Devious Donald

Devious Donald


by digby





















Charlie Pierce's crystal ball is on the money:

This will now be the pattern. He, Trump will campaign thuggishly. It will work. Then he will accept victory less thuggishly, and he will be congratulated for it. Then it all will start again, over and over, all the way to November.
This notion that Trump is putting on an act is idiotic. Of course he's a showman. But that doesn't mean he isn't a neo-fascist xenophobe and he's been remarkably consistent about it for 30 years or more. He has always railed against foreigners, worshiped the police, and celebrated state violence. That he has different personas in different circumstances is irrelevant to that. 

I think if you want to see the "authentic" Trump, just read the Washington Post and New York Times editorial board interviews. He wasn't playing to the crowd, he was among fellow elites. And he relied on a whole bag of tricks to hide the fact that he doesn't know what he's talking about. What comes through is the bravado, the violence, the deviance, the guile.  He's a monster.  It's right there in plain sight.

If the press persists in portraying this "transformation" to statesman as being anything but a cynical act of political expediency we are going to have a problem. 

Update: Nate Silver has an important piece today about how Trump's message that "the system is rigged" may be working and how the press is helping him (and not just by giving him the usual wall to wall airline.)

 Trump’s system-is-rigged message is relatively simple and plays into the media’s master narrative of the Republican race as a conflict between the Republican base and the GOP “establishment.” The Republicans’ delegate selection rules, by contrast, require an attention to detail that narrative-driven stories about the Republican race can misconstrue. Take this recent article from Jonathan Martin of The New York Times as an example; here’s how it begins:

With his thoroughly dominating performance on Tuesday in New York, Donald J. Trump proved that he remains the preferred candidate of most Republican primary voters. The question now is whether winning the most votes will be enough to make him the Republican nominee.

The volatile nominating contest has effectively spun off into two simultaneous races: one for votes and one for delegates. And they are starkly different.

Winning New York in a landslide — he captured all of the state’s 62 counties except his borough, Manhattan — Mr. Trump demonstrated the breadth of his support and his resilience in the aftermath of a loss in Wisconsin two weeks ago. With just 15 states remaining on the primary calendar, he has left little doubt about his popular appeal.

But the sturdy opposition to his candidacy within the party and his own organizational deficiencies have hampered him at the state and local level, where a byzantine process is underway to elect delegates to the Republican convention in Cleveland this summer. Senator Ted Cruz has dominated that esoteric inside game until now. And if Mr. Trump falls short of clinching the nomination after all 50 states, the District of Columbia and five territories have held their contests, those delegates could make their own decisions after the first ballot in Cleveland.

There’s quite a bit to critique in this passage. To start, note how Martin asserts that “Trump proved that he remains the preferred candidate of most Republican primary voters.” In fact, Trump has won only 38 percent of the vote so far and has won a majority of the vote only in his home state of New York. Trump is unusually unpopular for a party front-runner — only about half of Republicans would be happy with him as their nominee — but he’s taken advantage of the divided opposition.

These erroneous  narratives are very harmful. Remember George W. Bush, the man who everybody wanted to have a beer with.

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