My snarky neighbor, Kurt Schlichter, thinks so. And wow, he seems to dislike him even more than I do, if such a thing is possible.
I did note on Twitter this weekend that if there’s anything Trump and his incompetent boobish minions understand less than how delegate selection works, it’s how to run a third-party campaign.
[Update a few minutes later]
Trump’s lies are a loyalty test for his followers:
The Donald Trump of the last week is the exact same Donald Trump many of us saw a year ago or five years ago. He’s always been full of sh*t. He’s always been a total ignoramus when it comes to public policy, lacking the simple sense of patriotic duty to do his homework on the issues. He’s always been a nasty and boorish cad. He’s always pretended to be a conservative while working on liberal assumptions of what conservatives want to hear.
His “punish the women” comments were of a piece with his refusal to condemn the Klan on CNN. It’s not that he wants to punish women who have abortions — I’d bet he’s paid more abortion bills than he will ever sign — it’s that he thinks that’s what pro-lifers want to hear. It’s not that he’s a Klansman or that the pillowcases at Mara Lago come with eyeholes cut out in advance. It’s that Trump thinks lots of his fans like the Klan and he wants to pander to them.
I have heard first-hand stories from people who’ve worked with Trump about how he disparages women’s appearance routinely. That’s who he is. If you’re attacking him because he retweeted a bad picture of Heidi, that’s not you being principled, it’s you getting cold feet. Indeed, I am sure that the same opportunism that has caused so many supposedly principled conservatives to hitch their wagons to Trump is now causing some of them to question their choices, not because Trump has changed but because the climate might be changing around them.
By all means, if Trump continues to unravel (a huge if), please abandon Trump. But don’t think for a moment that the rest of us will automatically take your word for it when you say this or that statement changed your mind about the man. He hasn’t changed, your calculations have.
But can I go back to Michelle Fields for a moment? I think that whole affair was really instructive.
Trump is a master of a kind of passive aggression — though it can often just seem like plain old aggression. When caught in a lie, Trump doesn’t merely stick to the lie, he enlarges it. Not only did Lewandowski do nothing wrong, he saved Trump from an assault! That pen could have been a bomb! A bomb!!! (Remember when he suggested a protester who charged the stage was with ISIS?)
By embracing and enlarging the lie, Trump gives his most ardent fans no escape. They must either fall in line with yet another comfortable story about how their leader is both supremely right and a victim of deceit or open themselves up to the possibility that this one instance of deception and boorishness isn’t unique but utterly representative, which it is.
I think many of us have known people like this. Inveterate liars and other kinds of sociopaths test the limits of polite society. They break the implicit bargain that says you can get away with lying only so long as everyone agrees not to notice. Obvious lies are insults, because they rest on the assumption that the person being lied to is either too stupid to recognize the lie or too weak to say anything about it. In this sense, Trump has been insulting his biggest supporters from day one.
It certainly appears that way.
[Update a while later]
More thoughts from Roger Kimball:
The point, as Andrew McCarthy observed in a much-read column, is that Trump is the effect, not the cause of the deterioration of our shared political assumptions. Many people believe that Trump is leading a new populist movement. In fact, he is the garrulous Howdy-Doody puppet of forces he represents but does not control. As Gurri observes, “the dizzying rise of Trump can best be understood as the political assertion of a newly energized public. Trump has been chosen by this public, . . . and he is the visible effect, not the cause, of this public’s surly and mutinous mood. . . . The right level of analysis on Trump isn’t Trump, but the public that endows him with a radical direction and temper, and the decadent institutions that have been too weak to stand in his way.”
I think that’s right. Gurri believes that the public’s “surly and mutinous mood” has something to do with a new “revolt of the masses,” one brought about partly by the decadence of our political institutions but also, and more pointedly, by the destabilizing spread of instant if superficial connectedness wrought by the internet.
The problem is neither Obama or Trump, but an electorate that could make them president.
[Update late morning]
Dear Trumpkins, this is why people don’t like you.
They confuse “political incorrectness” with mindless crude boorishness.
[Update a few minutes later]
No, Joe Scarborough, “Republican” is not synonymous with “conservative.”
The flip side shows up in the comments on this Washington Examiner article on Cruz snapping up Trump delegates in Arizona.
The commenters are saying some very nasty things about Cruz, and many are saying they’ll vote the straight Democrat ticket to punish the GOP for that kind of thing.
I’m not sure that would be happening if the main Trump opposition was Jindal, Fiorina, or some of the other alternatives, but it’s hard to say for sure, since the hypothetical nice guys finished last.
The question now is, will the establishment take Cruz over Ryan or Romney?
Rand, you and your friend are making up a list of reasons for a person to vote for Trump. Or at least to stay home on Tuesday if a person cannot bring themselves to take the Sharpie and draw the black line completing the arrow next to his name and then feeding that ballot into the “bleep bleep” ballot tabulator.
I am registered to vote in Wisconsin and you are not — your turn doesn’t come until much later.
Is someone coming to give me a ride to my polling place, the one a mile down the road with the dangerous blind left turn on a hill, thanks to the guy Ted Cruz likes so much? Did I mention it has an inadequate amount of voter parking, especially for a high-turnout primary as we will experience tomorrow?
Rand? Oh, Rand! Voting in this state is now . . . so . . . hard!
Hey, I tweeted your complaint to the Cruz campaign. No response?
But if the Trump campaign won’t show up to get you to the polls, why would you vote for him? It seems to be your single issue.
Because if he’s elected, we’ll all get really nice Trump buses to take us to the polling place.
Plus, our embassies and consulates will open casinos and we’ll make a fortune off the foreigners. It will be part of the country’s total rebranding. “We’re winners, and you can be a winner too!”
240 years ago, Caesar Rodney, suffering from terminal cancer, rode 70 miles on horseback, through a thunderstorm, to cast his vote.
Today, Paul Milenkovic says that driving one mile to a polling place and trying to find a parking place is so… hard.
I’m just saying.
It is. If you want me to cast a vote for Cruz it is hard.
If you want me to cast a vote for the guy having a bromance with the guy who changed my polling place from behind my backyard fence to a mile down the road with the dangerous blind left-hand turn on a hill, it is real hard.
If you want to persuade a guy — in the State of Wisconsin holdings its primary tomorrow — to vote for your guy by insulting that voter . . .
Say, Mr. Wright, you don’t happen to work for the . . . Trump campaign? . . . do you?
(Cue the scene where the heroin addict has hit “rock bottom” as evidenced by his pathetic dry cough; he is in the throes of withdrawal because he has been unable to “score” a “hit.”)
I beg of you man, I just got back from Faculty Senate, where everyone who received the Hilldale Award had a knock on Donald Trump in their acceptance speech. Never mind that the guy responsible for cutting the take-home pay of everyone in that lecture hall just got called a bunch of insults by Donald Trump because that guy endorsed Ted Cruz.
I can’t help myself. I should not vote for Donald Trump. I must not vote for Donald Trump. But after I show my Wisconsin Driver’s License to the clerk to get my voting credential, hand that credential to the next clerk to get a ballot, take the ballot over to that wobbly blue plastic table with the pathetic-excuse panels for voting booth panels, and pick up that Sharpie, my hands are going to be shaking.
Paul, vote for whoever the eff you want.
I really don’t know what you want from me. There seems to be zero rationality to this discussion.
All joking and kidding aside, all I am asking for is respect.
Ted Cruz had been endorsed by a guy who is all about voter suppression, and the senator has turned around and told everyone how great this man is and everything he has done. Everything.
Being a Republican voter from Cook County, Illinois who had his vote stolen from him in a election with a 10-vote margin influences my world view, especially regarding manipulation of access to voting.
I expressed this view in an e-mail exchange with a doctrinaire main-stream media liberal regarding how in Florida, year 2000, absentee ballots of overseas military voters were challenged by Democrats on the same flimsy excuses that my absentee ballot was tossed (I was on an engineering student at Northwestern on a job interview “plant trip”). My concerns were regarded dismissively.
I expressed the same view here, Rand, regarding Voter ID and got the same kind of rude, dismissive response as I received from that Democrat. Republican, Democrat, Socialist, Conservative, Libertarian, it doesn’t seem to be about the process and the Constitutional principle, it is all about the partisan advantage.
There is a party line in Republican/Conservative/Libertarian/Right Blogosphere circles — deviate from it and you are a heretic, or worse yet, an out-and-out fool subject to derision. The refreshing thing about Mr. Trump is that he shrugs off this shaming, from either the Left or the Right, the way that King Kong shrugs off the pinpricks of infantry weapons. Unlike Senator Sanders, he has a sensible perspective on the role of fossil fuels in our common prosperity. I mean what kind of Socialism can you build without scalable energy resources?
I get treated as a fool so I act the part of a fool to get my point across, and then the clueless don’t understand a word I am saying.
I really don’t know how I am going to vote tomorrow, or even if I am going to vote (it has nothing to do with the inconvenience of the redistricted polling place — Mr. Wright, I suggest getting caught up with reading from the archives of a certain Curtis Yarvin, who I learned about from discussions here).
Mr. Trump is certainly playing the part of a fool — Jerry Pournelle recently writes about Newt Gingrich meeting with Donald Trump privately and coming away with the impression that Mr. Trump is no fool. Jerry, by the way, is known for a strain of paleo-conservative thought that maybe a revenue-maximizing tariff (the heresy!) might be a good idea if we want to maintain our Welfare State (and good luck rolling it back).
For the first time in a lifetime, I am voting in a primary having an effect on a presidential election, and I really don’t know whom to vote for. If you want to influence my vote, however, you are going to have to “step up your game” with regard to making a persuasive case.