A gobsmacking day of intraparty pie-throwing ended with Donald J. Trump, from the stage of the Fox Theater in Detroit, assuring the American public that the size of his male appendage was just fine. “I guarantee you,” he said, “there’s no problem.”
There was a time when I might have been stunned. There was a time when Mr. Trump kept his anatomical allusions to post-debate interviews, when he referred to the moderator Megyn Kelly — who was tough on him at his last debate on Fox, in August — as having “blood coming out of her wherever.”
I might have been shocked, once, at this whole debate — the hooting audience, the barking candidates, the NSFW content — but those days are over.
.. They attacked him for lies; he answered with size.
.. Mr. Romney’s speech was high-minded and flowing, quoting presidents and philosophers. Mr. Trump throws sentences like punches. Sentences that repeat. For emphasis, they repeat. Mr. Romney disparages Mr. Trump’s integrity. Mr. Trump visualizes Mr. Romney as, literally, beneath him. Romney: You lack gravitas, sir! Trump: I got your gravitas right here!
.. But Mr. Romney was at least partly arguing for standards that Mr. Trump’s supporters reject. Over and over, they tell reporters, “He’s just saying what everyone thinks” and “He says what’s on his mind” — which are not the same thing as “He always tells the truth” or “He never contradicts himself.”
“Never Trump” and the Rise of a New Republican Respectability Politics
Another enumerated Trump’s boasts about sexual conquests and the moral superiority he associated with wealth and concluded, “He embodies virtually everything I strive to teach my young sons not to be and not to emulate.”
.. The more a voter goes to church, analysts have found, the less likely he or she is to vote for Trump.
.. In this election, that movement may be happening along a strange and unexpected axis: we are seeing the rise of a conservative respectability politics.