The mea culpas are coming fast and furious as we approach Thursday's anointment of Trump as the GOP's idiot king. We're getting the questioning of how the hell this could have happened, and we're getting individuals standing up and saying, "It was me. Fuck. It was me." Those would include Tony Schwarz, the ghostwriter of Trump's first hagiography, The Art of the Deal, who tells Jane Mayer in the New Yorker, "I feel a deep sense of remorse that I contributed to presenting Trump in a way that brought him wider attention and made him more appealing than he is." And it also includes reporter McKay Coppins of Buzzfeed, who says that one reason Trump even ran was because the reality TV star was stung by an article by Coppins that said Trump wasn't going to run.
Yeah, you're all motherfuckers and deserve whatever self-flagellation you inflict, but let's be perfectly clear. Stop thinking so fucking much of yourselves. There is one reason and one reason only that delegates at the Republican National Convention will be forced to watch a parade of Trumps bark at them in barely comprehensible English about how great their father/husband/lover/master/whatever is. Blame the voters. That's all. However important you think you are, at the end of the day, the voters had a choice, and they went, by increasing and then overwhelming numbers, to Trump.
You can come up with all kinds of justifications for why primary voters chose Trump - a disgust with "politics as usual," the glamour of the celebrity, the appeal to racist/nativist ideology, a white working class that has been ignored by Democrats (not true, but the perception is there) - but let's not use that to take away the agency of those voters. They looked at and listened to a blithering sociopath and decided, "Yeah, that's what I want."
In Esquire, Charlie Pierce wrote a piece titled, "This Isn't Funny Anymore" and called Trump supporters "traitors" to America. But let's go a little further. They should be ashamed of themselves, and, more importantly, they should be made to feel that shame and, especially when it comes to politicians and pundits who support Trump, they should be shunned and treated like they are not part of the conversation, including "leaders" like Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan who are aiding and abetting Trump.
In other election years, this liberal blogger could see that there might be a rational reason to vote for Mitt Romney and John McCain (pre-Palin) and Bob Dole and, hell, even W. Bush. Each of them had policies with which you could argue. They had extensive numbers and figures you could question and test. On 60 Minutes, in their first 2012 interview after Ryan was named Romney's running mate, Romney clearly stated what he was proposing for taxes: "We're not going to reduce taxes for high-income people, and we are going to reduce taxes for middle-income people." Then he talked about capital gains taxes while Ryan discussed getting rid of tax shelters. No matter how opposed you were to Romney and Ryan (and this blog thought Romney was a desperate little bitch), you never thought, "Holy fuck, they're gonna destroy the entire fucking country."
Romney and Ryan did their interview in a furniture factory in North Carolina. Donald Trump and his newly-announced running mate, Mike Pence, a man who looks like he's had his facial features power sanded off, sat in gold-trimmed chairs in Trump's Manhattan penthouse for their big interview with 60 Minutes. And while Trump's website includes a few detailed plans (one of which we'll get to in a minute), it's patently obvious that the candidate himself knows nothing.
Look at the section at the beginning of the interview, where Trump tells Lesley Stahl that he would formally ask Congress to "declare war" on ISIS. "I am going to have very few troops on the ground. We're going to have unbelievable intelligence, which we need; which, right now, we don't have. We don't have the people over there," Trump says. "And we're going to have surrounding states and, very importantly, get NATO involved because we support NATO far more than we should, frankly, because you have a lot of countries that aren't doing what they're supposed to be doing. And we have to wipe out ISIS." Stahl keeps coming back to the declaration of war because it's very clear that Trump doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about. He's gonna declare war but not send in many U.S. troops? If he's talking about air strikes, well, shit, we're doing that now. And neighboring states? Is he going to involve Iran? As far as NATO goes, Trump's position seems to be that he'll bully and blackmail them into more action.
That's Trump's approach to everything. You wanna know how Trump says Mexico is gonna pay for the wall? It's on his website. He says he'll get a rule that bars the transfer of funds from the United States by anyone not here lawfully. Then he'd prevent undocumented workers from sending money home to their impoverished families: "They receive approximately $24 billion a year in remittances from Mexican nationals working in the United States. The majority of that amount comes from illegal aliens. It serves as de facto welfare for poor families in Mexico." Apparently, this will make Mexico agree to pay for the wall by pixie magic or something. It's outright blackmail. Trump even says that he'll shakedown Mexico: "Make a one-time payment of $5-10 billion to ensure that $24 billion continues to flow into their country year after year." That's a fucking real quote. Surely, Mexico won't just tell us to shove our threat up our asses.
It's fucking embarrassing. Not Brexit embarrassing yet, but still, when the candidate of one of the two major parties says that it's fine that his running mate was wrong when he voted for the Iraq War, but that Hillary Clinton is not entitled to make a mistake, you're dealing with someone for whom reality is whatever he wants it to be. You're dealing with someone who will say what he needs to close a deal, true or not. And that shit is fucking dangerous.
Between the interview and the press conference to introduce Pence, which was really just about watching Trump suck his own dick for 28 minutes before blowing his load all over the Indiana governor and walking off stage to rinse out his mouth, it's not just that Trump is uniquely unqualified to be president. It's that he's uniquely unqualified to speak in public. It's beyond a joke now. It's into something existential for the nation. And who gives a fuck who started it at this point?
The media should treat any Trump voters and on-air supporters like they would a child molester trying to justify why he fucks little boys. We don't get cable news segments with the host saying, "Well, yes, you believe that anally raping pre-adolescents is morally appalling, but let's get some perspective on it from Chester over here. Chester is a long-time pedophile and he thinks butt sex with boys is great. Chester, what do you think?" No, we don't get those segments because fuck Chester and everything he believes. Some things are just in and of themselves wrong. Supporting Trump is one of them. And, yeah, let's be crystal-fuckin'-clear here: that was just a comparison between Trump supporters and child rapists because if he's elected, our kids are fucked.
That's how ashamed Trump voters should feel. They should be isolated and their opinions, even on valid issues like trade, should be discounted until they give up on Trump. You don't ask a goatfucker what he thinks about tax policy while he's fucking a goat.
You can say that all this is a rational approach that cannot compete with irrationality. Yes, but we have no obligation to make irrationality seem rational. We can say some shit is just wrong. We're allowed to that. We can set the terms of debate.
Now, let's all sit back and watch the calm, reasonable, inspiring speeches by Chachi and that Duck Taliban guy in Cleveland.
