Whether or not Donald Trump the human being is intelligent, there’s no question that “Donald Trump,” presidential candidate, is not. His entire campaign operates well below the level of rational thought — it’s all boasting, absurd promises, repetitive sloganeering, and abuse. Just as email scammers intentionally salt their messages with typos in order to weed out anyone educated enough to see through their swindle, allowing them to focus on the most gullible, Trump seems to consciously repel anyone possessed of a brain. When he says he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and not lose any support, or that he appeals to “the poorly educated,” he is broadcasting his contempt for his supporters.
The secret fear lying beneath Rubio’s accurate depiction of Trump as a “con artist” is that Republican voters are easy marks. The Republican Party is constructed as a machine: Into one end are fed the atavistic fears of the white working class as grist, and out the other end pops The Wall Street Journal editorial-page agenda as the finished product. Trump has shown movement conservatives how terrifyingly rickety that machine is and how easily it can be seized from them by a demagogue and repurposed toward some other goal. …Chait,NYmag
Or worse: A dedicated fascist?
The media have either missed or ignored the central shift that should be the focus of reporting: Trump’s supporters bring to light the fact that right wing theology has moved from traditional conservative values to the full embrace of authoritarianism.
We are witnessing a society going or gone mad, a collective lunacy that has detached from reality. We have seen this before and it did not end well. I despise facile references to past historic abuses, because such overreach diminishes the true horrors of atrocities such as the Holocaust or Stalin’s purges. But with Trump and his supporters we simply cannot ignore the parallels to Germany in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Muslims are the new Jews; propaganda dominates the airways, masquerading as hard fact; a fringe candidate rises on the wings of hate, paranoia and grievances real and imagined, promising a “return” to better times less tainted with the unwashed and unclean who have corrupted our virtues and undermined our economy. But…but, the claim of parallels between our situation now and Europe then – in the early part of this century – is so commonly quoted and so badly abused, the burden of proof is high. ...HuffPo
Fascist probably. But very close to being the Republican nominee.
…Today’s voting and the voting on March 15th may determine whether denying Trump the nomination outright is even all that realistic a possibility. If Trump wins both Ohio and Florida, it will become very, very hard to prevent him from getting a majority of the delegates. As Benjy Sarlin puts it: “If Trump is not stopped in the winner-take-all states of Ohio and Florida on March 15, he will likely become the GOP nominee.” …Greg Sargent,WaPo