What Kind of Person Would Vote For Donald Trump? These People.
It’s still not clear whether he’s in on the joke—there’s always been a bit of mystery to how aware Donald Trump is that Donald Trump is full of shit. But when you see him in person, and you hear him claim that the term “Supreme Leader” would be more fitting for him than for the head of Iran, there is the tiniest hint that he knows what a ludicrous thing this is to say. Even his exaggerations are hilarious. He said this was the biggest crowd in state history, even though we were in a public-school auditorium. He said he was worth more than $10 billion, a figure that is impossible for him to prove but also impossible for us to disprove. He said he made $213 million from The Apprentice, a figure which NBC steadfastly refutes.
.. You can see why people think he’s more “honest” than one of the other randos in the GOP field—he’s gifted at not sounding like a politician even as he deploys standard tricks from the “I’m not a politician” handbook.
.. If Donald Trump has one undeniable virtue as a politician, it’s that he does not try to fake being one of us. He’s not going to the fucking Bowl-o-Rama on a Saturday night in a plaid shirt to prove he’s a man of the people. The whole thrust of The Donald’s campaign is that he is special. He is extraordinary.
.. And here is where my brief jag of mildly effusive praise for Donald Trump must come to an end, because the grim undercurrent of his rise is SHAME. After all, if you believe we must make America great again, then you must also believe that America, at the present moment, sucks. And pretty much everyone at the Trump picnic believed that America sucks. When I asked a group of Trump supporters outside if they were proud of America, they all laughed with derision. Of course they weren’t proud of America. Of course this nation is a shithole. One voter named Corey told me he hoped Trump would help America “get back to the way it was,” a refrain I heard from a lot of people, as if the country was a rock band that had changed its sound. Backing Trump means acknowledging that you live in a world of failure, and that your last best hope is the Music Man moseying into town.
.. Now, here is how Donald Trump says he will Make America Great Again™. In Trump’s worldview, politics is little more than series of deals to be made. Every complex global problem, or intractable adversary, can be tamed with sufficiently hard-ass steakhouse dealmaking. He explained it all in Osky:
“I know the greatest negotiators in the world,” he said. “Now some of these people are horrible human beings. You wouldn’t have them to dinner. They’re vicious. They’re crude. They’re unhappy. They treat everybody badly. Who cares? I want them negotiating against China. Think of Carl Icahn, a friend of mine. He’d be great. I’d say, ‘Carl, take China’.”