But I think it’s much more than the messiness of politics, especially as exemplified by the current deadlock between the legislative and executive branches of our government, that gives rise to the desire for an outsider. Most Americans suspect that politics is corrupt. This is the legacy of Watergate, and that suspicion of political corruption fuels the desire for outsider candidates. What baffles me is that anyone could think that Donald Trump would be an antidote for political corruption.
.. Mr. Trump didn’t just, as Mr. Brooks puts it, walk onto the scene. Mr. Trump was triumphantly ushered in with kid gloves by the media establishment because its ratings skyrocketed when it reported about him.
.. David Brooks presents an allegory regarding what happens when good people say nothing. He was perhaps too young and idealistic to appreciate the nascent monster in the tactics laid out by the G.O.P. political strategist Lee Atwater, or the Machiavellian goals cloaked in Newt Gingrich’s Contract for America. But where was his voice when Sarah Palin was milking the very undercurrent of violence he now attributes to the Donald Trump campaign, or when the media fomented hatred across the airwaves until even our own members of Congress believed the misinformation (Joe Wilson’s shout of “you lie!” during Mr. Obama’s speech to Congress), or when the Senate G.O.P. leader vowed to put party ahead of country to make President Obama a “one-term” president?
Mr. Trump’s candidacy has been more than 30 years in the making,
.. Shortly before the fateful Kennedy-Nixon contest, President Dwight D. Eisenhower said that TV should help foster an alert and knowledgeable citizenry worthy of a modern republic. Alas, the opposite has transpired. We live in a world of sound bites, and we prefer quick fixes and four-word solutions proposed by telegenic candidates. The tragicomic irony: We are confronted with complex challenges, but the zeitgeist does not encourage candidates or voters to respond in kind.
.. As we see in debate after debate, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, Mr. Trump’s main competitors, consider Mr. Trump a traitor because he asserts that he will play politics by engaging in compromises. So, Mr. Trump may be all the bad things that Mr. Brooks asserts he is, but he distinguishes himself from and riles the other contenders by his lack of purity and his willingness to play politics.
Mr. Trump confirmed in a statement that the state Republican Party’s inability to assure an uncontested race was a deal-breaker, though he played down his interest. “I never looked seriously at running for governor,” he said, adding, “If I ran, I would have won.”
.. Mr. Nojay, armed with data, ran Mr. Trump through a list of presidents and their résumés. “Going back to George Washington, there has never been a president who has not served in high public office,” he said he told Mr. Trump.
.. Some of Mr. Trump’s advisers, including Roger Stone, a veteran political consultant, opposed the run for governor, arguing that Mr. Trump did not need Albany to serve as a prelude to his 2016 presidential bid.
.. But Mr. Trump, unwilling to face competition for the nomination, told Mr. Long that one condition for his candidacy would be to get Rob Astorino, the Westchester County executive who was already planning to run, out of the race.
“I made it clear to him, that’s not how politics works,” Mr. Long said. “It isn’t us picking up a phone and telling a candidate you can’t run.”
.. Eventually, Mr. Astorino recalled, he was asked (though he would not say by whom) to consider joining a “unity ticket” in which Mr. Trump would run for governor and Mr. Astorino for lieutenant governor. Mr. Astorino would become governor after Mr. Trump declared his presidential bid.
“Chris Christie’s endorsement of Donald Trump is an astonishing display of political opportunism,” Ms. Whitman, who was a national finance co-chair of the Christie campaign, said in the statement.
“Donald Trump is unfit to be president,” Ms. Whitman said. “He is a dishonest demagogue who plays to our worst fears. Trump would take America on a dangerous journey. Christie knows all that and indicated as much many times publicly. The governor is mistaken if he believes he can now count on my support, and I call on Christie’s donors and supporters to reject the governor and Donald Trump outright.
Marco Rubio, a frothy focus-grouped concoction whose main qualifications to be president consist of a nice smile and an easy wit, has been mocking Trump as a con man.
Real estate developers are con men by nature, trying to get what they want at the lowest price and sell it at the highest price, overpromising how great it’s going to be.
As Maria Konnikova, the author of “The Confidence Game,” notes, con men are created by the yearning of their marks “to believe in something that gives life meaning. … Their genius lies in figuring out what, precisely, it is we want, and how they can present themselves as the perfect vehicle for delivering on that desire.”
It’s delicious watching the neocon men who tricked the country and gulled the naïve W. into the Iraq invasion go ballistic trying to stop the Gotham con man.
.. For all the Republican establishment’s self-righteous bleating, Trump is nothing more than an unvarnished, cruder version. For years, it has fanned, stoked and exploited the worst angels among the nativists, racists, Pharisees and angry white men, concurring in anti-immigrant measures, restricting minority voting, whipping up anti-Planned Parenthood hysteria and enabling gun nuts.
.. After watching Hillary Clinton, for whom campaigning is a nuisance, and Barack Obama, who disdains politics, it’s fun to see someone having fun.
.. Trump sees his egregious positions on immigration, torture and terrorism revenge as opening bids.