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.
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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.
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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.
I just read that the Trump university lawsuit has cost Trump $600,000.00 so far. What a great businessman he is.
And he hasn’t won it yet.
Yes, I’ve seen it. Truly sad.
It was like little second grader Cruz had to call his 4th grade big sister to defend him from the nasty bullies.
What a chump!
One of the best and most coherent articles written about Trump and his followers.
You’ve done round the bend.
Do you even know who Donald Trump is?
I was offered a free subscription, no thank you. Whoever puts these articles on FR I want to tell you that you are successful in raising my blood pressure.
Poor Drew
You know I felt really sad for a trumper yesterday who sincerely said he would take a bullet for Trump.
Because this guy was so deluded.
Trump cares nothing for his supporters. His women supporters are the most pathetic.
If they are ordinary looking women (and most of us are) he would run them over with his limo if they got in his way.
If they lived in a little house that he considered an eyesore to the view from his casino, he would sue them to move.
How anyone can trust this guy at all is a mystery.
How they can trust him so much is beyond a mystery.
Sixteen years ago I would have said the same thing.
For that matter, I would have scoffed at the notion that Trump would be the best bet we had as recently as a couple of years ago.
We don’t know what Buckley would say today.
After all, he wrote that it would be better to let the Clintesterones get away with killing Vince Foster than to see a sitting president impeached, removed, and tried for murder.
(I’m watching Treasure of the Sierra Madre again because I want to have Walter Huston’s dance down for when Beelzebubba finally does us the service of expiring.)
Pure speculation , not even wort saying. Juvenile .
Quote:
“Do you even know who Donald Trump is?”
Stupid question.
But I do know this:
You Cruzers believe “conservatism” is Ted Cruz and Ted Cruz is “conservatism.” That makes you worse than stupid. That makes you a starry-eyed fool.
Trump presents an alluring siren’s song.
“If they are ordinary looking women (and most of us are) he would run them over with his limo if they got in his way.”
Yeah, that must he hires so many women executives, so he can run over the ordinary looking ones. You’re a nut.
The Yellow Kid points the way to yellow journalism...
Lucianne was a member here. She left because of people like you.
Too much incivility for her.
+ 1
If Trump wins then this magazine is kaput along with every other “conservative” voice. Trump’s rise is about populism not conservatism. It is about the people vs. the elite. Parties really have nothing to do with it. Politicians on both sides have given us Open Borders, 19 Trillion in debt and bad trade deals that have sold out the American worker. Immigration both legal and illegal is destroying our national identity and neither party has done squat to stop it.
This is a rare opportunity to get behind someone that will blow up the cartel that has destroyed this country. Ted Cruz is.a politician and Harvard Lawyer. We have elected this type many times for various offices and where did that get us? I say roll the dice and try something new. Could not get much worse!
Reading this post one thing is obvious, Cruzdavidians are mentally ill, or liars.
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