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I don’t usually write about politics, but the whole Trump phenomenon totally confounds me.
He’s said to appeal to “the base,” a group that regards all the other Republican candidates as progressive liberals. Seriously. Take a look at some of the online forums where “the base” gathers. I’m not going to list them. They’re easy to find. They’re composed of people who claim they refused to vote for Mitt Romney in 2012 because Romney’s a socialist.
Well, okay. Mitt’s a soft-shell Commie. I can dig it. But Trump, on the other hand, is supposed to be a real conservative. I’m not digging it.
Let’s look at his record.
Trump supports—100%, he says—Kelo, the Supreme Court decision that allowed a corporation to take over private property. This isn’t eminent domain; it’s theft. And it’s anathema to most conservatives. And to a lot of liberals, for that matter.
He has donated more money to Democratic politicians and their causes than he has to Republican politicians. And the Democrats better not forget it, either. If they do, he’ll remind them, plus issue marching orders. “Hillary Clinton, I said, ‘Be at my wedding,’ and she came to my wedding,” Trump stated on August 7, 2015. “She had no choice, because I gave to a foundation.”
Back in the day, he loved Hillary. He said so. Now he despises her.
In 2008, he thought Barack Obama was great. “I was his biggest cheerleader,” Trump claims. (Well, of course he was. According to Trump—who has recently acquired the lamentable habit of referring to himself in the third person—Trump and anything Trump-related is the biggest of whatever it may be.) In 2011, he offered to donate one million dollars to charity if someone would produce Obama’s real birth certificate. He said he sent a fleet of private eyes (the legendary Matt Jacob not amongst them, alas) to dig up the truth. In July of this year, Anderson Cooper raised the birth certificate issue. “I really don’t want to get into it,” Trump replied. Gee, I wonder why not?
He’s been all over the place on guns, abortion, and universal health care. His supporters say he’s “evolved.” They don’t cut the same slack for any other candidate who’s failed to toe the line without any deviation whatsoever, which is why, I assume, they decided that former candidate for the Republican nomination Scott Walker is a flaming liberal. Same for Marco Rubio. And Rick Perry. And Carly Fiorina. And John Kasich. The jury’s out on Ben Carson, because he once said something to the effect that he’d prefer not to see Uzis in the hands of homicidal lunatics.
At one point, Trump himself supported a ban on automatic weapons—but that was before he evolved, I guess.
So what’s Trump’s appeal to the people to whom he appeals?
Is it his braggadocio? “I’m really, really smart,” he’s said on numerous occasions, although probably not as often as he’s said “I’m really, really rich.” He’s told us that he’s “slept with the top women in the world,” though “the top women in the world,” whoever they are, seem to have unanimously declined to verify the claim. He’s informed us that his current wife Melania looks incredibly hot in a “very small thong.” (Amusing factoid: If Trump becomes president, his wife will be the second foreign-born first lady and the first to pose nude for a men’s magazine.)
The next time he tells us about whatever he has that’s the biggest, I hope it’s not what I’m afraid it will be.
Is it his general oafishness? He’s referred to various women—notably Rosie O’Donnell and Arianna Huffington–as slobs, dogs, and pigs. When Megyn Kelly of Fox asked him if he thought this practice might damage him with women voters, he responded by Tweeting that Kelly was a bimbo. Which would appear to prove Kelly’s point, but, hey…
Is it that he claims not to care what the press says about him? As he told Esquire magazine in 1991, “You know, it doesn’t really matter what [the media] write as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass.”
Or does it just come down to the fact that he said he’d build a 1575-mile-long wall along the southern border and make Mexico pay for it? If you believe that, you’ll believe anything.
Even about whatever’s biggest.