QOTD: Panchito
by digby
For all that he's a terrible threat to the Republic, Trump is bringing out some really interesting stuff among the punditocrisy. Frank Bruni in the New York Times has an interesting take:
[A] Democratic version of Trump is hard to imagine: He would play too neatly into caricatures of Democrats as godless assassins of family values. The party’s leaders and voters would be too self-conscious and defensive to go down a road as unabashedly randy as Trump’s. That Republicans are the ones traveling it is as inevitable as it is hypocritical. It’s a Nixon-in-China dynamic, but with less Communism and more cleavage.
And Trump, crucially, isn’t just any libertine. He’s a retro rascal, a throwback to an era and ethic of big suits, paneled boardrooms, thick billfolds and buxom arm candy. In the context of the pansexual, gender-fluid, Molly-popping millennials who make conservatives shudder, he’s a musky whiff of nostalgia, a stubborn ember of patriarchy, a vintage stripe of sybarite. He’s promiscuity steeped in chauvinism and misogyny: more old-fashioned, and more comforting.
Once again, he's running to restore an America that is literally disappearing and won't be coming back.
