Trump nakedly wants what maybe all politicians want, but few have the temerity to ask for: plenty of attention, all of it admiring. He appears to believe in a captive press, of the kind found, for example, in Benito Mussolini’s Italy or Fidel Castro’s Cuba. And he believes in a cult of personality—his own—that should obviate the need for questions. Just acknowledge his tremendousness and shut up. “Don’t believe the biased and phony media quoting people who work for my campaign,” he tweeted in May. “The only quote that matters is a quote from me!”
.. Trump’s campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, offered a unique interpretation of what journalists do. “I really don’t appreciate campaigns thinking it is the job of the media to go and be these virtual fact checkers,” she said on Sunday, on ABC’s “This Week.” Since when is it not journalists’ job to check facts?
.. after the debate was over, Trump complained that “they” had given him a “defective mic.” He added, “I wonder, was that on purpose?” (That’s a species of excuse he’s used before: in February, after he failed, in one of this phone interviews with CNN, to disavow David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard, he blamed the affair on a “bad earpiece.”)
.. Trump has repeatedly made is that as President he would “loosen” or “open up” libel laws, so that, as he said at a campaign rally in Texas in February, “when the New York Times writes a hit piece which is a total disgrace or when the Washington Post . . . writes a hit piece, we can sue them and win money instead of having no chance of winning because they’re totally protected.” It’s not clear how he would do this as President or whether he even could, and when he’s been challenged on those points he hasn’t made it any clearer, probably because he has no idea.
.. More frightening, though, is the way that Trump has spoken about the law as an instrument of personal vengeance—his way of getting back at his critics and making them pay. “We’re going to have people sue you like you’ve never got sued before,” he said, talking about reporters, at a February rally in Texas.
.. Clinton’s falsehoods belonged more recognizably in the realm of what politicians do so often: she obfuscated, or exaggerated, or was less than transparent in defending her handling of particular matters during her career in public life. She did not tend to lie, as Trump does, about what Politico called matters of “policy substance”—what one could also call demonstrable facts about the world.
.. “A man who is unconscious of himself acts in a blind, instinctive way and is in addition fooled by all the illusions that arise when he sees everything that he is not conscious of in himself coming to meet him from outside as projections upon his neighbors,” Carl Jung wrote in his 1945
Donald Trump’s Disturbia
“No matter what your feelings, whether you’re the governor of Ohio, whether you’re a senator from Texas, or any of the other people that I beat so easily and so badly, you have no choice,” he crowed. “You’ve got to go for Trump.”
.. Ivanka offered her father’s hero-myth at the beginning of her convention speech Thursday night: “He prevailed against a field of 16 very talented competitors.”
“No matter what your feelings, whether you’re the governor of Ohio, whether you’re a senator from Texas, or any of the other people that I beat so easily and so badly, you have no choice,” he crowed. “You’ve got to go for Trump.”
And on the distaff side, we are bound to hear more about “Crooked Hillary” and “Pocahontas” as the ladies celebrate making history in Philly this week.
.. “This idea that America is somehow on the verge of collapse, this vision of violence and chaos everywhere, doesn’t really jibe with the experience of most people,” the president said.
He added: “When it comes to crime, the violent crime rate in America has been lower during my presidency than any time in the last three, four decades. And although it is true that we’ve seen an uptick in murders and violent crime in some cities this year, the fact of the matter is, is that the murder rate today, the violence rate today, is far lower than it was when Ronald Reagan was president — and lower than when I took office.”
The rate of killings of police officers is also much lower since the Reagan years, he said. “Those are facts. That’s the data.”
.. Trump said The Enquirer, owned by a friend of his, should be “very respected” and should have won a Pulitzer for breaking the John Edwards love child story.
.. As Pence looked on with smiling trepidation, Trump asked him if he could set up a “super PAC” while he was serving as president to destroy Ted Cruz but didn’t wait for an answer.
Jonah Goldberg: July 22, 2016
Over and over again, in videos, speeches and interviews, the theme from Trump’s children was that their father, our champion, had been called from his happy life to serve the Republic. He didn’t want to do this. He has been called by destiny, pulled by patriotism. He is a modern day Cincinnatus laying down his golf clubs.
Never mind that Trump has wanted to run for president for 20 years.
.. Nowhere in his speech did Trump give any sense that he knew — or cared — how he would get things done through his “sheer force of will.” That’s the thing about magical thinking, you don’t need to explain it.
.. In the Mythic Trump story, he is like Moses living amongst the Egyptians before he sees the light. “Nobody knows the system better than me,” he says with an ironic wink. The idea is that he has been amongst the oppressors, in mufti, learning their secrets and now he shall deliver his righteous people from them.
.. As for the doubters? They are like some heretical fifth column. In his prepared text, Trump proclaimed, “Remember: All of the people telling you that you can’t have the country you want, are the same people telling you that I wouldn’t be standing here tonight. No longer can we rely on those elites in media, and politics, who will say anything to keep a rigged system in place.”
But then he ad-libbed: “We love defeating those people.”
And of course, the crowd — brimming with the very same elites who have lived off politics and Washington like remoras on Leviathan — went wild.
.. Just a day earlier Trump said, “When the world looks at how bad the United States is, and then we go and talk about civil liberties, I don’t think we’re a very good messenger.” Keep in mind, this was in the context of criticizing human-rights abusers like Turkey and Russia. But no matter, he told the audience he was going to — through that indomitable will of his — make America proud again. And the crowd went wild.
.. By the normal rules the speech should have been a disaster. But as we all know the normal rules no longer apply. I am fairly certain Trump will get his post-convention bump. I no longer think it is extremely unlikely Trump will lose. This was a bread-and-circus convention and, it seems, a great many people want to see how the mythic story of Trump, The People’s Champion, plays out.
.. It’s clear many of my friends on the pro-Trump right are giddy with resentment-justifying glee at the alleged comeuppance of Trump opponents. One need only listen to quite literally anything Laura Ingraham or Sean Hannity say about Trump critics to see how large a role spite plays in the now-unbreachable divide between the new nationalists and the old conservatives.
.. Then again, I think maybe not. The Trump movement in its glandular core is a movement about resentment and payback. It makes sense to conclude that at least some of its most ardent disciples are psychologically inclined to resentment and payback as well.
.. But the truth is conservatism has become shot-through with a kind of vindictiveness that reflects poorly on everyone, friend and foe alike.
.. I hate that after 20 years of fighting what I believe tobe the good fight, so many can’t muster the good will or generosity to consider that I’m doing what I think is right. I’m entirely open to the argument that my analysis and judgment is wrong. But I am resentful, furious and, most of all, contemptuous of the lazy and self-justifying assumption that my motives are malign.
.. I have nothing but sympathy for those who feel they must vote against Hillary Clinton. But I have scorn for those who think that requires lying about Trump. If you’re a true-believer in Trump, that’s fine. I think you’re making the same mistake that the Left’s 2008 true believers made about Obama. There are no saviors in politics.
.. In Cleveland, I met scores of fellow heretics. We didn’t meet in catacombs. But we plotted and planned all the same. We are the anti-establishment now. We stand opposed to two parties united behind two different facets of statism and identity politics.
What It Means for Trump to ‘Speak From the Heart’
“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.