It’s Trumpertainment! ; E!-Bear ; Fun Times at Circus Got-GOP!
Well Huffington Post has decided to relegate direct coverage of Trump’s daily activities to its Entertainment page even as they will still cover polling etc on their Politics page. So I thought I would kind of hitch a ride on that. But as amusing as all this is to a certain type of smug DFH know-it all type (like me!!!) it is increasingly not really funny at all.
(edit) I was going to take this a different direction but given the Trump/McCain brouhaha I think I will just open the fun for everyone to jump in.
Trump or GOOP 2016 Open Thread
Donald Trump is the best reason why the US should have a confiscatory estate tax and implement strict controls on the “perfectly legal” methods used to avoid the estate tax.
Donald Trump is a Democratic campaign poster.
As jokingly as the media likes to paint Trump in my minds eye most all the other campaigner are as about as incredulous as can be. Unfortunately our state of the country and economy is no laughing matter of entertainment unless you are part of the ignorance. The media will do anything and everything it can to discredit Trump because they are so fearful of any real meaningful change…”To succeed in life you only need two things, ignorance and confidence”. Mark Twain.
If Trump were an Austrian corporal with a following of rabid haters……
He is playing to the haters.
Donald Trump is the face of the GOP unmasked.
My concern is akin to that of Ilsm.
A couple of decades back Rush’s pronouncements were self-validating among the Dittoheads. That is the natural reaction of his most rabid followers to something that didn’t match their past experience or didn’t sound logical was more often than not something like this:
“Wow I didn’t know that! Man I never thought about it that way! Thanks Rush, Megadittos!!!!”
We don’t have to violate Godwin’s Law here, throughout the 20th century we saw Cults of Personality on both ends of the political spectrum and some in between, many gained their own enduring labels: Francoism/Phalangism, Maoism, Peronism. Perhaps its most egrious form was in Stalinism where he was acclaimed even by many westerners as the greatest scientist EVER!
The question I was going to raise in this post was exactly this: is there a level of Trumpism that will brook no opposition but instead convince themselves that despite everything Trump is right. Because Trump. And this struck me most a couple of days ago in perusing comment threads here and there when his supporters lauded him for being a “straight shooter” a “truth teller”, “telling it like it is” even when that truth would often change within the same statement, numbers in play at the beginning of a rant would change to bigger numbers by the end, $8.5 billion change to “more than $10 billion” based on no documentation at all but still was backed by “Trump revealed his financials!! See!!”
Well no I didn’t see. Rush didn’t release complete financial statements and still less audited ones. He released a summary and then a “stated” version of his FEC submittal which even in complete form would have only revealed ranges with the top being “$50 million or above”. Which Trump “stated” meant $1 billion here and $3 billion there. But it was all good. Because “Trump wouldn’t lie. Which we know because he tells the truth”.
Alrighty. Because I have seen how this works. When I was a boy everything any Chinese person needed to know was provided in one convenient source: The Little Red Book
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/works/red-book/
These days I guess the analogue is Art of the Deal. Everything you need to know.
Been poking around the Intertoobz. And things are a little odd.
One Trump/McCain is reported everywhere and dominating nowhere.
Two most of the outrage is being reported secondhand as in “GOP Elite Blast Trump”. Where is the base on this?
I think Trump weathers this storm. Walker wants to talk about Gay Marriage. Ted Cruz wants to block Obama State Department nominees over Iran. Boehner sounds bound and determined to defund Planned Parenthood. Heck Cosby is getting more top line coverage than Trump’s attack. It is not being ignored but there are few signs of it catching fire and cutting the legs off under Trump.
Time will tell.
Bruce,
I worry less about trump, he is no Catiline, see DeLong last night.
The ‘base’; that is worrisome, if trump or someone else were good as Hitler or Reagan,………
Fascism is here it is wrapped in any number of the flags, lifting the “good book”, spreading the true hate.
While the McCain thing is not ridiculous as it sounds. Vietnam POW’s were no saints, too many signatures, too many confessions. No one was court martialed. Mostly because they were pilots, officers and careerists.
The military industry complex has to push back on trump not worshipping career militarists.
Is US fascism the Mussolini roman catholic or the aryan style?
We should look at this episode of the Donald as just another effort at keeping his name and image on Page One of the national media, and lots more pages than that. I suggest that it is very unlikely that Trump thinks he has any serious chance of winning a nomination for a GOP run for the Presidency, but like many of the other GOP candidates, he is using this campaign season to reignite his brand. He is a genius at self promotion. I would guess that all this attention is costing him very few dollars and when the smoke clears we will find The Donald starring in yet some new “reality” TV program, or similar merchandising effort. Merchandising, that is the name of his game and,, for that matter, the game played by many other members of the political class. He may have been irritated that yet another Bush was racking in huge speaking fees in spite of having little to say of any value to the listeners. So much cash left on the table is an irresistible draw for the Business Man.
Jack I think you misread Trump.
The key to The Donald is that he believes his own press clippings. Especially the ones that he dictated to his press agents. He doesn’t believe that he is a genius at self-promotion, he believes that he is first and foremost a genius period, and then a genius in finance, investing and marketing all of which allows his natural genius to shine through.
Personally I think he is deluded in this, he just ain’t that smart and has confused being born on third base with being Brooks Robinson, just a hard working ball player with some natural skills. In this we can contrast him with two people with fairly equivalent styles: Rush Limbaugh and Glen Beck.
Glen Beck clearly has some self-awareness of who he is, where he came from, and where his talents lie. Which is why he has on occasion self described as a “Rodeo Clown”.
Rush on the other hand has no such self-awareness and seems to believe without any more than surface irony that he really DOES “have Talent on loan from God”.
You seem to see Trump as just G Beck 2.0, I see him as just an other version of Rush-Blow. Which in my mind makes him much more dangerous.
I actually had much the same opinion as you when all this started out. Because back then Trump had a plausible out, he could blame any flame-out on the other guys and the RNC just shutting him out. But as I argued in a previous post that self-exit is narrowed by the fact that he is polling top-two. His success has trapped him in the game and the only exit available to one of his self-deluded ego is straight ahead and to the top of the victory podium. Any other path leaves him a has-been or in his terms the worst of all possible things: “LOSER!!!”
Trump is Riding the Tiger. And knows he will get chewed up and shitted out if he falls off. So IM(not so)HO he will hang on and try to ride it out.
If you read Rick Pearlsteins take I think you’ll end up fairly optimistic. Haters gonna hate. But we can laugh right in their face when Trump leads the parade.