It was with Kierkegaardian fear and trembling that I peeked at Chris Cillizza's piece, "What Trump can teach the GOP field." It is here, in "The Fix," where Beltway banality is so often born -- the spawn of Washington's insider trading and warmed-over conventional wisdom -- and I quaked at another delivery so soon, right on the heels, that is, of The Huck's.
Instantly I was staring into the black, come-hither eyes of the Prince of Banality himself: Cillizza informed me that although Trump's media playtime was but a footnote in politics, "that doesn’t mean the Trump saga — and, it was a saga — is without lessons to be learned by the Republican candidates who will run for president in 2012."
So what, Chris, was "The most important lesson?" Was it, perhaps, that racism still tragically works in American politics? That anti-intellectualism persists as a real keeper? That it's now impossible to distinguish betwixt "carnival barkers" and right-wing politicians? That the right wing itself has flown from all semblance of rationality and seriousness?
Alas, no. For from the miasmic muck arose this, Cillizza's Answer to Cillizza's Question: "Confrontation is good. Confrontation works."
Ah, I sense you're underwhelmed. Appallingly so. But hey, at least my piece came with an up-front disclosure.
At any rate, by and by we learn from Cillizza that by "confrontation" he intended a somewhat unshockingly unrevolutionary theory of political campaigning, for which Cillizza conscripted political veterans to endorse.
Such as Rob Stutzman, GOP strategist: "[Trump] had the appeal of a candidate who would brawl with Obama on behalf of the rank and file and create contrast" (whoa, now there's an understatement). Added Stutzman, "The birther issue was stupid and contrived but it should demonstrate to legitimate candidates that you can stand out by being the candidate who engages Obama on substance like taxes, homeland security and spending."
All of which Cillizza promptly re-disfigured through boneheaded synthesis: "Put another way: Trump’s willingness to fight mattered more than the substance of what triggered the fight."
Precisely, absolutely, altogether and extraordinarily wrong.
From the beginning, Trump appreciated that he could appeal to the right-wing base only by exploiting their diseased willingness to believe anything wickedly mysterious about Barack Obama. It wasn't Trump's mere "willingness to fight" that stimulated them to ecstatic heights of drooling hysteria; it was the substance of idiotic non-substance that the reactionary army of whackodom was able to comprehend, and so exuberantly sign on to.
Aggressive accusations about Obama's "China policy" or superfluous drivel on taxes? Come on. What the far right wanted, what it needed, and what it got from Trump was a boatload of stupidity. And they ate it up. Because ...