Jonah Goldberg is a semantic samurai. He uses words as expertly as a Benihana sushi ninja uses knives.
Today, on Fox News Special Report, he accused Brett Baier of assuming Trump and his followers used the same "Earth-Logic" as normal people.
He's right! The Trump Cult occupies an alternate universe, where facts are denied with vulgar vigor and the vacuous many words of very terrific nonsense uttered by their fearlessly feckless leader inspires unsubstantiated confidence and delusional devotion.
Charles Lane, another guest on today's Special Report, cited the recent Washington Post interview with Donald Trump: Trump's Interview is Totally Bananas, to describe the candidate's incoherency, but added that his supporters just "don't care!"
Why don't they care? Why aren't Trumpians embarrassed by the buffoon they adore? Surely, they have recovered from their initial crush on the man who "tapped into their anger" and "connected with the common man". Certainly, by now, they've all seen someone pull back the curtain to reveal the little man working the levers to manufacture the big-headed Wizard no one is allowed to criticize. Yet they live in a state of denial.
They're like...pod people. And according to Jonah Goldberg, the threat is spreading like the Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Even respected colleagues are not immune: "What I can’t get my head around is how other people can listen to [Trump's answers] and hear something substantive or serious. I truly don’t understand it. Or maybe I do understand it, and I just don’t want to because I don’t like what it might say about a lot of people I respect."
Consider the evidence: "if you listen to Trump’s answers to almost any question about how he will fix a problem, he uses up the first 95 percent of his time explaining, re-explaining and demagoguing about how bad the problem is. (That is, if he’s not talking about polls.) Then in the last few seconds, he says we’ll fix the problem by being really smart or by winning or by hiring the best people. In other words, he has no idea how to fix it." But he'll berate and humiliate anyone who dares challenge his superiority.
Recently Ted Cruz correctly identified Trump's bizarre behavior as "Projection" - a defense mechanism of the subconscious that allows the perpetrator to accuse an enemy of the very character flaws in himself or his hero, in order to maintain the higher ground of attack and preserve esteem.
This is the man who bragged that he could shoot someone in the middle of 5th Avenue and not lose a single supporter.
Worse, this leading Republican Presidential candidate fits the description of a dangerous cult leader: “They all have or had an over-abundant belief that they were special, that they and they alone had the answers to problems, and that they had to be revered. They demanded perfect loyalty from followers, they overvalued themselves and devalued those around them, they were intolerant of criticism, and above all they did not like being questioned or challenged. And yet, in spite of these less than charming traits, they had no trouble attracting those who were willing to overlook these features.” - from Dangerous Cult Leaders, by Joe Navarro, M.A.
Trump's candidacy is not merely embarrassing, it's insane.
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