The entire rest of this election year is going to be like this. The whole campaign.
"Don't forget. We're like the piggybank that's being robbed. We have the cards. We have a lot of power with China," Trump told an audience in Fort Wayne, Indiana. "When China doesn't want to fix the problem in North Korea, we say, 'Sorry, folks, you gotta fix the problem.' Because we can't continue to allow China to rape our country. And that's what they're doing. It's the greatest theft in the history of the world."
This is Donald Trump in his element. America is going down the tubes, and it's foreigners to blame. Foreigners here in America. Foreigners outside America. We are a righteous national piggybank that the crafty foreigners are stealing from. We are the righteous white folks that the foreigners are coming to rape. It's probably telling that Donald Trump started out complaining that Mexico was "sending us" their rapists, and sees Chinese policy disagreements with the United States as them "raping" America. It seems to be a core theme of xenophobic frothing the world over.
But even though China, in Trump's words, is committing "rape" against the U.S., he isn't mad at the Chinese. On the contrary, he said, he is angry with U.S. leaders for allowing it to do so.
Of course, Donald Trump himself manufactures many of his own conspicuously mediocre Trump-branded products in China, so he would be the precise sort of leader that should get a stern talking-to, by his theoretical standards. He's been blistering in his theories about Apple, and Ford, and why Nabisco opening a plant in Mexico means he'll never eat Oreos again, but you'll pry the income from his imported Trump ties and suits from his cold, dead, too-small hands.
"I mean, China's great. No problem. I'm not angry with China," he continued. "And I'm not angry at Japan. And I'm not angry at Mexico. I'm not angry at anybody. I'm angry at our leaders, because they are grossly incompetent and they shouldn't have ever been elected to do this job. Terrible."
He's all over the map. His mind is a helium balloon in a hurricane. There’s no evidence Donald Trump has ever started a sentence knowing how he intended to end it. China is a rapist, but Donald Trump thinks it's not even their fault—it's ours for doing something to deserve it. It’s what we were wearing, he supposes, all of us parading around in our Trump suits and Trump ties like gigantic galloping doofs.
The whole sodding campaign is going to continue to be an unending stream of these ridiculous, grotesque, nonsensical verbal grunts and burps from a man who brought the entire Republican Party to heel with ease by merely standing himself up in front of a microphone and saying out loud all the things previously reserved for Fox News online comment threads. That's all it took, and that's what the entire rest of the campaign is going to look like whether Trump sweeps the nomination or whether by some vanishingly unlikely miracle the party manages to wrestle control away from him in order to give the nomination to whatever other chump feels like putting their face between a desperate Republican ruling class and the clenched fist of the Republican base.
We're all going to need booze in our breakfast cereal, each and every one of us, before this is done with. This isn’t going to be a presidential campaign—it’s going to be a national trepanation.