Monday, August 22, 2016

I did not write this article but I could have. I've been saying the same things since Trump came off the esclator to infect our lives



Once again, Trump snatches defeat from the jaws of victory in the news cycle -- Daily Kos

We so often hear that Donald Trump’s real talent is in showmanship, sales skills, marketing and public relations. The talking heads crow with pride that he’s a political outsider, they remind the faithful over and over that Trump can really take care of business, that he's a black-belt when it comes to PR and back-room negotiating, and we’re then reassured that that’s why we should all suspend common sense and vote for him. It seems to work on lots of voters, around 35% to 40% by last count.

But to watch the Republican nominee for President bumble his way straight toward the worst ass kicking since McGovern and Goldwater combined is a study in what to never do when cameras and microphones are pointed in your direction. At this point any objective observer has to wonder, could he screw it up worse if he tried?

And the answer isn’t eleventy-billion dimensional chess or anything like that. Trump is just a common trust fund kid who got in over his head by a quirk of fate, and he doesn’t have a chance in hell of coming out of it with a shred of dignity left intact.

The list of Trump’s strategic and tactical failures is rapidly becoming to tl;dr. Two highlights are the Judge Curiel and Gold-star family Kahn debacles, each of which resulted in two separate, empirically measurable poll crashes from which Trump may never recover.

These aren’t exceptions any more, they have become rules. Time and time again, Trump has swaggered into the limelight in the midst of a news cycle that was already working in his favor, only to halt any positive momentum and redirect the nation’s spotlight to his serial failures as a candidate. This weekend, the backdrop was the flood stricken waste of what was once a nice part of Louisiana:

The enduring image of an uncomfortable Trump literally handing Play-Doh to Pence while flooding victims stared at him in confusion is already playing poorly across nearly all portions of the political media spectrum, apart from extremist site Breitbart, which is now officially running Donald Trump’s campaign as of this week. Trump may end up wishing he had heeded the Louisiana Governor’s warning and simply made a donation instead.

For several days the alt right has been building a myth that President Obama had stubbornly, selfishly remained on summer vay-cay, not so much as lifting one of his brown fingers, and thus condemning the desperate, whiter victims of Baton Rouge and other flooded communities in the Pelican State to a watery grave. It was nonsense, it is part and parcel to the usual managed ignorance dipped in vitriol so favored in those dark corners, and it had a better chance of hanging a Katrina level streak of cruel incompetence around Obama’s neck than anything else they’ve tried in the last eight years.

But instead of that carefully cultured story dominating right-wing cable news and bleeding over into the rest of the media universe, there are now pics depicting about as clear a sleazy exploitation of tragedy ever seen going viral all over social media. Each and everyone starring Donald J Trump in the leading role.

This is not a fluke, it’s happened too many times. This is not bad advice, it’s happening over and over again despite several senior staff shake ups. This is Trump, this is who he really is when the insulation that vast inherited wealth can provide is ripped off and the man underneath is revealed: Trump is no master showman, he is no PR wiz, and he’s not even particularly bright. Trump is just another lucky one-percenter who was born wealthy and managed to not lose that endowment. Hardly evidence for investing brilliance in the middle of the longest period of prosperity for the super-wealthy since the Pax Romana.

Trump bought some NYC real estate with daddy’s money, and that’s an investment much like the &P 500; you simply could not lose over the last three or four decades on that deal. In fact, there has been some convincing debate that just parking money in a blue-chip index fund like the S&P 500 would have performed significantly better than Trump has done with all his supposed investment mystique.

Trump is a complete fraud, from head to tail. He’s a garden-variety trust fund kid with trophy wives who bought his way into leagues he can’t compete in. Like so many trust funders he fell prey to the seductive idea that he did it all by his lonesome. The only difference between most rich kids who make that mistake and Trump is he’s in over his head in the public sphere in such a big way that no one can protect him, so it’s all unraveling in a rather spectacular public fashion at his expense. And I don’t know which is funnier, watching Trump flail around like a drunken monkey so far out of his league that the light from the league would take a million years to reach him, or reading various pundits who should know better, and probably do, explain that, somehow, Trump is so dang successful and cunning that he’ll come out of this better off -- and maybe he even planned it all along.

Hint: this flameout campaign wasn’t planned, folks, everyone should drop that nonsensical idea. This is what actually happens when an overgrown juvenile bozo like Trump buys his way into the big leagues without paying his dues or demonstrating any talent. This what happens when a clown that’s been sheltered all of their life from the consequences of lousy or humdrum choices and instead told they are a genius at everything they touch, actually goes out onto a level playing field with actual world-class competitors.

This is like one of the Walmart kids buying their way onto an Olympic Team: there is no miracle finish. They don’t win Cinderella gold, they don’t win consolation silver, they don’t knock out Apollo Creed and bring home split-decision bronze. They barely get a chance to catch their breath on the field before being humiliated and bruised and bloodied. Trump will be crushed by this defeat, he will never live it down, he will never be the same. Trump will forever be the biggest political loser of our time. And when it is over, he might at best limp along grifting the extreme right like a neutered Sarah Palin for a few years, before sinking into a final reclusive eccentricity and well deserved senility.

NOT ANYMORE

  I wrote this last week and for the most part sat on it because I did not want my writing to imply anything against Israel. As stated agai...