Pierce: Stop Lying to Yourself About Donald Trump

[mcar]

For the 2016 ecosystem, he might have been the perfect candidate.

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a54633/why-trump-won/

...I mention all this because one of the more interesting sidelights of what certainly will be a deluge of post-mortems regarding the 2016 presidential campaign is the widely held notion that Hillary Rodham Clinton was gifted with a uniquely easy opponent. This idea is central to the narrative that holds that HRC's campaign was a uniquely bad one, and she a uniquely bad candidate. She couldn't even beat a reality-show star who doesn't know North Korea from East Hampton. True, there were a number of things that HRC and her campaign did badly, but they did get three million more votes than did Trump, which counts for something...

Yes, the elite political media—and, especially, the cable news stations and, especially, CNN—put the wind beneath his wings with stunning regularity. And, yes, he got a lot of help from James Comey, the renegade New York office of the FBI, and (likely) Macedonian adolescents in the pay of Russian plutocrats. But you do not do what he did, and you do not overcome all the self-inflicted lacerations that he suffered, simply by being a traveling freak show.

Consider this: Whatever you may think of how he won the presidency, and we'll get to that in a minute, Trump took on a Republican field composed of what was alleged to be the best that party had to offer, the deepest part of its allegedly deep bench, and he utterly destroyed it. Scott Walker, popular scourge of middle-school history teachers, never even made it to the starting gate. Rand Paul, brogressive libertarian heartthrob, was reduced to invisibility. Chris Christie was demolished as a national political figure. Marco Rubio—The Republican Savior, according to Time—is still wandering the political landscape looking, as Abraham Lincoln said of General Hooker after Chancellorsville, like a duck that's been hit on the head. And, when he finally got around to it, he took the heart out of Tailgunner Ted Cruz in Indiana, alleging on the morning of the primary that Cruz's father hobnobbed in New Orleans with Lee Harvey Oswald...

The myth of Trump's vulnerability has two sources, I think. The first is the apparently irresistible impulse in some quarters to score some sort of final victory over the Clinton family. (We dealt with that on Monday.) The other is the reluctance of Republicans—and of the elite political classes at large—to accept the reality that Trump is merely a cruder manifestation of the political prion disease that has afflicted conservatism and the Republican Party since it first ate the monkeybrains 35 years ago. It was all leading to someone like Trump, and something like last year's election. There are any number of reasons for people to deny that simple truth.

[Hekate]

1. Kicking this

[ismnotwasm]

2. K&R

[kentuck]

3. Thought-provoking.

Thanks!

[mcar]

4. It is a different take on the GE, isn't it?

[Permanut]

5. Rubbish..

I know of no one who thought Trump was a "travelling freak show". We have known since the eighties that he would, and has, gotten what he has by, well, first, inheriting millions, and then by lying, browbeating, cheating and swindling selected targets who happened to pop up on his radar. During the primaries, those targets were the gang of fifteen assorted right wing wackos, and in the general election, the target of course was HRC.

Now, about how he "won" the presidency. Sometimes parsing the words matters (for example, "pro-life", but that's a subject for another thread). He "won" the presidency by lying, browbeating, cheating and swindling the electorate; by using Russian hackers, and by using the Republican election fraud already in place. Sorry, I don't define "winning" that way.

Evidence for my assertions is piling up day by day; I feel compelled to provide sources for these accusations, but the information is already well documented in many threads here.

[leftyladyfrommo]

8. Nothing is too low.

I still can't believe just how low these people will go. The things they did were unimaginable.

[oasis]

6. "Crude". Yup, that describes Trump's character, in part. nt

[Cha]

7. KICK!

Mahalo, mcar