How Donald Trump courted the right-wing fringe to conquer the GOP

The Washington Post ^ | November 27th, 2015 | By McKay Coppins

[Mariner]

Early one evening in January 2014, I sat in a darkened den with walnut-paneled walls and baroque furniture, trying desperately to get Donald Trump to stop telling me about his Barack Obama conspiracy theories. “And to this day,” my billionaire host bellowed, “we haven’t seen those records!”

Our interview had started out fine, but now Trump kept veering off on long, excited tangents about forged birth certificates and presidential coverups. No matter what questions I asked, I couldn’t get him off the subject. “We have seen a book of [Obama’s] as a young man that said he was from Kenya, okay?” Trump said, connecting the dots for me like a crazy uncle who has cornered his nephew at Thanksgiving dinner. “The publisher of the book said at first, ‘Well, that’s what he told us.’ But then they said, ‘No, that was a typographical error.’ . . . I have a whole theory on it, and I’m pretty sure it was right.”

Trump’s effort to expose Obama as a fraudulent foreigner had routinely hijacked national news cycles and riled up right-wing voters in 2012, turning him into a political celebrity courted by top Republican presidential candidates. But by the time I approached him more than a year later, the shtick had worn thin. The GOP was sick of him, and the press had mostly moved on. For attention, Trump had turned to the conservative fringes, where his torch-juggling act was still cheered at grass-roots gatherings and his musings about impeachment still went viral in far-right corners of the Web. My purpose in interviewing him was to find out why he was still bothering with politics at all.

[kcvl]

October 30, 2012 | 3:31 PM EDT

Former Newsweek reporter McKay Coppins was caught on a hot mic trashing Mitt Romney at a live event on Tuesday. Moments before Romney's appearance Coppins, who currently works for BuzzFeed, predicted there was "a 40 percent chance that he says something stupid." At first it wasn't known who made the remark, reported by Huffington Post's Jon Ward, but Coppins actually came forward, on his Twitter account, to admit he was the one who made the liberal bias-revealing "snide comment."

press here

[caver]

If Karl Rove had a son, it would be McKay Coppins.

[GingisK]

If the fringe outnumbers the “regulars”, than who is really the fringe?

[Jack Hammer]

His favorability rating is at 40% - that’s a LOT more than the “fringe” no matter how you define the term.

[GilGil]

Meanwhile Black Lives Matter is the democrats’ conservative icon the model of human grace. It would seem BLM are the NAZIS when one in their group emptied 15 bullets in a police officer.

To compare Trump to a MAZI means this reporter does not know what a NAZI is. NAZI guards used to grab babies by the leg and smash their heads against the walls of train boxcars to kill them because they were not allowed in concentration camps.

Those were NAZIS.