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America Is Not A Reality Show

Can we really afford someone as vain, erratic, and trivial as Trump?
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Ross Douthat, continuing to crack the whip hard on Republicans who won’t stand up to Trump, and thereby are complicit in handing over the GOP to Trump:

The irony is that I say all this as someone who has little love for the Republican Party as it currently exists, who was initially happy with the prospect of some Trumpian creative destruction, who might ultimately prefer the party that (eventually) emerged from the post-Trump rubble to what we have right now. So I’m not sure what it says that I (and not a few others in the reform-minded conservative commentariat) now seem to feel more urgency about stopping Trump than the men who actually lead the actual-existing G.O.P.

That we enjoy the liberty of punditry rather than wearing the manacles of politics is no doubt part of it. Still, since pundits are also prone to overreaction, it’s important to keep in the mind the possibility that we’re wrong, that we’re being hysterical, that Trump’s progress isn’t a good reason to suspend the normal rules of politics or deliberately split the party or otherwise go to anti-Trump extremes.

And I try to keep that possibility in mind. But you know, read the transcript of Donald Trump’s meeting with the Washington Post editorial board. Just read it. This is from yesterday, less than twenty-four hours before the atrocity in Brussels. This is the man who will be the Republican nominee for president, representing the party of Eisenhower and Nixon and Reagan and George H.W. Bush, at a moment when the Western/liberal order is more fragile than it’s been since 1991. [Emphasis mine — RD] And of all the leaders of the Republican Party, all the men and women who hold high office, is history really going to record that this demagogic, blathering clown was opposed forthrightly and absolutely only by a defeated presidential nominee, a Senate backbencher, and a retired Senator lately recovered from cancer? Really?

I had not thought Trump had undone so many.

Read the whole thing.

I pretty much agree with this, and I say that as someone who takes real pleasure in the devastating walloping Trump is giving to the GOP, and who is sympathetic to many of the concerns Trump is alleged to have about the direction of America. But when the man took the stage in the televised debate a couple of weeks ago and assured the nation he seeks to lead that his penis was big, that’s when I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that the country would be taking an extreme risk putting a man like that in the White House. So, look, if you haven’t read the WaPo transcript, you really should. He went in there to meet with the editorial board of the major newspaper in the nation’s capital, and he talked about his penis, and his real estate prowess.

Can you imagine somebody with a temperament like that as Commander in Chief of the US Armed Forces? Can you imagine someone so utterly trivial in the White House? Here is a man who has suddenly emerged as possibly the most significant American political figure since Reagan, a man who has, in less than a year, nearly destroyed the once-formidable Republican Party from within, and yet he still finds time to bitch on Twitter about a Fox newscaster:

No, you juvenile boob, you can’t fight back, because you are running for President of the United States, and you ought to be above staging a pissing contest with a newsreader. America is not a reality show!

And you can never really be sure what Trump truly stands for, because he doesn’t know himself. This morning, he said on the news that we should close our borders in response to the ISIS attack in Brussels. Then he turned around and denied he said it. Here is the evidence. Remember when he flip-flopped on the H1B visas? The man does not know his own mind. He just says whatever pops into his head and suits his interests at the time.

On the other hand, Ted Cruz. Gack. What a wretched election we face. Notice, by the way, the news today about the woman the Republican Party chose to run as vice president in 2008:

The gavel is in Sarah Palin’s court — well, it will be.

The former Alaska governor will star in a reality-TV courtroom, according to a report from People magazine.

Palin signed a deal in February to preside over a “Judge Judy”-type show expected to premiere in the fall of 2017. A source told People that the Donald Trump surrogate will meet with stations, create a pilot episode and then sell it.

 

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