TRUMP: THE CANDIDATE

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From Charlie Pierce at Esquire [emphasis added]…

[T]his is the day in which the denizens of the epistemically closed hallucinatory menagerie of the political right become reality. The conjuring words finally have worked. The black spirits of the conservative imagination walk the landscape, making news.

Donald Trump, [will] actively pretend to run for president this time around, and … announced his intentions in a speech that apparently was written by elves who learned English 20 minutes before Trump walked on stage.

“Politicians are all talk, no action. Nothing is going to get done. They will not bring us, believe me, to the promise land. They will not. I’ve been on the circuit making speeches and I hear my fellow Republicans – and they’re wonderful people, I like them! They all want me to support them! – … I watch the speeches of these people and they say, ‘The sun will rise, the moon will set! All sorts of wonderful things will happen!'”

Personally, I think saying that the sun will rise and the moon will set are two of the easiest campaign promises to keep ever.

Trump’s vaguely paragraph-like globs of words were shot through with magical spells. There’s this doctor he knows who doesn’t like the Affordable Care Act. There’s this manufacturer he knows who’s having trouble with China. They all call Trump — perhaps through his bridgework, perhaps not — and unburden themselves on him because they know that Trump is the person who can solve their problems because he is a problem-solver on the art of the deal, the four bankruptcies notwithstanding.

He is the inevitable result of 40 years of political conjuring, mainly by Republicans, but abetted by far too many Democrats as well. He is the inevitable product of anyone who ever argued that our political institutions should be run “like a business.” … He is the inevitable product of anyone who ever argued why the government can’t balance its books “the way any American family would.” He is the inevitable result of the deregulated economy that was deregulated out of a well-cultivated wonder and awe directed at the various masters of the universe. Sooner or later, all of this misbegotten magical thinking was going to burp up a clown like Donald Trump.

Only quibble with Pierce here: Trump is not “pretend[ing] to run” for President. He’s actually running. And anybody who ‘misunderestimates’ what the Republican Party has become at this point — who they would actually nominate as their standard bearer and, by extension, who they might actually be able to get “elected” in the US of A in 2016, through any means necessary — does so at their own peril…

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