It's Not About Trump-- It's About His Supporters

We keep getting told not to demean Trump because if you do, you'll be demeaning his supporters. Yeah, so? Isn't that the point? 

No one with an ability to exercise a modicum of critical thought would take Trump seriously for two seconds. Every word out of his mouth is a lie or is so twisted that its relationship to reality is approximately equivalent to the reality on reality TV-- mixed with the prescription drugs that inhabit the tiny brains of the people who drool over Trump's simple-minded nonsense. Watching him in New Hampshire yesterday (see the video above) almost had me feeling sorry for Jeb Bush, Rand Paul and the Republican Party Establishment. Almost-- they created these people and they deserve what they're getting back now.



Bruce Bartlett, a supply-side economist who worked for Ron Paul, Jack Kemp, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, nailed Trump and his supporters a few days ago:

Oh, I love Donald Trump because he exposes everything about the Republican Party that I have frankly come to hate. It is just filled with people who are crazy, and stupid, and have absolutely no idea of what they are taking about. And the candidates, no matter how intelligent they may be, just constantly have to keep pandering to this lowest common denominator in American politics.

Trump is all manipulation, bombast and bluster. And I imagine his supporters have the collective IQ of a guppy. Even when he's briefed by his advisers and he says something correct-- like Iraq being a colossal error-- he sounds like he has the communication power of an angry, egomaniacal 11-year-old. "And who's better at infrastructure than Trump?" I guess that's based on... the Central Park skating rink?

In his glorification of Douglas MacArthur he went off on a typical Trumping tangent:

I went to the greatest school. You had to be really smart to get into that school. The Wharton School of Finance. You've got to be really smart! And that was before I was Trump! You've got to be really smart. That's like the hardest one.

Forbes lists the top business schools in the country, and Wharton, part of the University of Pennsylvania, came in at #4 after Stanford, Booth (University of Chicago) and Harvard. The average GMAT score is 720, lower than the 740 at Stanford or the 730 at Harvard. So, there he was, twisting the truth again, for one purpose: self-aggrandizement... which his pathetic supporters just eat up.

Yesterday, writing for the Washington Post, Dave Weigel spent some time looking at why Trump is legitimately making sense to some voters-- including Democrats-- among hard-hit Michigan workers. Trump is, insists Weigel, "the candidate talking most directly about the loss of manufacturing jobs to foreign countries." He acknowledges that Bernie Sanders "has adopted a similar theme," not bothering to mention that Bernie's entire political career going back several decades has centered on these concerns and that Trump's concerns are ego-driven psychosis, probably because that isn't how disaffected Michigan voters he talked to see it. "Trump's appeal here," he wrote, "captured something that went beyond policy: a brew of impossible nostalgia coupled with a pledge to destroy other countries, most notably China, in negotiations."

“Back when our economy took a dump, I had to go to Afghanistan,” said Bob Parsons, 51. “I had to work there as a product relations manager, just to build our retirement back up. There were no jobs in Michigan to be had. They’re not fair to what’s coming over, as far as the trade goes. For example, 100,000 cars come over here; 5,000 go over there. I like what he says: If they don’t let us send them there, we don’t take their stuff.”

Parsons’s wife, Brenda, who’d been nodding her head, interjected to explain why she trusted Trump.

“He’s a businessman,” she said. “Being a businessman, he knows the ways around. I don’t think he’d go to Congress and ask. I think he’d just do it.”

Bob Parsons explained that Trump could ignore lobbyists. It was lobbyists, hungry to sell out America for a buck, who weakened the trade deals, he said.

“You wouldn’t believe how many young kids I met in Afghanistan who have their degrees but can’t find jobs at home,” he said. “I compare Donald Trump to Ronald Reagan. He lets people know what he’s going to do, not what to ask for.”

When he hit the stage, Trump delivered. He went after China. He played out one of his favorite scenarios, in which he works the Oval Office phones, ignoring the president of Ford-- and his lobbyists-- and wages tax war on his company for shipping jobs to Mexico.

“Ford is building a $2.5 billion plant in Mexico,” he said.

Booooo!

“I’ll actually give them a good idea. Why don’t we just let the illegals drive the cars and trucks right into our country?”

Yaaaaaay!

“I would say, the deal is not going to be approved, I won’t allow it. I want that plant in the United States, preferably here. So then I only have one question: Do they move the plant to the United States the same day or a day later?”

The crowd burst into fresh applause.

What Italian workers saw in Benito Mussolini and his Fascist Party in the early 1920s is what Michigan workers like Brenda Parsons see in Trump. Mussolini opposed class war and replaced it with nationalism and a yearning for Rome's glory days as an empire. He demonized Slavs in the same way Trump demonizes Mexicans. In a speech Mussolini gave in 1920, a year before he was first elected to parliament, he told the crowd in Pula:

When dealing with such a race as Slavic-- inferior and barbarian-- we must not pursue the carrot, but the stick policy... We should not be afraid of new victims... The Italian border should run across the Brenner Pass, Monte Nevoso and the Dinaric Alps... I would say we can easily sacrifice 500,000 barbaric Slavs for 50,000 Italians...

Mussolini pursued imperialistic policies in Africa with the same reasoning: Blacks are "inferior."

In 1922 King Victor Emmanuel III asked Mussolini to form a government in the hope of avoiding a civil war. A year later Mussolini invaded Corfu, a Greek island in the Adriatic. Italians ate up the cult of the strong man which Mussolini promoted through propaganda. He bragged about how smart he was, what a great athlete he was, a skilled musician and a gifted philosopher. I bet Brenda Parsons doesn't know squat about Mussolini-- if she's even ever heard of him.



Trump was at the Iowa State Fair Saturday-- for a few minutes. Philip Bump wrote about it for the Washington Post and summed up the press conference in a couple of lines:

Donald Trump loves Iowa. He loves children. He'll spend as much as it takes, up to a billion dollars. He'll bend Congress to his will as he bent the New York City Zoning Commission. Jeb Bush is a puppet of lobbyists and Scott Walker ran Wisconsin poorly.

All bullshit-- other than the last line.

The guy who wrote the song "Ahab the Arab" in 1962, Ray Stevens, thinks all Mexican "illegals" should be forcibly removed from this country. He didn't mention undocumented immigrants from other countries. But he's been telling anyone who will listen that he thinks Trump is the only one who can get America back on track. And speaking of tracks, this is the last one he released: