I will be going to the polls in a couple of hours and will post my impressions after I return. I am taking advantage of my retired status to vote in the middle of the day and avoid the lines that may exist in the early morning and late evening hours. As this dreadful campaign winds down to its long awaited end, the New York Times has managed to get access to Donald Trump’s campaign to see what the mood is like.
Donald J. Trump is not sleeping much these days.
Aboard his gold-plated jumbo jet, the Republican nominee does not like to rest or be alone with his thoughts, insisting that aides stay up and keep talking to him. He prefers the soothing, whispery voice of his son-in-law.
He requires constant assurance that his candidacy is on track. “Look at that crowd!” he exclaimed a few days ago as he flew across Florida, turning to his young press secretary as a TV tuned to Fox News showed images of what he claimed were thousands of people waiting for him on the ground below.
…In the final days of the presidential campaign, Mr. Trump’s candidacy is a jarring split screen: the choreographed show of calm and confidence orchestrated by his staff, and the neediness and vulnerability of a once-boastful candidate now uncertain of victory.
Trump’s shameless behavior continues and the latest episode is where he blatantly mischaracterized the way that president Obama dealt with a heckler. Obama came to the defense of a protestor who heckled him during his speech, asking the crowd to settle down and saying that the heckler should be respected, but Trump later said that Obama went on an unhinged rant against him. This was just too much for Charlie Pierce who was there when Trump spoke and had finally had enough.
I have a respectably high tolerance for this stuff, and I can’t tell you why this particular incident shoved me over the International Crapola Line for good. Maybe it was because it was so ludicrously provable a lie. Maybe it was the smug confidence he has in his own mind that that he is talking to a country full of thoroughgoing morons. Maybe it was how little he cared that people could go on their fcking telephones and find out how dreadfully obvious his lie was. They could do it right at that moment, while he was telling the lie.
He didn’t care. He never has cared. His contempt for the democratic processes and for the norms of self-government is matched only by the deep contempt he has for all the suckers who mistake his contempt for the American experiment for their deep disappointment in it. He has measured their intelligence by his heavily leveraged net worth and found them hilariously lacking. We are all the subcontractors who build his indomitable ego for him and, as such, he can stiff us according to his customary business plan. His campaign long ago became a sickening charade performed by a grotesque charlatan. I had enough, finally. I left the hall.
He is not the only person who has had it up to here. So has The Rude Pundit, who can be very rude, who says that the arguments that people use to try and persuade Trump voters to change their minds, by pointing out all Trump’s faults, are the very things that the voters like about him
Of all Trump’s faults, and there are many such as his ignorance, vindictiveness, xenophobia, misogyny, nativism, bigotry, and racism, the one thing that baffles me the most is that his sociopathic levels of lying do not seem to faze his supporters. All the other things can be rationalized away. It can also rightly be argued that lying by politicians is common and the Clintons are no exception. But Trump’s lying is so blatant and so easily contradicted by facts that are readily available that to not see it is to have shut one’s eyes to reality.
It is really quite amazing.
Trump’s basically Stephen Colbert’s character “Stephen Colbert” on steroids, and the living embodiment of truthiness: “a quality characterizing a “truth” that a person making an argument or assertion claims to know intuitively ‘from the gut’ or because it ‘feels right’ without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts.”
And yet you’re not baffled that the Clintons’ lying does not faze their supporters. Double standard? Cognitive dissonance?
I’ve been saying it for a long time -- all those “faults” you list for Trump are not bugs, they’re features.
Let me start by lies done by politicians. The last time I saw such an act post election back in the old country, the capitol caught on fire in amidst of a riot. The reason is the same why Trump supporters can’t be phased even if their idol contradicts himself. Take the issue of factory resettlement. Wherever he campaigned he pointed out how these companies went overseas or down to Mexico, but conveniently omitted, that it happens because a) corporate tax loopholes benefit them, if the HQ isn’t in the US, so a lower or no tax can be paid (or, in GE’s case, IRS paid them 1.4 billion upon not paying taxes) and b) wages go upwards in the US, so it’s beneficial to do it anywhere on less money. These are hardcore capitalist decisions, which is as American it gets.
Yet, there are people who don’t benefit from the American dream, as such they blame that shortcoming on business as usual politics. Since they don’t get privileged by the good suburban life, they reject the existence of other privileges, like not getting shot or harassed. 12 Angry men meets How to kill a mockingbird, and the verdict was in before Trump entered the stage. What he did, and I’m surprised almost no one talks about, at least not in the media: siphoning out the voter base from under the Tea Party leadership, who were the first ones to introduce neofascism into the wider debate. So long he stays on point finding anything else but their own responsibility, he can say anything, it’s not their community.
I know of a similar man in power, I’ve met him once, he toys with the alt-right just enough as necessary, and can even shove down their throats that cozying up to the same guys they vilified for decades and occupied the country, and the people goes along with it, because it’s not the guy who lied. As long as the majority will stand for ideals that protect majority interests, Trump will remain having loyal followers. To highlight one perspective, they believe multicultural=white genocide. Not much reasoning with that.
I’m just happy that in a few short hours the race to 2020 begins.
It is quite clear that Mano knows they both lie, while also noting that Trump’s habitual lying is vastly in excess of any other candidate. There is no dissonance there, the observations are completely compatible.
Why, thank you Tabby! Just what I needed to hear on such a morning as this. I can hardly wait for the begging phone calls to start all over again.