With eyes wide open, Mike Pence eagerly auditioned for the role as Donald Trump’s poodle. Now comfortably leashed, he deserves the degradations that he seems too sycophantic to recognize as such. He did Trump’s adolescent bidding with last Sunday’s preplanned virtue pageant of scripted indignation — his flight from the predictable sight of players kneeling during the national anthem
.. No unblinkered observer can still cling to the hope that Pence has the inclination, never mind the capacity, to restrain, never mind educate, the man who elevated him to his current glory.
.. no one can have sustained transactions with Trump without becoming too soiled for subsequent scrubbing.
.. Hell is truth seen too late
.. instinct to pander to those who adore him as much as he does
.. they are impervious to the Everest of evidence that he disdains them as a basket of gullibles.
.. He gives his gullibles not governance by tantrum, but tantrum as governance.
.. The faux nationalists of the “alt-right” and their fellow travelers such as Stephen K. Bannon, although fixated on protecting the United States from imported goods, have imported the blood-and-soil ethno-tribalism that stains the continental European right.
.. Trump’s election has brought back to the public stage ideas that a post-Lincoln America had slowly but determinedly expunged.
.. the alt-right sees society as inevitably “a zero-sum contest among fundamentally competing identity groups.” Hence the alt-right is explicitly an alternative to Lincoln’s affirmation of the Founders’ vision. They saw America as cohesive because of a shared creed.