"I personally find H.P. Lovecraft quite cheerful. However depressed I am about the real world I'm unlikely to be devoured by gibbering squamous horrors from beyond space and time so the contrast is refreshing."
~ Reader Comment from The Guardian, UK edition.
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{"Donald Trump Is Saving Our Democracy"
Article written by Frank Rich.
Printed September 20, 2015, in New York Magazine}
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Kimberley Strassel, a conservative columnist at the Journal who regards the Republican field as "teeming with serious candidates," has complained that Trump is "not policy knowledgeable." That's for sure. You won't catch him following the example of "serious" candidate like Fiorina, Rubio, and Walker, who regurgitate the boilerplate drilled into them by foreign-policy tutors.
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Why bother, Trump explains, since "one of the problems with foreign piolicy is it changes on a daily basis." Such thinking, or anti-thinking, may not win over anyone at the Aspen Institute or the American Enterprise Institute, but does anyone seriously doubt that it plays to much of the Republican-primary electorate? That's precisely what is spooking conservatives like Strassel.
What's exhilarating, even joyous, about Trump has nothing to do with his alternately rancid and nonsensical positions on policy. It's that he's exposing the phoniness of our politicians and the corruption of our political process by defying the protocols of the whole game.
He skips small-scale meet-and-greets in primary-state living rooms and diners. He turned down an invitation to appear at the influential freshman senator Joni Ernst's hog roast in Iowa. He routinely denigrates sacred GOP cows like Karl Rove and the Club for Growth.
He has blown off the most powerful newspapers in the crucial early states of Iowa (the Des Moines Register) and New Hampshire (the Union-Leader) and paid no political price for it. Yet he is overall far more accessible to the press than most candidates -- most conspicuously Clinton -- which in turn saves him from having to buy television ad time.
It's as if Trump were performing a running burlesque of the absurd but intractable conventions of presidential campaigns in real time. His impact on our politics post-2016 could be as serious as he is not.
Unsurprisingly, the shrewdest description of the Trump show's appeal has come from an actor, Owen Wilson. "You can't help but get a kick out of him," he told the Daily Beast, "and I think part of it is we're so used to politicians on both sides sounding like actors at press junkets -- it's sort of by rote, and they say all the right things.
So here's somebody who's not following that script.
It's like when Charlie Sheen was doing that stuff." As Wilson says, for all the efforts to dismiss Trump as an entertainer, in truth it's his opponents who are more likely to be playacting, reciting their politically correct and cautious lines by rote. The political market for improvisational candor is as large as it was after Vietnam and Watergate, and right now Trump pretty much has a monopoly on it.
view from Room 603, Watergate, 1974
He also makes a sport of humiliating high-end campapign gurus. When Sam Clovis, a powerful Evangelical conservative activist in Iowa, jumped from the cratering Perry to Trump in August, it seemed weird. Despite saying things like "I'm strongly into the Bible," Trump barely pretends to practice any religion.
The Des Moines Register soon published excerpts from emails written just five weeks earlier (supplied by Perry allies) in which Clovis had questioned Trump's "moral center" and lack of "foundation in Christ" and praised Perry for calling Trump "a cancer on conservatism."
But, like Guy Grand in The Magic Christian, Trump figured correctly that money spoke louder than Christ to Clovis. He was no less shrewd in bringing the focus-group entrepreneur Frank Luntz to heel. After Luntz convened a negative post-debate panel on Fox News that, in Luntz's view, signaled "the destruction" of Trump's campaign, Trump showered him with ridicule.
Luntz soon did a Priebus-style about-face and convened a new panel that amounted to a Trump lovefest. One participant praised Trump for not mouthing "that crap" that's been "pushed to us for the past 40 years." It's unclear if Luntz was aware of the irony of his having been a major (and highly compensated) pusher of "that crap," starting with his role in contriving the poll-shaped pablum of Newt Gingrich's bogus "Contract With America."
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