Posted on 04/02/2016 11:18:24 AM PDT by DrewsDad
A Unified Fields Theory
Until Trump changed the subject to punishing women for having abortions, the Trump obsession of the week was Michelle Fields.
I’m glad that story is largely gone. I don’t think it was good for Fields or for the forces opposed to Trump. And it distracted from more important stories, like Trump’s willingness to nuke Europe.
RELATED: If Donald Trump Were Eight, His Behavior Might Be Endearing
Without rehashing the whole thing again with reference to frame-by-frame analysis best left for the Zapruder film, let me just say I think all of the important and relevant facts are on Fields’s side. There’s audio of her describing what happened immediately after the Corey Lewandowski incident. There are the bruises captured on film. There’s video and there are eye-witness accounts, all of which corroborate the basic story Fields has been telling.
To listen to Trump’s and Lewandowski’s defenders, this is all a big lie, the upshot being that Fields invented the whole story in a deviously clever gambit to trade her job at Breitbart and her regular gig on Eric Bolling’s show for something so much better. Indeed, I think her plan went something like this:
Step 1: Ask Donald Trump about affirmative action while he’s walking out of a press conference.
Step 2: Walk in just such a way as to dupe Corey Lewandowski into putting his hands on me.
Step 3: Pretend that he grabbed me too hard, convincing eyewitnesses on scene that something bad happened.
Step 4: Bruise my own arm and take a picture of it.
Step 5: Ask for an apology from the Trump campaign, which is like asking Trump to create a boulder too heavy for him to lift.
Step 6: Wait for my own news organization to throw me under the bus, then quit job.
Step 7: Wait for the checks to roll in!
Still, what happened to Fields was not Kristallnacht and Lewandowski should not, in my opinion, stand trial or be sent to even five minutes of jail. I think he’s a boorish lout and he behaved stupidly. If Lewandoswki had common sense or decency, he would have apologized for overreacting and thrown Fields an interview with Trump to make amends. The whole thing would have been over without any of us having heard a word about it.
Second Thoughts on Trump
But observing common courtesy and civility is not what Team Trump does. And that’s the real issue here. Donald Trump and his campaign take great pride in overturning the basic rules of politics and democratic discourse. For those who want to see “the establishment” — however defined — torn down, this bull-in-a-china-shop stuff is celebrated. Trump’s fans ascribe a brilliance to his actions that is wholly underserved. Breaking the rules in ways large and small is seen as self-justifying in every case.
RELATED: Trump Has No Clue What American Government Is All About
Or almost every case. This week there have been some cracks in the façade. Trump’s attacks on Heidi Cruz unsettled even Ann Coulter. And his abortion remarks are still sending tremors through the granite foundations of Trump can-do-no-wrong-ism. Joe Scarborough and Breitbart’s John Nolte are talking about what a bad week he’s having and gravely warning Trump to get his act together.
As Jim Geraghty has been writing, the problem with such second thoughts is the assumption that something is amiss with Trump or his campaign. This is Trump. This is his campaign. The Trump we see before us is the same Trump. It’s a bit like when Barack Obama said that the Jeremiah Wright he saw denouncing America wasn’t the man he knew. That was nonsense. Obama knew exactly who Wright was, having attended his church for 20 years. It was only when Wright’s act moved to a larger national stage that all of a sudden he became inconvenient to Obama.
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The analogy isn’t perfect, of course. But the basic point is the same. 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.
#related#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.
#share#
The Gravitational Pull of Lies
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?)
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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.
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We’ve all had dinner parties or family gatherings ruined by that oaf who refuses to bend to simple politeness. They force polite people to either swallow small — or large — insults for the sake of civility. “I didn’t want to make a huge deal about it because it would have just made things worse,” is a rationalization we’ve given voice to on the drive home.
Trump is doing this on a massive scale. Like all demagogues, he’s using his lies as a loyalty test for his followers. He’s exploiting his popularity and abusing the devotion of his fans to force them into going along with his fictions, until they are in so deep psychologically, they have no choice but to carry on. It’s an ancient psychological tactic of authoritarians, Mafia dons, and the like: Force your followers into sharing the blame for your misdeeds so that they can’t break ranks. For instance, when Trump was caught saying something typically ignorant about abortion, he told Eric Bolling that MSNBC cut out the nuance of what he really said.
“You really ought to hear the whole thing,” Trump told guest host Eric Bolling. “This is a long convoluted question. This was a long discussion, and they just cut it out. And, frankly, it was extremely — it was really convoluted.”
Of course, Trump knows that MSNBC ran the clip in its entirety, and Bolling probably does, too. But I am sure that if I went on Twitter and said, “Trump lied about his comments being edited,” within minutes I’d hear from people saying “No, MSNBC edited him!” or “Of course you RINOs would believe MSNBC!” I’ll also be interested to see if Bolling says anything about the fact that Donald Trump blatantly lied to him.
But I won’t hold my breath.
Quote:
Goldberg asserts:
” Trump Has No Clue What American Government Is All About “
What is American government about, Goldberg?
Goldberg asserts: “I bet Trump has paid more abortion bills than he will ever sign.”
That is an ad hominem attack and worthy of an ass-kicking. But seeing as how Goldberg can stoop that low while claiming Trump stoops that low, how about this:
Jonah Goldberg is the privileged, spoiled, Neo-Con son of a Belt Way hack. Goldberg was given a job at NRO because of his connections and not his talent. And this Neo-Con mouthpiece for the GOPe never met a war he wouldn’t send YOUR fly-over-country son or daughter to die in.
Jonah Goldberg is a chickenhawk coward.
She immediately got on twitter and started her campaign. She never asked for an apology. Fields has a history of this very same sort of attack where she claims she doesn't want to be the story, yet makes herself the story repeatedly.
Better question is, is she telling the truth?
Here’s your “wonderful” Cruz. He’s such a fraud and you are so deceived.
http://detonite.com/cruz-campaign-gets-popped-by-federal-election-commission-again/
I agree with regard to NR. But Buckley was not a Trump fan. He had disdain for Trump. Here is what he wrote:
Look for the narcissist. The most obvious target in today’s lineup is, of course, Donald Trump. When he looks at a glass, he is mesmerized by its reflection. If Donald Trump were shaped a little differently, he would compete for Miss America. But whatever the depths of self-enchantment, the demagogue has to say something. So what does Trump say? That he is a successful businessman and that that is what America needs in the Oval Office. There is some plausibility in this, though not much. The greatest deeds of American Presidents — midwifing the new republic; freeing the slaves; harnessing the energies and vision needed to win the Cold War — had little to do with a bottom line.LinkSo what else can Trump offer us? Well to begin with, a self-financed campaign. Does it follow that all who finance their own campaigns are narcissists? At this writing Steve Forbes has spent $63 million in pursuit of the Republican nomination. Forbes is an evangelist, not an exhibitionist. In his long and sober private career, Steve Forbes never bought a casino, and if he had done so, he would not have called it Forbes’s Funhouse. His motivations are discernibly selfless. . . .
As a matter of fact, that picture you incessantly post is pretty darn accurate. Trump is done.
In the last week’s news cycle, Trump has not done one thing to gain him any support.
It’s been flub after flub, all revealing of his lack of character or substance.
And yet, the little trumpers fly onto a post like this to frantically defend the indefensible ... the Trump...
And all the ammunition they have is nasty and untrue posts about Ted Cruz. Just read all their posts here and find one that is substantive. You will get a prize.
So, Just like every other candidate, successful politician, and pundit and their sycophantic supporters, huh Jonah?.
Name on thing in this contrived screed that wasn’t true.
Post 2 or 3 blaming Ted for Trump’s failures.
I’m counting.
“Burn in hell?” That’s for God to decide. But that doesn’t preclude a thorough ass-kicking here on earth. And I bet the house 69 year-old Trump can beat the snot out of Pillsbury Doughboy, Jonah Goldberg.
Goldberg asserts: “I bet Trump has paid more abortion bills than he will ever sign.”
That is an ad hominem attack and worthy of an ass-kicking.
—
I think it’s a simple statement of fact.
“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.”
So this is a theory that Donald is courting the conservative vote despite not being a longtime conservative. It’s an interesting idea. There could be something to it, without it being the whole story. It’s been said that “a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality.” If Donald is somewhat liberal but realizes that the liberal position on Islam is insane, that might explain a partial conversion to conservatism.
What??
Rushing to post on twitter is wrong?
Somebody hurry and tell Donald Trump.
Do you believe that Lewandowski told the truth when he tweeted?
@MichelleFields you are totally delusional. I never touched you. As a matter of fact, I have never even met you.
At then end of the article you copied and pasted this.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/3416793/posts?page=1#1
No objection was present. That led me to think you agreed with it.
I met Jonah and his mother in the early 2000s. I liked the guy. He seemed to agree with our political outlook.
Then his mother went South and now he’s well down the road to Leftist paradise.
“Until Trump changed the subject to punishing women for having abortions,”
Wasn’t that a hypothetical brought up by Chrissy Matthewy?
A sentence so wrong on so many levels, it’s an irrational hate-Trump-jump the-shark moment for Jonas.
Too bad.
He’s old, the mind is going, time to retire.
I am taking bets on who will be the last Conservative to turn the lights out on FR. From where I am standing, you are looking like a good bet. I applaud you for fighting the good fight for Conservatism among hordes of Trumpkins.
SteelFish, if you think you have any credibility left here, think again.
How about you prove it? Don’t bother. We all know Cruzers are bottom-feeding liars just like their bottom-feeding “principled conservative” candidate.
That's a two edged sword...
This is my biggest Trump concern.
Running a successful business and being able to successfully govern are vastly different skill sets...
As owner of successful Trump Organization, Trump is the absolute boss, he leads and his people follow....you don't ..."You're Fired"...
In government, you are a leader by in large by consensus and compromise...
In government power is shared and there are many competing interests to work though...
I'm concerned that Trump will not be able to make that transition, I think he will try at first and become very frustrated with the process and start to govern like Obama...Dicates from the WH....
I hope I am wrong, but Trump as far as I can tell he doesn't suffer fools and government is filled with them...
You just can't say "You're Fired"...
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