He was just looking to expand his brand
John Scalzi on Trump as the worst ever and the inevitable result of what the Republican Party has been up to.
He’s not some weird “how did that happen??” but the natural outcome of the Republicans’ steady march to the right.
Well, surprise! Here’s Donald Trump. He is the actual and physical embodiment of every single thing the GOP has trained its base to want and to be over the last forty years — ignorant, bigoted and money-grubbing, disdainful of facts and frightened of everything because of it, an angry drunk buzzed off of wood-grain patriotism, threatening brown people and leering at women. He was planned. He was intended. He was expected. He was wanted.
Only, they wanted someone more charming about it, more telegenic, more adorable. They didn’t want an angry pumpkin who can’t string a coherent sentence together. Also they wanted a Republican, someone they could control. Trump is a Trumpist instead of a Republican.
And this is why the GOP deserves the chaos that’s happening to it now, with its appalling and parasitic standard bearer, who will never be president, driving his GOP host body toward the cliff. If it accepts the parasite, it will be driven off the cliff. If it resists, the parasite Trump will rip himself from it, leaving bloody marks as it does so, and then shove the dazed and wounded GOP from the precipice.
…
Trump was never about being a Republican; he was just looking to expand his brand. As it turns out, like apparently so many things Trump does, he’s done an awful job of it — the name Trump, formerly merely associated with garish ostentation and bankruptcy, is now synonymous with white nationalism, sexual battery and failure — but the point is on November 9th Trump is going to move on and leave the wreckage of the GOP in his wake, off to his next thing (everyone assumes “Trump TV,” in which Trump combines with Breitbart to make white pride propaganda for the kind of millennial racist who thinks a Pepe the Frog Twitter icon is the height of wit — and I hope he does, because the Trump touch will drive that enterprise into the ground, and little would warm my heart more than a bankrupt Breitbart).
I don’t know – I think the GOP will just dust itself off and laugh ruefully and go right back to being the home of the Tea Party.
H/t G Felis
I think Trump is what happens when someone who is usually behind the politicians, lobbying and schmoozing, becomes the politician. The invisible people who lobby the politicians don’t have to be considered in either their opinions or how they express them and they are used to being allowed to do and get whatever they want. It is amusing that Trump supporters, who can’t tolerate politicians because they can’t trust them at least due to their mealy mouthisms which they have to use to talk to people who would otherwise never have anything to do with them, like a guy who is patently saying all the things politicians avoid saying while believing all the same things the politicians do.
Trump is what the sausage is made of and politicians have carefully had the sausage manufacturing as far behind closed doors as they could.
Well the sausage is alive and running for president!
I find myself wondering, if Trump is so awful, what are the other business people like? Oh, some of them are decent, hard-working people, I have no doubt. But we saw the worst in people like Jeffrey Skilling, and the bankers, and now Trump. Is it some sort of badge of honor in business to be the worst sort of slime ball?
I knew Trump was going to have an easier time getting the nomination than he should’ve when I saw some of the handful of reasonable conservative columnists describing Trump as a ‘barbarian at the gates’. He’s not at the gates, and he never was. He’s the monster in the basement, constructed like Frankenstein’s Adam from all the worst parts of the GOP’s base. And when the ‘establishment’ Republicans failed to recognize that, it meant that they also were doomed to fail to stop him.
Well said. Except that I think Trump was unplanned in the sense that they played to the worst in us, in order to lower the bar for themselves and win votes, without ever expecting to see this process reach its logical conclusion.
(And I mean that literally: Trump may indeed be the literal worst there is, or close enough. I believe he could, and would, unleash a holocaust if congress and the courts didn’t stop him.)
I’m not a one-percenter, but my take is that impunity is what does it. You see awfulness in cops, too: exactly the kind you’d expect to see once they realize they can kill people with impunity. Politicians, likewise. Also, churches. Wherever the power structure creates a vacuum of accountability, most people are affected for the worse.
Yes, I basically just said “power corrupts,” but not quite. It’s not the power, I don’t think; it’s the impunity that power confers. Money, connections, and positions of trust can all have that effect. Although you might reply that impunity is a good definition of power, in which case my point becomes synonymous with the proverb. Most people would define power in terms of authority, and I don’t think authority is what corrupts.