Trump Is Winning Even Though 66 Percent of Us Don't Like

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Mar 9, 2016 at 5:00 PM

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Trump Is Winning Even Though 66 Percent of Us Don't Like Him at All
And he is the human embodiment of channel surfing.

BY CHARLES P. PIERCE
MAR 9, 2016

FLINT, MICHIGAN—

I watched the now-presumptive Republican nominee for president declare victory on Tuesday night. The chyron said "Jupiter," presumably the one in Florida and not the one orbiting between Mars and Saturn, but who can really tell.

He'd won in Mississippi and in Michigan. It took me a moment to understand what I was watching but I finally got it.

The now-presumptive Republican presidential nominee is the human embodiment of channel surfing. In addition to testimony to his own greatness, we had an infomercial for his products, and a sports report from this past weekend's stop on the PGA Tour, as well as an ESPN Classic moment with ex-Yankee Paul O'Neill, and we had snatches of poorly written dialogue from a number of different old television shows.

In some cases, I was joking, and in some cases I was showing anger, a certain toughness that we need in our country.

I call him Lyin' Ted. He holds the Bible high and then he puts the Bible down and then he lies.

Chris Christie's here somewhere.

Little dumb babies.

He had water and wine for sale. And steaks, rather than bread. Trumpian communion is so much classier.

But he at least could have had the steaks in a refrigerator.

And speaking of dead meat, howzabout that Marco Rubio?

Boom!

Every one a Maserati!

I'm sorry, but how am I supposed to take this stuff seriously? For example, I can't be Matthew Dowd, who watched the pitchman hawk his wares and saw a president in the making.

"It is a smart move," Matthew Dowd, the former chief strategist for George W. Bush's 2004 presidential campaign, told CNN. "One, it sets him apart from all the others who give canned speeches. Two, it makes him look like the dominant force taking questions. Like a president at a press conference."

I can't…I mean…really...

Make no mistake. I think the guy is going to be the Republican nominee because he's brought 30 years of chickens home to roost, and because the Republican attempts to stop him have proven to be comically inept, and because Ted Cruz is such a terrible alternative that Carly Fiorina has signed aboard with him.

Trump is winning even though 66 percent of us don't like him at all. This is a phenomenon that I take very seriously because there's a measure of national self-loathing in there that has to be checked at some point. You will never see another performance like the one he put on last night.

It was more than a demonstration of the degradation of democracy. It was also a demonstration of the degradation of capitalism. I mean, Jesus, have some pride, rich folks. At least Andrew Carnegie built libraries and Jay Gould wore stylish diamond stickpins.

None of them tossed slabs of dead cow to their supporters from the stage. I'm not entirely sure, but I think that, halfway through the speech, I accidentally may have bought a time-share in Florida.

I can be presidential if I want to be. I am more presidential than anybody other than the great Abe Lincoln. He was pretty good.
I'll get back to grim analysis tomorrow. For now, though, I'm sorry, America, but you've lost your mind.

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics...ry-speech/

Kim Jonas

Let's be specific: *conservative* America has lost its mind.

On the other side of our ideological and partisan divide, we're still sane. (That's we.' I'm not making any claims about myself.) We've got Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, and for all the debate about the realism (or lack of it) of Bernie's proposals, they're at least in the same time zone as reality. The proposals of Trump and Cruz and Rubio aren't within light-years of reality.

Apparently GOP proposals aren't subjected to the same level of scrutiny as Democratic proposals. I think that sort of thing used to be called 'the soft bigotry of lowered expectations.'

Jerry Rosen ·

Likewise. I was watching MSNBC when the talking yam came on. I immediately muted. I played a little spider solitaire on the computer, checked my email, read some WaPo columns, checked my email again, did the NYT crossword online (I do it every night as mental exercise), looked over t the TV and the thing that walks like a man was still doing it. I read (re-read) a chapter of Dune and looked over at the TV, and he was still at it. Unbelievable.

Can it be that MSNBC figures the more exposure he gets, the more people will see what a phony he is? They can't really think anybody not already in his thrall want to see so much of him can they? But it hasn't worked for Wheel of Fortune or MTV in all these years.

I have seriously begun to despair of American democracy. Maybe Plato was right, after all.

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