America is the first country to ever elect a Mad King, and the way things are going, we may be dumb enough to do it twice. Matt Taibbi on Trump 2020
Early evening, August, Cincinnati
Much of America loves its Mad King, whose works are regularly on display. Russians under Ivan the Terrible used to watch dogs being hurled over the Kremlin walls when the tsar’s mood was bad. Americans have grown used to late-night insults tweeted at nuclear powers from theRoyal lunacy is traditionally a secret, but in Twitter-age America it’s a shared national experience. We are all somersaulting down and out the sanity chute.
The rescue is failing. We’ve gone from Trump being skeptical of Obama’s citizenship to musing about “very fine” neo-Nazis to a Twitter version of “Go back to Africa.” In Cincinnati, even his most hardcore supporters talk about wanting him to shut up. “I wish,” says one fan, “he would edit himself a little bit.”
Now they’re writing their own script. They can’t arrange for Jake Tapper to be fed to a shark, so they’ll settle for rolling Donald Trump into Washington. It’s hard to see right now, it being the end of our society and all, but the situation is not without humor, in a “What does this button marked ‘Detonate’ do?” sort of way. Can America shoot itself in the head a second time? It sounds, appropriately enough, like the premise of a Trump TV show.
Trump takes his sweet time to get to the podium. He gives photogs every pose: the clap, the wave, the arms akimbo, the blown kiss. It’s “I’m Too Sexy” brought to politics. A lot of candidates scan crowds like they’re looking for the sniper, but Trump acts like he’s ready for a mass frottage session.what he does.”
“The Democrats spent more time attacking Barack Obama than they did attacking me, practically,” he says, to cheers. “And this morning that’s all the fake news was talking about.”Nobody draws bigger catcalls than the “fake” news media. Trump knows this and pauses to let the bile rise. He expresses pleasure at being back in “the American heart land,” which he pronounces as if he’s just learned the term.
Press accounts will call this a lie, and of course it is, and even the crowd knows it. But they cheer anyway.
Walls and his friend James Monroe drove in from Kentucky. Walls is an enthusiastic Trump supporter, Monroe not — he’s here for the show. Though they disagree about Trump’s politics, they express surprise he won the last time.US President Donald Trump, US Presidential Election campaigning, Cincinnati, USA – 01 Aug 2019This is a common theme, when you ask people what impresses them most about Trump, i.e., that he won despite the press.
Ronald Reagan once took working-class voters away from Democrats by offering permission to be proud of the flag. Trump offers permission to occupy the statistical American mean: out of shape, suffering from gas, poorly read, anti-intellectual, treasuring things above meaning, and hiding an awful credit history.
Trump’s political strategy is primitive but effective. He picks something that polls badly, and kicks it in the crotch. Then he backs off and lets three eternal truths do the rest of the work.Two: In a fractured political landscape, the so-called “legitimate” politicians who are his main competition will spend more time fighting one another than him. This is because intellectuals can’t bring themselves to take Trump’s dumbed-down version of politics seriously.
A representative from Wisconsin compared Democratic moderates to child abusers, and debonair Twitter subversive Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez cried, “Hell, no.” When Pelosi yawned back at Ocasio-Cortez and three other young female members for “their public whatever and their Twitter world,” the Bronx congresswoman called Pelosi out for the “singling out of newly elected women of color.”
For the 10 millionth time since he launched his presidential campaign, Trump seemed to make a fatal miscalculation, revealing himself to be a meandering, incoherent racist on a political suicide mission. But we should recognize by now, these outbursts by Trump are never fatal.
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