The Trump Effect

Greg Sargent is rightly skeptical that Trump's latest dustup-his claim that he saw 'thousands of Jersey City Muslims cheering the fall of the Twin Towers' is going to be his death knell.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2015/11/24/morning-plum-heres-why-donald-trumps-lies-dont-matter-hes-strong/

The idea that because he's been caught in an outrageous falsehood, his numbers are going to reflexively crater seems almost quaint assuming you've actually been watching the last six months.

I think Sargent is right-his followers aren't worried about this because they see him as strong. Indeed, I also agree that from their standpoint he's stronger by refusing to get mired in all the painstaking details that the fact checkers demand.

"Members of the media are wringing their hands so hard over this perplexing question that their skin is practically peeling: How is it possible for Donald Trump to tell so many blatant lies, shrug off our fact-checks, and continue rising in the polls?"

"Easy: Because in the minds of his supporters, Trump has converted even the simple act of dismissing pointy-headed media fact-checks into a sign of his “strength.” Trump’s big insight is not simply that the details don’t matter. It’s that getting mired in the details is itself a sign of weakness."

I mean in all seriousness doesn't it seem a little banal for Glenn Kessler to be wrapping his knuckles and giving him 4 Pinocchios?"

Sargent then goes on to note Trump's latest, latest outrage last night on what he said about waterboarding.

Here’s what Trump told a crowd last night about the need to bring back waterboarding:

“Would I approve waterboarding? You bet your ass I would — in a heartbeat…And I would approve more than that. Don’t kid yourself, folks. It works, okay? It works. Only a stupid person would say it doesn’t work….Believe me, it works. And you know what? If it doesn’t work, they deserve it anyway, for what they’re doing. It works.”

When it comes to torture, Trump would approve “more” than waterboarding, never mind whether it actually works? As noted above, the details don’t matter in the least. Still, this one is worth following up on."

Yep, let's demand more details. LOL.

I have to say, what I've said before. I have argued in the past that I find Trump in a sense to be a breath of fresh air and I think this latest outrage about waterboarding underscores it.

In my previous post I looked at Rubio's craven triangulation strategy as in some ways crueler even than Trump's positions on Muslims and immigration.

"In purely affective terms, Rubio is positioning himself masterfully, courting, or at least refusing to offend, both the party’s nativist faction and its more ethnically inclusive donor class. The trouble for him is that the rhetorical middle between Trump’s xenophobic policies, and Bush’s reality-based rejection of them, is an incoherent substantive realm that is in many ways crueler and more reactionary than Trump’s outright rejectionism. By successfully adopting a more measured, less inciting form of rhetoric, but refusing to condemn Trump’s bigotry, Rubio has unintentionally outflanked Trump—on the right."

"It’s not about closing down mosques,” Rubio told Fox News’s Megyn Kelly last week. “It’s about closing down anyplace—whether it’s a cafe, a diner, an internet site—anyplace where radicals are being inspired. … Whatever facility is being used—it’s not just a mosque—any facility that’s being used to radicalize and inspire attacks against the United States, should be a place that we look at.”

"The purpose of this tack was to deemphasize the explicitly religious nature of Trumpian Islamophobia. But rather than shift frames from policing religion to policing crime—by perhaps arguing that no mosque (or church or synagogue or cafe or website) provides legal refuge to terrorists—Rubio instead simply promised to shutter more and different mainstays of Muslim communities than Trump did."

http://lastmenandovermen.blogspot.com/2015/11/rubio-is-to-right-of-trump-on.html

I have mostly admitted that I've enjoyed the rise of Trump. I mean it really has been hilarious. Now, others have been arguing that there's a less humorous more worrisome side to his rise.

Could it be poisoning our public debate in ways that we'll never get back? For the most part I'v'e been dismissive of this, although the one thing that has given me pause is what we've seen post Paris where I was shocked by how quickly we seemed to revert to the early years after 9/11 on the media with even a third of House Democrats turning on Syrian refugees out of pure political expediency.

After all, these are the same Dems who were lecturing the President in September for taking in only 10,000 refugees-they wanted 100,000.

But I guess as far as Trump is concerned I look at it this way. The GOP debate has been awful for a long time but in previous cycles they were able to veil it a little in a kind of pious seriousness. 

You know Trump's comment about waterboarding recalls one man, of course-Dick Cheney. 

Now when Cheney even more recently defended waterboarding, there was nothing remotely funny about it. It was truly scary, full stop. But the reason for this is the Very Serious Pundits take Cheney as someone totally serious. 

But somehow with Trump hearing him, I will admit to having to laugh when he said-'It works but even if it doesn't they deserve it.'

Because that's honest. This has been the true Republican position on torture. It works but even if it doesn't they deserve it anyway. 

Except they could never say that last part. Trump by saying it, kind of makes it a more honest conversation that the GOP can't disguise or dissemble. 

It will be interesting to see if Cheney has anything to say about Trump's endorsement of his favored methods. Nothing gets Cheney so energized as defending waterboarding. 

Here was Cheney asked about Trump back on September 1. 

http://www.cnn.com/2015/09/01/politics/donald-trump-dick-cheney-liz-cheney-book/