Mollie Hemingway does not like The Donald. Neither (above) does Uncle Sam the eagle.
We’re now in month eight or so of Trumpmania. He has a core of support, and the media can’t get enough of him. The effect he has on people is fascinating. But it’s also remarkably annoying. Every casual utterance by Trump leads the news cycle until the subsequent outrage. And everyone flips out. Trump flips out. His fans flip out. His enemies flip out. The media flip out.
It’s enough to make you hate everyone. In fact, it does make me hate everyone. That probably includes you. …
I admire Donald Trump’s ability to singlehandedly control national conversations, expose the media as corrupt, and generate popular support through sheer force of entertainment will. I am serious. I think he’s an absolutely brilliant communicator operating at levels we’ve not seen before. He is the closest thing to the physical incarnation of the Sweet Meteor of Death 2016 that some have been praying for. Oh, and as someone who truly loathes the Republican Party for its incompetence and impotence, I sometimes love that he’s destroying it with such efficiency.
But he’s a demagogue with no real solutions for anything at all. He’s a narcissist who takes no responsibility for the negative consequences of his ill-conceived and incoherent verbal spews. He flip-flops incessantly. He is not honest when called to account for previous things he’s said. He insults individuals and groups of people gratuitously. His ideas always involve an expansion in the size and scope of government. And his blow-ups seem perfectly timed to help people in the party he’s not running in.
Read the whole thing.
SDD
What is routinely and particularly galling is the asymmetry of response to to the mobs. Whether it’s the Black Live Matter bunch or the Occupy bunch or a mob of loony students in Silliman Courtyard, the demands of these mobs are not only taken seriously, they often get a lot of what they want from lawmakers and administrators. But the Tea Party mob or the anti-immigration mob or anti-abortion mob simply gets dismissed as extremists.
The response to Black Lives Matter is a mad scramble to make sure that blacks are not subject to the rare overreach of police. The response to the Planned Parenthood revelations was to double down (really, how difficult would it have been to simply stop federal funding and let PP get their abortion money from donors?). The response to Occupy was endless demoniztion of their target. The response to the Tea Part’y was endless demonization of the Tea Party itself and calling in the IRS to shut them up. The response to the Sanctuary Cities mobs is approbation. The response to the “enforce the immigration laws” mob (not sure a majority of the country constitutes a mob) is”go f**k yourself.”
Donald Trump understands this dynamic and has simply decided to become the Uber Mob leader. He is Howard Beale discovering that millions of people are shouting out of their windows with him. It must feel pretty good to a man with a Trump-sized ego. In the end, the Network will decide they have to assassinate him, too.
BMD
They asked for an angry blonde white man. They got one. Deal with it.
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