“Trump speaks from the heart.” For months, Mr. Trump’s supporters have been leaning hard on those words to turn his vengefulness and vigilantism into a virtue.
.. Casting Mr. Trump’s incitements to xenophobia and violence as heartfelt evidently makes them slightly less terrifying. A through-line of the convention has been to set up a powerful antagonism between “political correctness,” the province of the hypocritical, intellectual and weak-willed, and “speaking from the heart,” as a province of … Donald Trump.
.. I’m going to speak from the heart tonight.”
The phrase sounds smarmy. It compromises the Republican Party’s usual claim of hardheadedness over and against the bleeding-heart emotionalism of the other party.
But it’s probably the only possible rhetorical move of the Trump campaign.
.. It’s become impossible for Mr. Trump’s supporters to lend reason or logic to his vendettas, daft misogyny, thoroughgoing racism and bloodlust. Instead, they advertise it as lovable.