I was thinking something more like this - Donald Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Trump:
Posted on 08/11/2015 7:39:33 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Has there ever been a cult of personality built around a personality so unpleasant?
The answer, by the way, is “yes,” but more about that in a moment.
After Donald Trump’s bombastic performance in last week’s debate, it’s clear that the key to his appeal is not his policy positions, which are all over the map. No, it’s all about his personality, and the paradox is that the more unpleasant his personality is revealed to be, the greater his appeal to his core group of supporters.
For example, one of my readers responded to my article criticizing the new EPA rules on power plants by touting Trump as the only candidate with “the balls” to dismantle the EPA. In reality, there is no basis in Trump’s background, his ideology (if he had one), or his public statements to think he would do anything in particular with the EPA. But that’s how Trump is regarded: as a cure for what ails you, as an all-purpose tonic for whatever somebody thinks is wrong with our current system.
People are projecting onto Trump what they want to see. They are pouring into him their fantasies about what could be accomplished by a strong leader who doesn’t care about making people angry. But that’s a dangerous fantasy to indulge.
To be sure, every presidential election is about personality. We are electing a leader who is going to make important decisions and will have to stick to them in the face of opposition. So when we look at a candidate, we’re not just looking at the values he endorses, the ideas he claims to believe, or the specific platform he has announced. We’re also asking whether he’s the sort of person who really means what he says, whether he has the guts to stand up to opposition, whether he has the charisma to rally other people to his cause, and whether he has the negotiating skills to broker deals without getting taken for a ride.
But there’s a difference between this kind of judgment about character and a cult of personality. The cult of personality is a general faith in the leader—whereas a considered judgment about a candidate is based on specific facts about the candidate’s record and past performance. So we might look to a candidate’s record in the Senate. Did he stand up against legislative cave-ins? Has he shown a willingness to buck the establishment? Or we might look to his term as governor. Did he accomplish something important? Has he faced down opposition without folding?
The GOP has plenty of people with pretty good records on this. Ted Cruz and Rand Paul have shown they’re not afraid to lock horns with the GOP establishment. Scott Walker and Chris Christie have pushed through state-level reforms against vicious opposition. You may not like the specific positions of some of these candidates—the overlaps between Chris Christie supporters and Rand Paul sympathizers has got to be pretty much nil. But there’s almost certainly someone other than Trump in this race who has a longer, more consistent track record for promoting any particular policy preferences.
That’s not what support for Trump is about. Support for Trump is not about what a candidate has actually done. It’s about how loudly and recklessly he’s willing to break things. Support for Trump is a protest vote, but not a rationally considered protest vote in favor of a specific cause. It’s an expression of general, unfocused rage. Trump supporters just want someone who’s willing to turn over the tables and call people names and burn the place down. And that’s why the more unpleasant Trump is—the more he insults lady reporters and boasts about how rich he is, the more he thumps his chest about how sexy he is and calls everybody else a loser—the more they love him.
The result is a disturbing kind of cult of personality. I asked earlier about precedents for unpleasant personalities as the basis of a cult. Well, consider the original editions of the “cult of personality,” the ones built up around Stalin and Mao. Or more recently, the one built around Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. All of these men had a certain blustering charisma, much like The Donald, but they could be even more abrasive, boastful, thoughtless, insulting, and crude. And each benefited from the same paradox: the less he adhered to any standards of responsible behavior the more he thrilled his true believers with what a tough guy he was, with how much he was supposedly a strong leader who would face down the capitalist running dog imperialist fascists and deliver for “the people.”
It seems strange that this kind of banana republic cult of personality would find purchase in a republican system (republican with either a small “r” or a big one), but maybe that’s not such an impenetrable paradox. Stable systems of representative government are notoriously slow and resistant to radical change. You can elect a lot of new people to Congress, as insurgents on the right have done in recent years, but the old party leadership stubbornly clings to their positions, and if the last winner of a presidential election is opposed to your agenda, then congressional leaders can’t get much done even if they try. Changing the political system is patient work that takes decades, and most of it is done, not by electing the “right guy” in a single election, but by promoting the right ideas to your fellow citizens and actually convincing people, which is really annoying work.
What doesn’t get the job done is, from my experience, the favorite activity of Donald Trump’s supporters: insulting people on the Internet. So no wonder they want to short-circuit the system and indulge the fantasy that they can push through their agenda, whatever it is, just by electing a guy who will insult people on a bigger scale.
There will always be those who lose patience and long for someone to sweep in and knock everything over and be strong enough to bring everyone to heel. That’s a dangerous illusion, though there are some people who want it enough not to care what their strong man really stands for. But I suspect it’s much smaller number than some of the inflated early poll numbers for Trump would imply.
as the real donnie emerges with statements like the one about funding the GOOD part of Planned Parenthood.....we will need a LOT of POPCORN...and patience with the fanboys who think the donnie is better than sliced bread.
Good article. The blind support for Trump that I have seen on free republic has really scared me. I always thought that us conservatives were informed and cared about the issues and so I have been shocked to see so many buy blindly into Trump’s personality cult.
Hillary, Obama horrible. Dead bodies litter the earth. All other candidates at the mercy of donors. America insolvents. Trump has skin in the game. Trump had issues but all other candidates would lose their lifeline ($$$) of they proved they’ve escaped the political matrix. This is Trump’s election to lose. The disenfranchised sit by and watch.
People are projecting onto Trump what they want to see.
Having watched him tonight, this is all too true. Does anyone actually remember Ronald Reagan? Trump has nothing in common.
Trump just seems like a New Yorker to me and since I grew up with them he doesn’t bother me at all. NYers say stuff all the time but it doesn’t really mean that’s what they really mean. It’s kind of venting.
The rest of the country does not understand this.
-(F)riend (O)f (B)ill-and Hillary
-Used government to seize private property of woman in the way of his state-subsidized development
-Pro-abortion
-Supports more gun control than Mitt Romney.
-CONSERVATIVE CHAMPION!
Donald Derangement Syndrome symptom #29 - blindly thinking Trump supporters are blind.
BUMP ditto
I think this is a brilliant piece.
I have been a fan of Trump’s knocking stuff over and breaking things up until he starts doing it for the sake of breaking things, and not to push a Conservative agenda.
We may have reached that stage based on comments from him, and his supporters.
Raising a bear is fun until the day he turns around and devours you.
The reason that Trumps supporters are blind is that they don’t seem to care about his liberal history and the fact that even since he got into the campaign he keeps flip-flopping on issues.
For example, in 2011 he was pro-abortion, when he got into the campaign he said that he had become pro-life and even said that we should shut down the government to defund planned parenthood and then today he says that actually there are good parts of planned parenthood and that he would look into funding them.
Similarly, during the 2012 campaign he criticized Romney for alienating Hispanics with his self-deportation plan. Then when Trump starts his campaign he stakes out a position as a hardline anti-immigration candidate. Then over the last week he has walked that back to the place where he actually supports amnesty for most noncriminal illegal aliens. Basically Trump just says what he thinks people want to hear and there is no consistency to his positions.
Only one candidate in this race can say they proudly voted for Hillary Clinton for Senate!!
The man in the white suit with mink shoal, carrying a silver cane.... the one, the only, Pimpus Maximus Donaldo Trump!!
In the Iowa and NH polls, Trump is only 4, 5 percentage points ahead and I’ve enjoyed what he has said but he has gone from “shut down the government to defund Planned Parenthood” to this new position he is espousing. That won’t be good for the Evangelical and other conscientious pro-life voters. Trump’s points were close to the Democratic talking points for Planned Parenthood and PP applauded what DT said. So, this is a bit of a misstep.
Also, for those many people who have talked of a Trump Cruz ticket, this could become an issue as well; but there is a lot of time before the convention but it is definitely something to watch. Cruz is a rather hard-core pro-lifer it seems to me.
Exactly, this guy is truly a clown. Funding the “good part” of Planned Parenthood, or “evolving” on gay marriage to now accept it, or having “Mexico” pay for the wall. This is mutton-headed nonsense.
I was thinking something more like this - Donald Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Trump:
“All my illusions
Projected on her
The ideal, that I wanted to see...
From the song “Halo Effect” by the rock group RUSH.
Words on the album cover introducing the song:
I HAD FALLEN HELPLESSLY IN LOVE with one of the performers. She was so different from “the girl I left behind,” and I was beginning to understand I had only pretended she was right for me. I pursued my beautiful acrobat obsessively until she let me be with her - then I suffered her rejection and contempt. Once again, I had created an ideal of the perfect soulmate, and tried to graft it onto her. It did’t fit. Such illusions have colored my whole life.
Lyrics:
What did I see?
Fool that I was
A goddess, with wings on her heels
All my illusions
Projected on her
The ideal, that I wanted to see
What did I know?
Fool that I was
Little by little, I learned
My friends were dismayed
To see me betrayed
But they knew they could never tell me
What did I care?
Fool that I was
Little by little, I burned
Maybe sometimes
There might be a flaw
But how pretty the picture was back then
What did I do?
Fool that I was
To profit from youthful mistakes?
It’s shameful to tell
How often I fell
In love with illusions again
So shameful to tell
Just how often I fell
In love with illusions again
A goddess with wings on her heels ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlKsMYsb47s
If you mean completely unbearable, then I would agree.
This is mutton-headed nonsense.
Yep.
Hes not quite bright enough to realize how fatuous his grand statements are.
he is in fact........ an Unctuous Bumpkin with Money!!
the fanboys already hate my guts .....for calling him a con man
“I got a solution....You’re a D—K....South Carolina, What’s Up!”
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