Donald Trump first become "respectable" to Republicans for promising he'd get to the bottom of whether the first non-white American president was truly an American at all. Donald Trump vows he'll deport every last person living in America who can't produce paperwork proving their individual right to be here. Donald Trump has now taken to asking audiences to raise their hands in personal salute to him. He is simply a repulsive human being, a human septic tank in elegant gold trim.
The result is so over-the-top that every new thing he does defies outrage. Instead, the Trump candidacy mainly continues to confound America's few remaining not-insane people, who are still working to deduce whether any human being could truly be that crap-filled or if it is an elaborate ruse, a morality play staged by some unseen genius who at any moment will whip back the curtain and declare the whole thing to have been an experiment in whether the voters of our nation can still distinguish their asses from their elbows.
And in the meantime, Donald Trump continues to get worse.
Donald Trump's campaign has been relying on the support of Carl Gallups, a Florida-based pastor and radio host, ahead of the state's March 15 Republican primary; the campaign invited Gallups to speak at a rally and touted his endorsement as a "great honor" from a "prominent" leader. Gallups is a fringe conspiracy host who believes the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, CT, was a "staged" "hoax" and that the father of one of the victims was an "actor employed by the Obama administration to take away your guns."
Carl Gallups continues to be all in for Trump. Gallups, for those of you blessed enough to not know, is a lower-tier conspiracy peddler who wraps his schtick in the trappings of Jesus because apparently being a "pastor" who publicly and repeatedly declares that the families of murder victims are all making it up in order to trick him and his audience of human roaches is, in fact, a path to some small bit of fame in America. (You would not know that from the AP article because they deemed it unworthy of mention.)
And while the rest of us wonder if America will do even one little thing to prevent future elementary school children from being murdered in their classrooms by an American with a gun who just feels like killing people that day, the leading Republican candidate for the presidency tips his hat just a bit to the promoters of this notion that maybe, just maybe, Obama killed those children or faked the very existence of those children to make wee little shitstains like Carl Gallups look bad.
Time and time again, the Trump campaign seems to find itself holding hands with the most vile people and groups in America. Is there a possibility that the Trump campaign never realized who Gallups is, or the claims he makes? Perhaps, at first. Is there also a possibility that the Trump campaign has known full well who Gallups is, and the claims he makes, but—as with Alex Jones, another far, far more prominent lunatic who Trump personally heaps praise on—does not give a damn?
Let's suppose we make that a question at the next Republican debate. Dear prospective leaders of our nation, do you believe the current administration staged the murder of school children in a secret plot to take all our precious guns? But would the answer matter? Donald Trump could deny it, and Carl Gallups would understand and forgive him. The Donald Trump candidacy is post-truth, and after years of party obsession over alleged conspiracies from ACORN to Planned Parenthood—all proven false afterwards, not that it has ever mattered—and omnipresent conspiracies about the secret Muslimness of the president (they mean he's black), or the secret Kenyan birth of the president (again: black), or the dozen-ish "Benghazi" theories that continue being promoted by sitting congresspeople despite them all being notably insane, and let us not forget Agenda 21, or Jade Helm, or Mexican-ISIS-ebola, or the omnipresent notion that The Muslims are this close to putting America under Muslim rule, or any other fucking thing you can name, many of which will have their own CPAC panel discussions because they are all very serious conservative things to think, as long as you care fuck-all about evidence or common sense—
—after all of that, can any of us really say that Donald Trump's post-truth, counter-factual, white supremacist, conspiracy-addled open sore of a campaign came out of nowhere? Or did Trump merely deduce the obvious faster than the GOP itself did—that the party was ripe for any zealot who would tell the base every cheap lie they wanted to hear?