There are crackpots who believe that the earth is flat, and they don’t deserve to be quoted without explaining that this is an, er, outlying view, and the same goes for a crackpot who has argued that climate change is a Chinese-made hoax, who has called for barring Muslims and who has said that he will build a border wall and that Mexico will pay for it.
.. We owe it to our readers to signal when we’re writing about a crackpot. Even if he’s a presidential candidate. No, especially when he’s a presidential candidate.
E pluribus unum
Many of us understand and agree that the way you lose to terrorism is to cop to its premises in the way that you react to it. If ISIS or Al Qaeda want to claim that there is a war of civilizations, a religious war between “Muslims” and “The West”, the worst thing we could do is to live up to the role into which the terrorists have cast us by indiscriminately harassing and attacking Muslims. Acts of ostentatious violence are calculated to goad us into reinforcing the enemy’s framing of the conflict.
.. I think that the “war on terror” cannot be won by defeating ISIS or Al Qaeda or any other enemy, but will end when the people of the Middle East have hope of living decent lives in stable countries with legitimate governments. Most problems in the world must be solved, not defeated, however attractive the branding of yet another “war on” may be.
.. But you can’t solve “Trumpism” by defeating racism.
Donald Trump’s Ideology of Applause
“He does have an 82 percent approval rating,” Donald Trump said during the special “commander in chief” forum last week. It’s worth dwelling on that sentence, because it’s the key to what drives and guides his presidential bid. It’s the giveaway.
For Trump, the whole point of political office is adulation, and adulation is the entire proof of a person’s worth. Rectitude pales next to ratings. Ethics are a sorry substitute for applause. And the methods by which a crowd is fired up don’t matter, so long as he can bask in the clapping.
.. He grew so enamored of a magnificent, impenetrable wall along the Mexican border because the primary-season voters who thronged his rallies went gaga for it. He was a rat pressing a lever and getting precisely the pellet of reverence that he sought, so he kept pressing, over and over, harder and harder: Mexico will pay for it! Meanwhile I’ll round up and deport all the illegals! Let’s ban Muslims while we’re at it!
.. The general election is a laboratory with rules different from those of the Republican primaries, and he’s still trying to figure out which lever to press.
.. When his insults aren’t about physical appearance, they’re about popularity.
A newscaster is incompetent because his or her show isn’t No. 1. A newspaper isn’t trustworthy because its profit margin is down. Jeb Bush wasn’t fit for the presidency because voters didn’t swoon for him. Trump deserved the job because more people chanted his name.
.. The idea of intrinsic merit is alien to him.
.. the Russian word that Putin used for Trump can mean not only “brilliant,” which is Trump’s interpretation, but also “colorful” or “flamboyant.”
.. When he demeans the very Republican senators whose re-election campaigns he should be helping, it’s typically on the grounds that they haven’t showered him with praise or genuflected when he draws near.
.. He’ll play a fascist if that’s the path to the throne. He’ll weave ludicrously tall tales if that’s the route. Should he get there, he’ll proclaim his arrival the very evidence that he’s worthy, and then he’ll do whatever it takes to continue feeling as affirmed.
Donald Trump’s Big Lies at the Commander-In-Chief Forum
Contrary to some accounts, neither Hitler nor his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, took credit for successfully using what the French refer to as le grand mensonge: the Nazi leaders always claimed they were telling the truth. In Hitler’s mind, it was the Jews of Vienna who spread the original Big Lie—about Germany’s conduct in the First World War. Goebbels later blamed the English, saying they “follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it.”
.. On September 11, 2002, he appeared on “The Howard Stern Show,” where the host asked him if he was “for invading Iraq.” Trump replied, “Yeah, I guess so. I wish the first time it was done correctly.” This wasn’t the most fulsome of endorsements, it is true. But it clearly indicated that Trump backed sending in troops to overthrow Saddam Hussein.
.. Depending on how charitable one feels, Trump’s blatant disregard for the factual record could be described as chutzpah, self-delusion, or the default reaction of someone to whom lying has become, in the words of his ghostwriter Tony Schwartz, “second nature.”
.. by his demanding standards, as a medium lie, rather than a big one. It is the sort of thing he throws out every so often—a bit like his claims that President Obama founded isis, or that “thousands and thousands” of people in Jersey City cheered the collapse of the Twin Towers. Trump must know such things didn’t happen. But, in his world, the truth’s value is instrumental, rather than intrinsic. “He lied strategically,” Schwartz told Mayer. “He had a complete lack of conscience about it.”
.. When he utters some outrageous falsehood, as he does almost every day, the reaction in some quarters is that it is just Trump being Trump. He’s the P. T. Barnum of the modern age, and he’s been telling stretchers for decades. What else can you expect?