THE DANGEROUS ACCEPTANCE OF DONALD TRUMP. "We can control him. No you can't"

[cali]

Vice is a monster of so frightful mien, / As, to be hated, needs but to be seen,” the poet Alexander Pope wrote, in lines that were once, as they said back in the day, imprinted on the mind of every schoolboy. Pope continued, “Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face, / we first endure, then pity, then embrace.” The three-part process by which the gross becomes the taken for granted has been on matchlessly grim view this past week in the ascent of Donald Trump. First merely endured by those in the Republican Party, with pained grimaces and faint bleats of reluctance, bare toleration passed quickly over into blind, partisan allegiance—he’s going to be the nominee, after all, and so is our boy. Then a weird kind of pity arose, directed not so much at him (he supplies his own self-pity) as at his supporters, on the premise that their existence somehow makes him a champion for the dispossessed, although the evidence indicates that his followers are mostly stirred by familiar racial and cultural resentments, of which Trump has been a single-minded spokesperson.

Now for the embrace. One by one, people who had not merely resisted him before but called him by his proper name—who, until a month ago, were determined to oppose a man they rightly described as a con artist and a pathological liar—are suddenly getting on board. Columnists and magazines that a month ago were saying #NeverTrump are now vibrating with the frisson of his audacity, fawning over him or at least thrilling to his rising poll numbers and telling one another, “We can control him.’

No, you can’t. One can argue about whether to call him a fascist or an authoritarian populist or a grotesque joke made in a nightmare shared between Philip K. Dick and Tom Wolfe, but under any label Trump is a declared enemy of the liberal constitutional order of the United States—the order that has made it, in fact, the great and plural country that it already is. He announces his enmity to America by word and action every day. It is articulated in his insistence on the rightness of torture and the acceptable murder of noncombatants. It is self-evident in the threats he makes daily to destroy his political enemies, made only worse by the frivolity and transience of the tone of those threats. He makes his enmity to American values clear when he suggests that the Presidency holds absolute power, through which he will be able to end opposition—whether by questioning the ownership of newspapers or talking about changing libel laws or threatening to take away F.C.C. licenses. To say “Well, he would not really have the power to accomplish that” is to misunderstand the nature of thin-skinned authoritarians in power. They do not arrive in office and discover, as constitutionalists do, that their capabilities are more limited than they imagined. They arrive, and then make their power as large as they can.

And Trump announces his enmity in the choice of his companions. The Murdoch media conglomerate has been ordered to acquiesce; it’s no surprise that it has. But Trump’s other fellow-travellers include Roger Stone, the Republican political operative and dirty-tricks maven, while his venues have included the broadcasts of Alex Jones, a ranting conspiracy theorist who believes in a Globalist plot wherein “an alien force not of this world is attacking humanity”—not to mention Jones’s marketing of the theory that Michelle Obama is a transvestite who murdered Joan Rivers. These are not harmless oddballs Trump is flirting with. These are not members of the lunatic fringe. These are the lunatics.

<snip>
http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-dangerous-acceptance-of-donald-trump

[Fumesucker]

2. Quite a coincidence that Trump should be a candidate now

Just when the most unpopular Democratic candidate in the history of polling is all but assured of being the nominee.

Yeah, I'm a coincidence theorist, what of it?

[riderinthestorm]

3. The full weight of the Republican party allied behind Trump. God help us

The only faint hope of a Trump defeat may have lay with the Republican party refusing to back him.

Damn

Another story for you cali...

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/05/gop-elite-line-up-behind-donald-trump-223394

[ancianita]

4. SO well put. People's hope often rests with certainties presented by Trump, rooted in his

promise of a predictable future, such that by voting for him they are doing the right thing with their lives.

Thank you so much for this post.

[cali]

5. Yeah, Adam's really a good writer.

[Surya Gayatri]

6. K & R. Thanks for posting.

[valerief]

7. Of course, he can be controlled. He wouldn't be the first assassinated president.

That's how control is executed by the PTB.

[pampango]

8. "Hitler wasn’t Hitler—until he was. At each step of the way, the shock was tempered by acceptance.

It depended on conservatives pretending he wasn’t so bad, compared with the Communists, while at the same time the militant left decided that their real enemies were the moderate leftists, who were really indistinguishable from the Nazis. The radical progressives decided that there was no difference between the democratic left and the totalitarian right and that an explosion of institutions was exactly the most thrilling thing imaginable."

[JustABozoOnThisBus]

9. Wake me up when Prez Trump dissolves Congress and the Supreme Court.

Until then, a president can be controlled.

[bullwinkle428]

10. K&R. Some of us at DU have been saying for a couple of months that these

"NEVER TRUMP" people will do complete turn-arounds and throw their support behind him. I just didn't realize how quickly that would happen! Probably a good 80% of them have gone through the stage of acceptance, and the remaining ones are holding back only out of ego at this point, and they'll be there very soon as well.

[gollygee]

11. Kick