So, where did Donald Trump learn his distinctive and bizarre political style of crude, unlimited aggression? Who taught Donald to how to throw his opponents off their stride by confusing them by breaking all the rules?

Olivia Nuzzi says that The Donald learned how to win by being a complete ******* from the master, flamboyant attorney and anti-communist attack dog (who exposed commies with Joe McCarthy and sent Ethel Rosenberg to the chair) the Left’s all-time ultimate bête noire Roy Cohn.

Donald Trump’s brash and bullying style was learned at the heel of Roy Cohn, one of America’s most infamous lawyers.

They met at Le Club, a private disco on the Upper East Side frequented by Jackie Kennedy, Al Pacino, and Diana Ross, according to Trump: The Saga of America’s Most Powerful Real Estate Baron. Donald Trump, the young developer, quickly amassing a fortune in New York real estate and Roy Cohn, America’s most loathed yet socially successful defense attorney who had vaulted to infamy in the 1950s while serving as legal counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy.

The friendship they forged would provide the foundation for Trump’s eventual presidential campaign. And in hindsight, it serves as a tool for understanding Donald Trump the Candidate, whose bumper sticker-averse declarations—undocumented Mexican immigrants are “criminals” and “rapists”; Senator John McCain is “not a war hero”—have both led him to the top of the Republican primary polls and mistakenly convinced many that he is a puzzle unworthy of solving. It may appear that way, but Trump isn’t just spouting off insults like a malfunctioning sprinkler system—he’s mimicking what he learned some 40 years ago.

A longtime friend of Trump’s who was introduced to the candidate by Cohn told me it’s a shame that Cohn’s not alive to see the chaos his protégé has wrought.

“He would have just loved what’s going on right now,” the friend said. “Roy liked upsetting the establishment.”

Read the whole thing.

Well, what do you know? Maybe Donald Trump really does have a certain kind of conservative roots, after all.

Tom Nichols blames the Left for the rise of Trump.

By assailing sensible conservatives as sexists, racists, and imbeciles, they paved the way for a jackass who embodies their worst fears.

The American left created Donald Trump.

When I say “the left,” I do not mean the Democratic Party—or, solely the Democratic Party. Rather, the pestilence that is the Trump campaign is the result of a conglomeration of political, academic, media, and cultural elites who for decades have tried to act as the arbiters of acceptable public debate and shut down any political expression from Americans with whom they disagree. They, more than anyone else, created Donald Trump’s candidacy and the increasingly hideous movement he now leads. …

It’s pointless to try to explain Trump in terms of political platforms because Trump himself is too stupid and too incoherent to have any kind of consistent political views about anything beyond hating minorities and immigrants. Nuclear weapons? “With nuclear, the power, the devastation is very important to me.” Drugs? “That whole heroin thing, I tell you what, we gotta get that whole thing under control.” A random word generation program could do better.

To understand Trump’s seemingly effortless seizure of the public spotlight, forget about programs, and instead zero in on the one complaint that seems to unite all of the disparate angry factions gravitating to him: political correctness. This, more than anything, is how the left created Trump. …

Today, … we have a new, more virulent political correctness that terrorizes both liberals and conservatives, old-line Democrats and Republicans, alike. This form of political correctness is distinctly illiberal; indeed, it is not liberalism at all but Maoism circa the Cultural Revolution.

The extremist adherents of this new political correctness have essentially taken a flamethrower to the public space and annihilated its center. Topics in American life that once were the legitimate subjects of debate between liberals and conservative are now off-limits and lead to immediate attack by the cultural establishment if raised at all. Any incorrect position, any expression of the constitutional right to a different opinion, or even just a slip of the tongue can lead to public ostracism and the loss of a job. (Just ask Brendan Eich.) There is a huge vacuum left by this leftist attack on speech, and Trump is filling it.

Read the whole thing.

The faces Chris Christie made at Donald Trump’s Tuesday press conference provoked lots of questioning commentary and also mockery.

Trump’s Latest Acquisition: Christie’s Soul:

Chris Christie seemed trapped in a nightmare at Trump’s press conference Tuesday night—and in a lot of ways, he was and it’s all his fault.

Chris Christie gazed up at the back of Donald Trump’s golden head in a Mar-a-Lago ballroom the evening of Super Tuesday. His mouth was slightly open. His brow was furrowed. His eyes were wide and uncertain, as if adjusting to the soft light of the crystal chandeliers that adorn his new world for the first time since Friday, when he shocked the political class and the members of his own inner circle by endorsing Trump’s candidacy. …

Trump told the cameras, confidently. “I’m a conservative, but I’m a commonsense conservative.”

Behind him, Christie seemed to shudder as his political career passed before his eyes. …

Christie’s mouth curled into a frown, and then it opened.

But all that escaped was dead air.

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Chris Christie Says Donald Trump Is Not Holding Him Hostage:

I don’t know what I was supposed to be doing,” Christie said. “I was standing there listening to him. All these armchair psychiatrists should give it a break. … He was answering questions from the national press corps, and I was listening. This is part of the hysteria of the people who oppose my Trump endorsement. They want to read anything into it that can be negative.”

“So no, I wasn’t being held hostage,” he added. “No, I wasn’t sitting up there thinking, ‘Oh my God, what have I done?'”

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“It profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world … but for some cabinet or judicial appointment, Christie?”

— paraphrasing Thomas More to Richard Rich in Man For All Seasons.

Trump supporters talk as if it’s in the bag, but they are basing that belief on news announcements that “Trump Has Won” this primary or that. In reality, Trump has only come in ahead with a plurality in several primaries. His opponents again and again got the majority of the votes. Trump is still very likely to arrive at the convention with more delegates than any other candidate, but not with a majority, not with enough to gain the nomination. All the other Republicans need to do to defeat Trump is to unite behind one other candidate.

Of course, when that happens, Donald Trump is going to scream and cry that he was robbed and it was all so terribly unfair. And then he’ll go and run third party, delivering the election to Hillary. I would say that the fact that we can predict that, that is, most probably, the way that Donald Trump will react establishes that we all recognize that Trump habitually lies; that Trump invariably takes the most self-indulgent, self-flattering view of reality; that Trump is not any kind of loyal conservative or Republican; and that, when his own personal agenda conflicts with the best interests of the country, we think that Trump could be predicted to do the selfish, unpatriotic thing.

So, tell me, except as some kind of middle-finger-in-the-air gesture of Nihilism, how can any of you possibly justify supporting someone like Donald Trump?

Detail, John Melhuish Strudwick, A Golden Thread, 1885, Tate Gallery.

This ought to be a locked-in-concrete, dead-certain Republican year. America has a two party system, and Americans have an instinctive habit of giving both sides a turn at the presidency. Unless the incumbent walks on water like Ronald Reagan, after 8 years, the American public is hankering for a change and typically turns the ball over to the other team.

Beyond that, running against Hillary is a lot like running against the mean old woman of every Blues song, who moreover seems likely any day to be indicted.

But, along comes Trumplestiltskin.

In Scenario 1, Trump wins nearly all the rest of the primaries. The GOP caves and gives him the rest of the votes he needs for the nomination, and then the Party splits. Movement conservatives, the people who nominated Barry Goldwater and elected Ronald Reagan, and the intellectuals (very possibly including the Neocons), conceivably including socially-moderate, but snobbish, Country Club Republicans take a hike. In significant sectors of the Party, voting for The Donald is just infra dig, and some contend that even Hillary would make a more responsible first magistrate. Trump loses, Hillary becomes President.

Scenario 2, Trump has a ceiling, getting a plurality of delegates on the first ballot, but no majority. Conservatives and GOP Establishmentarians will die in the last ditch before nominating Donald. The knives come out. Trump delegates are pulled away on subsequent ballots, and a brokered convention nominates Cruz or Rubio. Donald J. Trump is no sportsman. He immediately forms a Third Party, and in the election proceeds to pull all the numbskulls and Reagan democrats away from the GOP candidate. Hillary becomes President.

There is no scenario 3.

The Trumpkins are going to say: This isn’t fair. We’re having a Revolution, and the rest of you are supposed to get on board. Donald Trump is our only hope of Change. Change you can believe in. And the rest of us, the sane people, are going to make little circle next to our temples with our index fingers at the idea of turning all the power of the Presidency over to a totally-unprincipled, egomanaical airhead with the morals and manners of the most spoiled rich kid in the entire country. Some of us actually know what happened when they made Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, nicknamed “Caligula” (“Little Boots”) by the Army, Emperor. It was not pretty.

Timothy L. O’Brien explains how Trump blew his biggest real estate deal ever.

Through Trump’s rise, fall and rebirth, there was one major real estate project that he tried to keep. The tale of what happened to that property should be of interest to anyone looking for insight into how Trump might perform as president. It was a deal of genuine magnitude and would have put him atop the New York real estate market. And he screwed it up.

The deal involved Manhattan’s West Side Yards, a sprawling, 77-acre tract abutting the Hudson River between 59th and 72nd Streets and at the time the largest privately owned undeveloped stretch of land in New York City. The Yards were a vestige of the Penn Central Transportation Company, a failed railroad enterprise that, in 1970, filed what was then the biggest corporate bankruptcy in U.S. history. In the wake of that collapse, Trump leveraged his father’s ties to New York’s Democratic machine and local bankers to acquire pieces of Penn Central’s holdings, including the Yards, in the mid-1970s.

Unable to reach agreements with the city and community groups on how to develop the site, Trump let his option lapse in 1979. His Yards saga began in earnest in 1985, when he bought back the property from another developer for $115 million.

Trump’s plans for the property included office and residential space; a new broadcasting headquarters for NBC; a rocket-ship-shaped skyscraper that would have been the world’s tallest building and cast shadows across the Hudson River into New Jersey; and a $700 million property tax abatement from the city as an incentive to build it. The $4.5 billion project — which Trump called Television City — would have been New York’s biggest development since Rockefeller Center.

Like London’s Canary Wharf, begun a few years later, Television City promised to reshape a significant portion of a major urban center. “It’s an opportunity to build a city within the greatest city, and I don’t think anybody’s ever had that opportunity,” Trump said in an interview at the time.

With the property, financing and plans in place, a large part of what Trump needed to do to make Television City a reality was to bring together different stakeholders: locals (like the late actor Paul Newman) who wanted parks and a less imposing development, and a mayor, Ed Koch, who had his own outsize personality and who was trying to balance the city’s redevelopment with the needs of the area’s longtime residents.

Had Trump appeased these interests, he might have made the project a reality. Instead, the author of “The Art of the Deal” quickly became entangled in an epic, only-in-New-York round of public fisticuffs with Koch in the spring and summer of 1987. The brawl devolved into name-calling — and ultimately helped doom a deal that could have had vastly different results if Trump chose different tactics.

After learning that Koch was going to turn down his request for the $700 million abatement for Television City, Trump dashed off a letter to the mayor.

“For you to be playing ‘Russian Roulette’ with perhaps the most important corporation in New York over the relatively small amounts of money involved because you and your staff are afraid that Donald Trump may actually make more than a dollar of profit, is both ludicrous and disgraceful,” he wrote to Koch.

Koch wrote back to Trump, warning him to “refrain from further attempts to influence the process through intimidation.” Koch then held a press conference, during which he released the letters and said he wasn’t going to give Trump the abatement.

Trump doubled down, holding his own press conference and calling on Koch to resign. The battle played out in a carnivalesque stream on TV and on the front pages and gossip columns of newspapers.

Koch said Trump was “squealing like a stuck pig.” Trump said Koch’s New York had become a “cesspool of corruption and incompetence.” Koch said Trump was a “piggy, piggy, piggy.”

Trump said the mayor had “no talent and only moderate intelligence” and should be impeached. “Ed Koch would do everybody a huge favor if he would get out of office and they started all over again,” he noted. “It’s bedlam in the city.”

Eliot A. Cohen, in the American Interest, points out that Donald Trump is not the solution to America’s problems, he is really the most alarming symptom of the disease.

Politicians have, since ancient Greece, lied, pandered, and whored. They have taken bribes, connived, and perjured themselves. But in recent times—in the United States, at any rate—there has never been any politician quite as openly debased and debauched as Donald Trump. Truman and Nixon could be vulgar, but they kept the cuss words for private use. Presidents have chewed out journalists, but which of them would have suggested that an elegant and intelligent woman asking a reasonable question was dripping menstrual blood? LBJ, Kennedy, and Clinton could all treat women as commodities to be used for their pleasure, but none went on the radio with the likes of Howard Stern to discuss the women they had bedded and the finer points of their anatomies. All politicians like the sound of their own names, but can anyone doubt what Trump would have christened the Hoover Dam—or the Washington Monument?

That otherwise sober people do not find Trump’s insults and insane demands outrageous (Mexico will have to pay for a wall! Japan will have to pay for protection!) says something about a larger moral and cultural collapse. His language is the language of the comments sections of once-great newspapers. …

The current problem goes beyond excruciatingly bad manners. What we increasingly lack, and have lacked for some time, is a sense of the moral underpinning of republican (small r) government. Manners and morals maintain a free state as much as laws do, as Tocqueville observed long ago, and when a certain culture of virtue dies, so too does something of what makes democracy work. Old-fashioned words like integrity, selflessness, frugality, gravitas, and modesty rarely rate a mention in modern descriptions of the good life—is it surprising that they don’t come up in politics, either? …

The rot is cultural. It is no coincidence that Trump was the star of a “reality” show. He is the beneficiary of an amoral celebrity culture devoid of all content save an omnipresent lubriciousness. He is a kind of male Kim Kardashian, and about as politically serious. In the context of culture, if not (yet) politics, he is unremarkable; the daily entertainments of today are both tawdry and self-consciously, corrosively ironic. Ours is an age when young people have become used to getting news, of a sort, from Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert, when an earlier generation watched Walter Cronkite and David Brinkley. It is the difference between giggling with young, sneering hipsters and listening to serious adults. Go to YouTube and look at old episodes of Profiles in Courage, if you can find them—a wildly successful television series based on the book nominally authored by John F. Kennedy, which celebrated an individual’s, often a politician’s, courage in standing alone against a crowd, even a crowd with whose politics the audience agreed. The show of comparable popularity today is House of Cards. Bill Clinton has said that he loves it.

American culture is, in short, nastier, more nihilistic, and far less inhibited than ever before. It breeds alternating bouts of cynicism and hysteria, and now it has given us Trump.

Paul Kengor sums up the embarrassing spectacle which has constituted the Republican Presidential Nomination Campaign thus far

The whole thing is depressing. Consider, Rubio and Cruz, the two genuine conservative front-runners, are the hardworking sons of extraordinary immigrants from Cuba. They are quintessential American success stories. They are both solid Christian family men. And into the race comes a sudden self-proclaimed born-again conservative who laughs at them and eviscerates them, and is rewarded for it. It’s hard to watch.

All of which brings me back to Trump’s mastery of an altogether new campaign tactic of non-stop rapacious ridicule of opponents within one’s own party. The New Jersey casino founder brashly accused Ted Cruz of everything from being a closet Canadian citizen to cheating when the Donald lost Iowa. Schoolboy-like, Trump threatened lawsuits. Of late, he jumps in the sandbox and taunts Marco Rubio: “choker, choker!”

Can you imagine Ronald Reagan doing this? Reagan’s “11th commandment” was never to speak ill of another Republican. Donald Trump’s commandment is to speak ill of every Republican.

Do Republicans want this as the party’s new face and standard-bearer? Apparently those on the Trump side do. Many of them even assume the insult-king’s persona, dealing with dissenters with similar levels of obnoxiousness, blow-torching Republicans in the way of their Donald.

Like Ace, I originally found Trump’s candidacy amusing, and I smiled with pleasure at just how much he would annoy the liberals and the sell-out professional GOP pols, but watching Trump in action, seeing his shameless mendacity, his infantile self-entitlement and narcissism, listening to his endlessly-repeated boasts and vacuous policy proposals has, in the end, scared the Bejesus out of me.

Trump is a vulgarian and a low-grade moron. Electing him actually could be worse than Obama, and that’s really saying something.

My problem with Trump is that he is a dealmaker trying to make a sale. Right now he’s trying to make a deal with conservatives — so this is the very most conservative we’ll ever see him.

If he gets the nomination, he now starts working on making the second part of the deal with the other party in the negotiations, the general public.

So this is the most conservative we’ll ever see Trump — this is the absolute most conservative he’ll ever be — and he’s not conservative at all, except, possibly, on immigration. He combines liberal policy impulses with frankly authoritarian or even fascist ones, which he thinks are “what conservatives want,” because, frankly, he conceives of us as ugly-minded, stupid dummies who get off on this shit.

That’s why he didn’t put the “Ban Muslims” line in a more palatable, persuasive form, like “Reduce immigration from Muslim-majority countries or countries with a terrorism problem to a level where we can vet each individual applicant.”

No, he put it in the most bigoted, ugly way he could think of, because that’s about his level, and because, also, that’s what he thinks “conservatives” are.

Even on issues like that, where I would like him to move the Overton Window so we can begin discussing a rational reduction of such immigration until this Jihadist Madness passes from history, I find he doesn’t move it at all, because he makes the issue much more toxic and alienating than it needs to be.

What does Trump actually know about conservatives? He seems to only know five things, which he repeats in such crude ways it’s preposterously insulting. Apparently we “love Jesus,” so he says he does too. He knows we love guns, so he’s so in love with the Second Amendment he wants to make out with it.

Does he ever explain the underpinnings of his belief in the Second Amendment, such that you get the impression if he’s challenged on it, he can break out chapter and verse on the amendment like Reagan would have and remained resolute in his position?

He senses we don’t like Mexicans or Muslims very much, so he wants to ban rapists and terrorists.

He knows we love babies and hate abortions, so he’s reversed himself from being “very, very pro-choice” and even supporting partial birth abortion to being so against abortion you couldn’t believe it. (But he’ll keep on funding Planned Parenthood because they’re a wonderful organization.)

He knows we love the military, so he proclaims himself, seriously, the most “militaristic” guy you’ve ever met. Then sometimes he talks about “bombing the shit” out of people to appease the hawks, and other times about a Ron Paul style isolationism, to appease his substantial Paulite wing.

Which is true? Who the fuck knows. I’m certain on this point he’s not lying, because I don’t think he knows what the fuck he thinks either.

Well, in any event, Trump suppporters aren’t getting my brain.