Figuring Out What The Donald Is Up To

They can’t, but I think I can.

Donald Trump is the Post-Modern Candidate, who isn’t really running to win office at all.

It should have been obvious months ago, but the commentariat is only beginning to take notice the second week of August.

Erik Erikson, 10 August: If Trump wanted to lose to Clinton, what would he be doing differently?

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Damon Linker, The Week, 11 August, Something Is Going On With Donald Trump:

The media just can’t shut up about Donald Trump. In no small part, this is because his behavior appears to be inexplicable.

Where the most gaffe-prone big-league politician might go off the rails once every week or so, Trump does it several times every week, and sometimes several times every day. And where the most gaffe-prone big-league politicians quickly take back their verbal flubs, clarify, and apologize, hoping to move on before inflicting maximal political damage on themselves, Trump invariably doubles down, needlessly dragging out the controversies for endless days.

This seemingly self-destructive behavior has spawned, in turn, a cottage industry of armchair psychologizing of the man, who’s been repeatedly diagnosed as suffering from narcissistic personality disorder or maybe just “insanity.”

Something is going on with Donald Trump. But we don’t need a precise clinical diagnosis. It’s possible to examine Trump’s behavior over the past few weeks and reach a tentative understanding of his bizarrely self-subversive and flagrantly unpresidential statements and actions, including his tendency to flirt with inciting political violence.

Trump wants to lose the election.

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The Hill, 11 August, Dem Accuses Trump of Sabotaging His Own Campaign:

Donald Trump is trying to sink his own campaign, Rep. André Carson (D-Ind.) contended Thursday.

“It appears as if he knows he will not be the next president of the United States, so he’s trying to sabotage this thing because he’s not used to losing,” Carson said during a press briefing in the Capitol.

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Face it, Trumpkins, you’ve been had.

Donald Trump isn’t a conservative. Donald Trump is not a down-home American like you. Donald Trump is a conniving, cynical New Yorker. He’s 70 years old, fabulously wealthy, already famous and already living a completely sybaritic life-style. For him, moving from one of his luxury residences to the White House and having to be president would be like moving down-market in housing and getting a full-time job. It would be a real bummer.

He is not into personal sacrifice. Donald Trump cares about political ideas the way I care about Olympic soccer matches. Donald Trump has no real personal political ideas or preferred policy agenda at all. He’s just a businessman, a total pragmatist.

Donald Trump is not your buddy and he is no kind of patriot. Trump likes money, tail, and Trump, period.

So we’re watching him campaign. He carelessly contradicts himself. He routinely takes one position and then the opposite one. He constantly offends rival candidates and significant potential voting blocs. He does exactly as he pleases, casually taking time away from campaigning, often spending no money, doing no advertising and no fund-raising. He behaves like a crazy person, defying convention, political correctness, and rather frequently ordinary good manners and civility as well. He says something embarrassing or outrageous several times a week.

One is obliged to conclude that either Donald Trump is crazy and the most incompetent candidate for office in human history, or he is motivated by something other than winning.

Since we know that Trump is a close friend of the Clintons, on the whole, I like best the theory that contends that Trump has really just been running, all along, in order to kill Republican chances in what ought to have been a landslide Republican year and to make possible the impossible: Hillary’s election.

He’s having lots of fun. He’s soaking up the limelight and laughing at all the dopes supporting him, while mischievously dropping another turd in the electoral punchbowl every now and then and watching the commentariat have fits over what they think is a gaffe.

Donald Trump is having huge personal laughs at the expense of all you oiks out there who are supporting him on the basis of total BS and he is enjoying himself even more playing the role of unruly Groucho to the Mainstream Media’s Margaret Dumont.

Trump is, in essence, the practical man of business who is casually kicking into a heap of rubbish the whole superstructure of American presidential politics, reducing all the theories, ideals, and PC taboos into useless impotent debris by sheer chutzpah.

All of this, I believe more and more as time goes by, is not a genuine political campaign at all, the Trump campaign is guerilla theater, an exercise in deliberate mockery and transgression, that has not only succeeding in bamboozling the American electorate and satirizing our political system on a fantastic scale. Trump has turned reality on its head, defeating all the real Republican candidates and usurping the GOP nomination for the presidency with pure comedy theater. Reality TV has defeated reality.

Trump has, in essence, demonstrated that energy, shameless aggression, and flamboyant pandering will, in America, triumph over ideas, serious policy, and decorum every time. H.L. Mencken is laughing cynically in Hell.

Yet, he obviously has not been doing all this just to prove that he can outdo the late Andy Warhol in art. There has got to have always been a substantive purpose there, and that purpose could only be one thing: electing Hillary. After the inauguration, just watch the multi-billion-dollar contracts for Infrastructure and new Federal housing start rolling Trump Enterprizes’ way.

Hillary is so scandal-beset that it is actually miraculous that she isn’t under indictment right now, and she is so unappealing as a candidate that I think it is only a matter of time before the Donald really will have to eat a hamster on live television to keep poor Hillary’s candidacy limping in the direction of the finish line. But you can count on him. If it takes eating a hamster to elect Hillary, that hamster is toast.

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Earlier Trump Faux-Candidacy commentary:

25 February — What If?

31 May — What Happens When the Dog Catches the Car?

04 August — Is Trump Deliberately Throwing the Election?