Posted on 04/02/2016 11:18:24 AM PDT by DrewsDad
A Unified Fields Theory
Until Trump changed the subject to punishing women for having abortions, the Trump obsession of the week was Michelle Fields.
I’m glad that story is largely gone. I don’t think it was good for Fields or for the forces opposed to Trump. And it distracted from more important stories, like Trump’s willingness to nuke Europe.
RELATED: If Donald Trump Were Eight, His Behavior Might Be Endearing
Without rehashing the whole thing again with reference to frame-by-frame analysis best left for the Zapruder film, let me just say I think all of the important and relevant facts are on Fields’s side. There’s audio of her describing what happened immediately after the Corey Lewandowski incident. There are the bruises captured on film. There’s video and there are eye-witness accounts, all of which corroborate the basic story Fields has been telling.
To listen to Trump’s and Lewandowski’s defenders, this is all a big lie, the upshot being that Fields invented the whole story in a deviously clever gambit to trade her job at Breitbart and her regular gig on Eric Bolling’s show for something so much better. Indeed, I think her plan went something like this:
Step 1: Ask Donald Trump about affirmative action while he’s walking out of a press conference.
Step 2: Walk in just such a way as to dupe Corey Lewandowski into putting his hands on me.
Step 3: Pretend that he grabbed me too hard, convincing eyewitnesses on scene that something bad happened.
Step 4: Bruise my own arm and take a picture of it.
Step 5: Ask for an apology from the Trump campaign, which is like asking Trump to create a boulder too heavy for him to lift.
Step 6: Wait for my own news organization to throw me under the bus, then quit job.
Step 7: Wait for the checks to roll in!
Still, what happened to Fields was not Kristallnacht and Lewandowski should not, in my opinion, stand trial or be sent to even five minutes of jail. I think he’s a boorish lout and he behaved stupidly. If Lewandoswki had common sense or decency, he would have apologized for overreacting and thrown Fields an interview with Trump to make amends. The whole thing would have been over without any of us having heard a word about it.
Second Thoughts on Trump
But observing common courtesy and civility is not what Team Trump does. And that’s the real issue here. Donald Trump and his campaign take great pride in overturning the basic rules of politics and democratic discourse. For those who want to see “the establishment” — however defined — torn down, this bull-in-a-china-shop stuff is celebrated. Trump’s fans ascribe a brilliance to his actions that is wholly underserved. Breaking the rules in ways large and small is seen as self-justifying in every case.
RELATED: Trump Has No Clue What American Government Is All About
Or almost every case. This week there have been some cracks in the façade. Trump’s attacks on Heidi Cruz unsettled even Ann Coulter. And his abortion remarks are still sending tremors through the granite foundations of Trump can-do-no-wrong-ism. Joe Scarborough and Breitbart’s John Nolte are talking about what a bad week he’s having and gravely warning Trump to get his act together.
As Jim Geraghty has been writing, the problem with such second thoughts is the assumption that something is amiss with Trump or his campaign. This is Trump. This is his campaign. The Trump we see before us is the same Trump. It’s a bit like when Barack Obama said that the Jeremiah Wright he saw denouncing America wasn’t the man he knew. That was nonsense. Obama knew exactly who Wright was, having attended his church for 20 years. It was only when Wright’s act moved to a larger national stage that all of a sudden he became inconvenient to Obama.
RELATED: No, Trump Isn’t Actually Better than Hillary
The analogy isn’t perfect, of course. But the basic point is the same. The Donald Trump of the last week is the exact same Donald Trump many of us saw a year ago or five years ago. He’s always been full of sh*t. He’s always been a total ignoramus when it comes to public policy, lacking the simple sense of patriotic duty to do his homework on the issues. He’s always been a nasty and boorish cad. He’s always pretended to be a conservative while working on liberal assumptions of what conservatives want to hear.
#related#His “punish the women” comments were of a piece with his refusal to condemn the Klan on CNN. It’s not that he wants to punish women who have abortions — I’d bet he’s paid more abortion bills than he will ever sign — it’s that he thinks that’s what pro-lifers want to hear. It’s not that he’s a Klansman or that the pillowcases at Mara Lago come with eyeholes cut out in advance. It’s that Trump thinks lots of his fans like the Klan and he wants to pander to them. I have heard first-hand stories from people who’ve worked with Trump about how he disparages women’s appearance routinely. That’s who he is. If you’re attacking him because he retweeted a bad picture of Heidi, that’s not you being principled, it’s you getting cold feet.
Indeed, I am sure that the same opportunism that has caused so many supposedly principled conservatives to hitch their wagons to Trump is now causing some of them to question their choices, not because Trump has changed but because the climate might be changing around them.
By all means, if Trump continues to unravel (a huge if), please abandon Trump. But don’t think for a moment that the rest of us will automatically take your word for it when you say this or that statement changed your mind about the man. He hasn’t changed, your calculations have.
#share#
The Gravitational Pull of Lies
But can I go back to Michelle Fields for a moment? I think that whole affair was really instructive.
Trump is a master of a kind of passive aggression — though it can often just seem like plain old aggression. When caught in a lie, Trump doesn’t merely stick to the lie, he enlarges it. Not only did Lewandowski do nothing wrong, he saved Trump from an assault! That pen could have been a bomb! A bomb!!! (Remember when he suggested a protester who charged the stage was with ISIS?)
RELATED: When Liars Lie, the Honest Face Ridicule
By embracing and enlarging the lie, Trump gives his most ardent fans no escape. They must either fall in line with yet another comfortable story about how their leader is both supremely right and a victim of deceit or open themselves up to the possibility that this one instance of deception and boorishness isn’t unique but utterly representative, which it is.
I think many of us have known people like this. Inveterate liars and other kinds of sociopaths test the limits of polite society. They break the implicit bargain that says you can get away with lying only so long as everyone agrees not to notice. Obvious lies are insults, because they rest on the assumption that the person being lied to is either too stupid to recognize the lie or too weak to say anything about it. In this sense, Trump has been insulting his biggest supporters from day one.
RELATED: On Donald Trump and the Two-Bit Thugs Who Do His Bidding
We’ve all had dinner parties or family gatherings ruined by that oaf who refuses to bend to simple politeness. They force polite people to either swallow small — or large — insults for the sake of civility. “I didn’t want to make a huge deal about it because it would have just made things worse,” is a rationalization we’ve given voice to on the drive home.
Trump is doing this on a massive scale. Like all demagogues, he’s using his lies as a loyalty test for his followers. He’s exploiting his popularity and abusing the devotion of his fans to force them into going along with his fictions, until they are in so deep psychologically, they have no choice but to carry on. It’s an ancient psychological tactic of authoritarians, Mafia dons, and the like: Force your followers into sharing the blame for your misdeeds so that they can’t break ranks. For instance, when Trump was caught saying something typically ignorant about abortion, he told Eric Bolling that MSNBC cut out the nuance of what he really said.
“You really ought to hear the whole thing,” Trump told guest host Eric Bolling. “This is a long convoluted question. This was a long discussion, and they just cut it out. And, frankly, it was extremely — it was really convoluted.”
Of course, Trump knows that MSNBC ran the clip in its entirety, and Bolling probably does, too. But I am sure that if I went on Twitter and said, “Trump lied about his comments being edited,” within minutes I’d hear from people saying “No, MSNBC edited him!” or “Of course you RINOs would believe MSNBC!” I’ll also be interested to see if Bolling says anything about the fact that Donald Trump blatantly lied to him.
But I won’t hold my breath.
you’re just pissed that trump’s showing his true colors...back to back.
Yes, sadly the giants are all gone. And it is a shadow of its former self. We miss they way things were, just a product of getting old....
You've just admitted to exactly what I have said.
Ted Cruz is a GOPe operative. He's doing exactly what the GOPe always does to block a game changer from being sworn in as President.
You don't see that right?
You are your own worst enemy in these exchanges.
You’re just pissed that I disagree with you and have pegged Ted Cruz for exactly what he is.
He’s playing the party of a destroyer in this election.
He can’t win public support, so he hopes to cozy up to our enemies to gain the position by treachery.
His treachery will be rewarded. Count on it.
Re: How many abortions has Donald Trump personally paid for?
hahahaha.
Even for you-this is a new low. Get some professional help.
Aww, you don’t like it when I play like you folks do.
Tough!
A loose cannon is also a game changer. Trump will change the game by getting into bed with Democrats, getting into bed with rinos, and going off half cocked because his "brain is so good."
He is a game changer all right and you will not like the final score.
And yet when Cruz joins the GOPe even before the election, you reference it as ‘business as usual’.
You baffle me, the fact that you can’t see that your guy is doing exactly right now, what you predict mine will later on.
So my guy has to be bad, but yours... no way. He’s great.
Seriously!
There are far bigger issues of more pressing importance than wasting my time on this completely stupid issue. Even if I were to agree with you, it has nothing to do with Trump.
If you think this negatively reflects on Trump, perhaps because you think Trump should fire him or take some other punitive action, then that is ludicrous.
Trump is loyal and would never toss someone under the bus for such a minor incident, and if he did I would lose respect for him. For it would show he cares more about winning then loyalty.
No doubt Ted would throw his campaign manager under the bus though for a similar incident that might threaten his lust to obtain power. The Cruzes seem more and more like the Clintons with each passing yday.
Well, if that’s the best you’ve got, then it’s the best you’ve got.
No sale.
Back that first term Senator all you like.
I’m not partaking.
From one perspective, this all boils down to an argument about which candidate can actually reach the Presidency in the general election. And while I understand that there is a good argument that Trump cannot win, I have believed Cruz to be a losing proposition since well before Trump was even mentioned.
Regardless of calls for gravitas or policy acumen, the general election is mostly a beauty contest. Sadly, many think it be a choice of the perfect candidate, where it is always the lesser of two evils.
Our country is faced with some very serious problems. We each have our own list. Mine are listed in more or less order of importance to me as follows:
1. Invasions by people with cultures completely alien and dangerous to ours.
2. Weakening of our national defence.
3. Lose of national sovereignty to international organizations.
4. Fewer citizen are earning their own way and more are relying on an expanding government.
5. Declining wealth and political power of the middle class.
6. Division of our citizens according to race and class.
l am a Trump supporter because he seems to be the only candidate that addresses any of these issues. Do I agree with everything he says? No. Do I trust him? No, but I don’t trust any politician (I’ve heard enough broken promises). If elected, will he address the problems he talks about? Probably not, but maybe his inflated ego will make him try to be a good president. Last of all, I don’t see any alternatives
Oh? I guess you haven't heard.
Thanks for the honesty. I just believe there is another candidate will address those issues too. Since he is my Senator, I have followed him closely and can confirm that he has done what he’s said. No, he’s not perfect, but is closer than the other options.
You are of course fully entitled to your opinion but the numbers, the approval numbers indicate exactly the opposite.
So his role is shrinking, that was probably the plan all along anyway. Still is supporting him and not throwing him under the bus.
#128 as to that point. Yesterday Trump himself flipped on his statement from the most resent townhall event that he wouldn’t support the R nominee. Why? Be cause if he does he loses the S.C. delegates and the RNC lists and funding
Seems to the utter dismay of the Trumpkins, Donnie does want to be a Establishment guy!.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.