Marco Rubio, a frothy focus-grouped concoction whose main qualifications to be president consist of a nice smile and an easy wit, has been mocking Trump as a con man.
Real estate developers are con men by nature, trying to get what they want at the lowest price and sell it at the highest price, overpromising how great it’s going to be.
As Maria Konnikova, the author of “The Confidence Game,” notes, con men are created by the yearning of their marks “to believe in something that gives life meaning. … Their genius lies in figuring out what, precisely, it is we want, and how they can present themselves as the perfect vehicle for delivering on that desire.”
It’s delicious watching the neocon men who tricked the country and gulled the naïve W. into the Iraq invasion go ballistic trying to stop the Gotham con man.
.. For all the Republican establishment’s self-righteous bleating, Trump is nothing more than an unvarnished, cruder version. For years, it has fanned, stoked and exploited the worst angels among the nativists, racists, Pharisees and angry white men, concurring in anti-immigrant measures, restricting minority voting, whipping up anti-Planned Parenthood hysteria and enabling gun nuts.
.. After watching Hillary Clinton, for whom campaigning is a nuisance, and Barack Obama, who disdains politics, it’s fun to see someone having fun.
.. Trump sees his egregious positions on immigration, torture and terrorism revenge as opening bids.
Donald Trump: The Post-Truth Candidate
Trump, despite his denunciations of employers preferring foreign to American workers, turned down 94 percent of American applicants for seasonal jobs at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Fla., and used, instead, workers brought in on H-2B visas. Not to mention that he has employed illegal immigrants on at least two occasions, the best-known in the early 1980s, when he used undocumented Polish workers to avoid paying pension and welfare benefits to unionized Americans. Trump, who was previously against increases in the importation of low-skilled and high-skilled workers, now suddenly supports those increases.
.. In short, Trump believes in nothing except the force of his own personality. Often, it’s not quite correct to say he’s lying, because he never believed anything in the first place. Donald Trump is post-truth.
Donald the Dangerous
Trump told The New York Times in January that he favored a 45 percent tariff on Chinese goods, then denied ever having said such a thing. The Times produced the audio (that part of the conversation was on the record) in which Trump clearly backed the 45 percent tariff, risking a trade war between the world’s two largest economies.
.. The third risk is to America’s reputation and soft power. Both Bush and President Obama worked hard to reassure the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims that the U.S. is not at war with Islam. Trump has pretty much declared war on all Muslims.
.. He is America’s Ahmadinejad.
.. As Mitt Romney notes, “This is the very brand of anger that has led other nations into the abyss.”
.. Peter Feaver, a Duke University political scientist who was a national security official in the Bush White House, noted that most Republicans are united in believing that President Obama and Hillary Clinton have damaged the United States and added to the burdens of the next president.
“Yet what Trump promises to do would in some important ways make all of the problems we face dramatically worse,”
Clash of Republican Con Artists
Mr. Ryan also declares that the “party of Lincoln” must “reject any group or cause that is built on bigotry.” Has he ever heard of Nixon’s “Southern strategy”; of Ronald Reagan’s invocations of welfare queens and “strapping young bucks” using food stamps; of Willie Horton?
.. Then there’s foreign policy, where Mr. Trump is, if anything, more reasonable — or more accurately, less unreasonable — than his rivals... the Trump phenomenon threatens the con the G.O.P. establishment has been playing on its own base. I’m talking about the bait and switch in which white voters are induced to hate big government by dog whistles about Those People, but actual policies are all about rewarding the donor class.