I didn’t think it could be done, but Rory Sutherland, in the Spectator, makes (sort of) a case for supporting Trump.

I’m not sure about my prefrontal cortex, but if I were American, my amygdala would vote for Donald. Because, in primatological terms, Trump is a beta male’s idea of what an alpha male should be. Trump does what most normal people imagine they would do if they had a billion dollars: he enjoys it. He buys a plane with his name on it and flies around mouthing off. It reminds me of visiting Texas, where I realised that Texans were exactly what my Welsh farming relatives would have become if they’d had oil instead of sheep.

He’s also unapologetically American — one of your own. Somehow we like our leaders to magnify the flaws of the cultures they represent. It’s why Britain is led by a slightly vague but amiable posh bloke, France is run by a man who visits his mistress on a moped and Germany is run by Rosa Klebb. This ‘vote your national stereo-type’ thing is definitely a trend. And I haven’t even mentioned Russia because I often drink tea in hotels.

Trump could only be American. And much as elite opinion despises his banausic tribe, America really would not be America without them. The country owes its success to the fact that, for a few hundred years, it became the natural homeland for the world’s overconfident loudmouths, blowhards, wiseacres and minor assholes. It didn’t get rich through agonising about safe spaces and the gender assignment of bathrooms. It got rich because of people called Vinnie building things.

Read the whole thing.

The German Chancellor

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The Hollywood Reporter’s Michael Wolff interviews The Donald at his Rodeo Drive mansion (which he visits roughly once a year). His conclusion is that Trump is having the time of his life.

Trump will turn 70 on June 14, but he shows no sign of fatigue even as our conversation drifts toward 11 p.m. He’s been at this since either 4 a.m. or 6 a.m. (he offers different times at different moments). “Today, I’m up at six in the morning, I’m meeting some of the biggest people in the world. I then had to give a speech to a big group, then I had to give a speech at 12 to [Dole Food mogul] David Murdock, [real estate magnate] Donald Bren, tremendous guys. Then I had to drive to Anaheim and give a speech in front of thousands of people. Then I came back and did more meetings, then I did a fundraiser tonight, then I did Kimmel. And now you. You’re not a two-minute interview guy.”

He hands me a water bottle from the refrigerator (it only contains water and about a dozen pints of ice cream), and we walk through the dark house decorated with hotel-like furniture (a four-star rather than a five-star hotel lobby). He reclines, still in his standard boxy suit, tie slightly loosened, with his Haagen-Dazs on an overstuffed couch in the living room (he asks me not to put my water bottle on the fabric-covered ottoman).

If there’s any pattern to his conversation, it’s that he’s vague on all subjects outside himself, his campaign and the media. Everything else is mere distraction. But I press him about Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley billionaire who, earlier in the day, has admitted to funding the $140 million Hulk Hogan lawsuit against Gawker. Thiel also is his most prominent Silicon Valley backer and will go to the convention in July as a pledged delegate. But Trump needs reminding who he is, and then concludes he must be a friend of his son-in-law Jared. (“Wow, I love him! So he funded it for Hulk Hogan? You think Hulk Hogan would have enough money, but he probably doesn’t.”) Indeed, Trump doesn’t appear to be interested in Silicon Valley, except to roll off his numbers on each social media platform. (“On Facebook, I have close to 8 million people. On Twitter, I have 8.5 million. On Instagram, I have over a million people. I’m inching on 20 million people. I have friends, somebody that’s a great writer, where they write a book and call me up and say, ‘Can you do me a favor, can you tweet it?’ ” “Can you,” I interject, “tweet my book, please?” “I will!”)

Finishing his pint, he reflects again on the remarkableness of the campaign, asking his traveling staffers, Corey Lewandowski and press secretary Hope Hicks, as well as his son-in-law, to confirm again how remarkable it is. Lewandowski recites the latest polls (as of press time, they show Trump inching to within a few percentage points of Clinton in a head-to-head matchup), and Trump, with something beyond confidence, seems to declare de facto victory.

I broach his problems with women and Hispanics and the common wisdom that he’ll have to do at least as well with these groups as Mitt Romney did in 2012. The “pivot” is the word more politico pros are using to refer to his expected turn to the center. “Unless,” I offer, “you think you can remake the electoral math.” He says he absolutely can. So no pivot. “It’ll be different math than they’ve ever seen.” He is, he says, bigger than anything anyone has ever seen. “I have a much bigger base than Romney. Romney was a stiff!” And he’ll be bigger with the people he’s bigger with, but also he’ll be bigger with women and Hispanics and blacks, too. He believes, no matter what positions he holds or slurs he has made, that he is irresistible.

Read the whole thing.

The interview reveals what we already knew: Trump is pathologically narcissistic and egotistical, Trump is surprisingly ill-informed, and Trump is shameless. But Trump-supporters do not care. They think this bozo is their personal messiah, who is going to wreak vengeance on the national elites on their behalf and make petite bourgeois America once again feel like the center of the universe.

The problem, it turns out, is that so much of the Republican base is made up of people who may actually be even stupider than the liberals. They do not follow politics. They don’t really know who voted how, who takes what positions, or who actually accomplished what. They have no understanding of political reality or sense of history. As far as these people are concerned, the Republican elites in Washington have enjoyed perfect control of Congress for decades and decades, and have only failed to thwart Obama, win the Culture Wars. throw out all the Mexicans, and repeal Obamacare because they are in cahoots with the enemy. Paul Ryan is a RINO, Ted Cruz is a RINO. Everybody is a RINO. One of my commenters today complained that the Republican-controlled House and Senate failed to “abolish Obamacare.”

In reality, estimates of the number of attempts to repeal Obamacare vary, but as of last January it was something like 62 times. Republicans have tried both straight-up votes and the Budget Reconciliation process again and again and again. Additionally, Republicans arranged to challenge the Obamacare mandate via the court system, successfully getting to the Supreme Court twice, with good arguments, only to fail each time. (There are those who believe Chief Justice Roberts was gotten at, and compelled to change his vote.)

So, all those political geniuses out there, whose expertise is primarily based upon Reality Television, are counting on The Donald to supply the principled leadership that professional Republican political leaders lack. They complain bitterly that the GOP nominated Mitt Romney, the governor who passed Romneycare in Massachusetts last time, but they do not care a bit that Donald Trump has come out for Single-Payer Healthcare and has been historically to the left of Romney on essentially everything.

Max Otworth found the rise of Trump predicted in a ’60s Sci-Fi novel:

[T]he visionary writer Frank Herbert saw Trump coming way back in 1965, and painted a prophetic picture of Trump’s future political legacy in his epic sci-fi series Dune.

Herbert probably knew Trumps name at the time, though through fear of a financially crippling lawsuit, thought it wise to change it to Vladimir Harkonnen. The name was created by combining Trump’s political Idol Vladimir Putin, real estate giant HAR, and the German word konnen, meaning power.

Just look at the Harkonnen banner, created to represent two tufts of orange hair arranged haphazardly to cover a deeply receded hairline. …

Read the whole thing.

Pals

We obviously do not know what was said, but witnesses reported that Donald Trump conferred by telephone with Bill Clinton just prior to announcing his campaign.

Washington Post:

Former president Bill Clinton had a private telephone conversation in late spring with Donald Trump at the same time that the billionaire investor and reality-television star was nearing a decision to run for the White House, according to associates of both men.

Four Trump allies and one Clinton associate familiar with the exchange said that Clinton encouraged Trump’s efforts to play a larger role in the Republican Party and offered his own views of the political landscape.

Clinton’s personal office in New York confirmed that the call occurred in late May, but an aide to Clinton said the 2016 race was never specifically discussed and that it was only a casual chat.

Read the whole thing.

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Back in Late March, Stephanie Cegielski, a former Trump Campaign Communications Director, confessed that Donald Trump originally had no intention to win.

Even Trump’s most trusted advisors didn’t expect him to fare this well.

Almost a year ago, recruited for my public relations and public policy expertise, I sat in Trump Tower being told that the goal was to get The Donald to poll in double digits and come in second in delegate count. That was it.

The Trump camp would have been satisfied to see him polling at 12% and taking second place to a candidate who might hold 50%. His candidacy was a protest candidacy. …

What was once Trump’s desire to rank second place to send a message to America and to increase his power as a businessman has nightmarishly morphed into a charade that is poised to do irreparable damage to this country if we do not stop this campaign in its tracks.

I’ll say it again: Trump never intended to be the candidate. But his pride is too out of control to stop him now.

You can give Trump the biggest gift possible if you are a Trump supporter: stop supporting him.

He doesn’t want the White House. He just wants to be able to say that he could have run the White House. He’s achieved that already and then some. If there is any question, take it from someone who was recruited to help the candidate succeed, and initially very much wanted him to do so.

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MSNBC reported on an interview with Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign chairman and chief strategist, which disclosed that Donald Trump has no intention of personally doing all the work of the presidency, even if he wins.

Manafort sat down with the Huffington Post’s Howard Fineman for a fairly long interview, and while the two covered quite a bit of ground, there was one exchange in particular that stood out for me.

The vice presidential pick will also be part of the process of proving he’s ready for the White House, Manafort said.

“He needs an experienced person to do the part of the job he doesn’t want to do. He seems himself more as the chairman of the board, than even the CEO, let alone the COO.”

This is no small acknowledgement. For months, it’s been clear that Trump has no meaningful understanding of public policy or even how government works at a basic level. By any fair measure, his ignorance and incompetence about affairs of state is unlike anything Americans have ever seen in a major-party presidential candidate. The question has long been when we can expect Trump to get up to speed.

And the answer is, he has no intention of doing any such thing. Day-to-governing and overseeing the executive branch apparently represent “the part of the job he doesn’t want to do.”

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All these little details support the theory I advanced back in February, that the Trump candidacy was never intended to win.

Suppose Bill Clinton figured out the sole, solitary possible way that he could shove a big, fat monkey wrench into the Republican Party’s Presidential Election Campaign’s works.

Let’s say, for instance, that Old Bill knew another feller, that he had a buddy, a good friend, not in politics actually, but a fellow in some respects kind of like himself, brash, shameless, fond of the ladies, appetitive, hugely out-going, and larger-than-life. Bill’s friend, like himself, would be a wealthy and successful person, a celebrity, a performer, and a chap vigorously able to go after what he wants free of ethical inhibitions.

One can picture Bill sitting down with his pal Donald, and saying, “Donald, old boy, I need you to do Hillary and me a solid. The good news is that the whole thing is going to be one of the greatest larks of all time, and together we are going to make history. This is really going to be a hoot! If it works, you get all the billions of dollars of federal contracts, leases, and subsidies you can use, and Hillary will appoint you ambassador to the Court of St. James. If it fails, sheeeit! you get to be president. This is a no-lose operation.”

Suppose it was slightly more complicated:

Donald Trump, last year, is unhappy with the Obama Administration’s mishandling of the economy, foreign policy embarrassments, and the general atmosphere of American decline. He also doesn’t like the Republican emphasis on conservative ideas and he has no sympathy with the rarified idealism of Bush-era Wilsonian Foreign Policy activism. The idea of running in the Republican primaries as a protest candidate has occurred to him.

He would get to ventilate his personal opinions, throw his weight around, and have an impact. Hell, he might win a state or two somewhere. He’d have himself a place in the History books, and as a former presidential candidate he would have a bit more influence and enjoy more respect when he did his business deals. Come to think of it, he would probably even get a little more tail. The aroma of political power does things to chicks.

Trump is reluctant, though, to alienate his pals the Clintons, so he decides to talk it over with Bill. Trump assures Bill that he means Hillary no actual harm, but as Bill thinks about all this, his grin gets wider and wider. Trump running may not really injure Hillary one bit, but it sure could make an unholy mess of the Republican race.

Bill Clinton advises Trump to be himself, and to come out loudly with all the nationalist, protectionist, working-class-hero kind of BS that Jim Webb was peddling in that book of his. What Bill is proposing is, in essence, that Trump should run as a democrat in Republican clothing. The campaign will be all democrat class warfare and promises of special government interventions for Trump’s voters, all served up under a nice Republican sauce made up of flag-waving patriotism.

Obviously, all of this turned out to match the temper of the times, the mood of the low-information voter, perfectly. No one could have predicted that it would sell quite so well, not Bill Clinton, not The Donald himself.

And now Trump is approaching the position of the the dog who actually caught the car he was chasing and then has no idea what to do with it.

How Mencken would laugh!