years ago just about the time that his casino ventures were beginning to fall apart. That film is now available on Youtube.
It describes how Trump originally got his start in real estate thanks not only to his father’s financial support [“my dad gave me a ‘small loan’ of $1 million”] but also his father’s political connections which allowed him to use tax abatement’s as capital to acquire his properties and then in cases such as demolition on the land that ultimately became the home of the Trump Tower, he would continue to scrimp on expenditures by literally using undocumented immigrant labor to remove asbestos-filled buildings without the benefit of gloves or respirator gear. Those immigrants were known as the Polish Brigade.
Thirty-five years ago, a small army of illegal immigrants was used to clear the site for what became the crown jewel of Donald Trump’s empire.
The 200 demolition workers—nicknamed the Polish Brigade because of their home country—worked 12-hour shifts, seven days a week with no overtime to knock down the old Bonwit Teller building and make room for Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.
According to testimony in a protracted civil suit in federal court, the laborers were paid $5 an hour or less when they were paid at all. Some went unpaid after the contractor had financial troubles. A few never received even the paltry sum that was owed them for their dirty and hazardous efforts preceding the construction of Trump’s monument to his own wealth.
So on top of everything else, he’s a wage thief who has knowingly employed on more than one occasion exactly the kind of undocumented worker he began his campaign railing about. Surprise, he's a hypocrite. But his base isn’t gonna care. Not one wit.
The more the media pound on him for this kind of thing, the better he’s gonna do with the type of people who would beat up a black lives protester, and a homeless man that they mistakenly thought was an “illegal,” or stalk a mosque armed with AR-15’s and out each member publicly and believe we need to bring back waterboarding even if it doesn’t work and on and on.
Fortunately as much as he’s getting his fans to love him with this bile, the rest of the nation is completely turned off by it and his chances of pulling together enough electoral vote, particularly with Latinos, are practically nil minus slim. In the process, he is exposing the soft racist underbelly of the GOP for everyone to openly see and view. They really truly can’t deny it anymore, not even a little bit. This may be why he’s begun to stick reporters in “the pen” so they can’t talk to his supporters and see just how batshit crazy bigoted they really are. He’s thrown away the dog whistle and replaced with the a foghorn and bullhorn. This is why we’re seeing reports that some GOP donors are growing severely nervous and panicked about Trump and are gathering to try and take him down while others in the GOP are openly calling him a fascist. Which, of course, will simply force him to go back on his pledge and run as an independent and totally hose whoever else the GOP tries to run.
All in all I see this as a Win/Win/Win scenario. If Trump gets the nomination, he goes down in flames demographically and embarrasses the GOP for the third time in a row. If Trump doesn’t get the nomination he goes rogue and embarrasses the GOP for the third time in a row. And even if he doesn’t go independent and actually gets beaten and goes away—fat chance, I know—his crazy racist fan base isn’t going to go away, they’ve been exposed now and any candidate they switch to is going to have to deal with them and try and keep them happy, but quiet so as not to scare the bass fish.
There’s only one way I can think of to respond to that scenario. Popcorn.
