I'm dreaming of a Trump presidency; most Americans would get what they deserve.

Confession hour. There's something in me — something wicked which my way came while reading Maureen Dowd just now — that makes me want to see the Donald go all the way. All. The. Way. as the ghost of Howard Cosell would put it.

Not just all the way to the Republican nomination. Given Trump's competition, that would be neither much of a feat nor much surprise. Even GOP Floridians favor the Mouth over Rubio and Bush, Republican Wisconsinites now rightly find Walker a bore, McCarthyite Texans seem less than inspired by Cruz, Huckabee can't get started with those lovingly hateful evangelicals, and so it goes, throughout the pathetic list of wannabe wankers in chief. What we're seeing in 2015 is an inversion, of sorts, of 2011 and '12. Romney was just qualified enough to stomp a roster of the eminently unqualified, while Trump, altogether unqualified, is wiping "deep-bench" resumes clean.

How can Trump be stopped? The amusing part of that presumed abstraction is that his competitors have stopped trying. The loud-mouthed bully is proving his point to the once-muddled masses every day. He brushes his competitors back and he kicks them around and, whimpering, they slither away. Will China and Japan and Mexico and Saudi Arabia not do the same? Bullies win. That is Trump's message — Trump's appeal — to a bullying base.

"Trump is the proverbial strongman," says David Axelrod to Dowd. "There’s no one more opposite to Obama. Bush had been impulsive and reckless, so voters wanted someone who was thoughtful and deliberative. Now they’ve had enough of gray and they want to go back to black and white, and that’s Trump. He knows nothing else."

With Trump, the once-muddled masses are muddled no more. They know exactly what this country needs — even if, in the sewage of Trump's inarticulate mush, it can't be articulated.

When we ponder the multitudes, let us not limit ourselves. Which is to ask, Does Trump's appeal in fact extend beyond the clueless hordes of the GOP base? As modern Republicanism's once-preeminent theorist of ideological hash would say, You betcha. Trump speaks to the resolutely inattentive, to the low-to-no-information voter, to the beer-guzzling sofa spud and to the thumpers who think His Will is revealed through halfwitted instrumentations like Trump. Doubtless, there's some considerable bleeding from GOP base to cretinous Americanism and then back again, but you get my point. The dumber we become, the more roller-derby-addicted we are, the more appealing a Donald Trump is.

Since the GOP is robustly infused with such cretinism, let us assume, for one blessed moment, that the party's nomination is Trump's. Indeed, nothing could be more just. Yet it's here that my confessed, sinister desire kicks in. Why not the White House itself for the Donald & Trumpeteers? Perhaps my desire is more vengeful than sinister. That is …

For several years now I (you, we) have watched the polls, in which a majority of Americans have disapproved of President Obama's successes, from expanding healthcare access to rescuing a GOP-shattered economy to withdrawing from squalid wars. Such disapproval has transcended hardcore partisanship; an additional 20 to 30 percent of Americans have taken little interest in the self-evident reality of Obama's achievements and have listened instead to the grim, fairy-tale assessments of hacks, hucksters, and malevolent media whores.

A majority of Americans, then, have for years been willfully obtuse as to just how good they've had it, all things considered. The gray of Obama's "thoughtfulness" and "deliberativeness" has lacked that frisson of Trump's black-and-white certainties, thus an amplifying number of Americans wish to move on — move back — to "impulsiveness" and "recklessness." In its rawest form, their wish would be the democratic way, as Mencken so famously framed it: "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."

Of course here I have separated presidential-voting Americans from Americans at large, so my sinister, vengeful dream of a Trump presidency — in which the hapless, ungrateful American majority gets what it deserves — will never materialize. But to dream of a President Trump — to imagine the horrorstruck multitudes realizing what a calamitous farce their cluelessness has earned them — well, such imagined payback is damn near orgasmic.

 

Comments

[shsavage]

The sad part of this fantasy is that the horrorstruck multitudes wouldn't blame His Majesty Donald I. They would blame the Democrats, the immigrants, the LGBTs, the nameless Others. For Faux Newz would tell them to. And, "freedom" loving souls that they are, they always do what they're told.

[Anne J]

I have thought the same thing for awhile now. We as a country just have not demonstrated that we deserve any better. I have seen nice people get viciously hateful as soon as they see Obama on tv, and these are usually people that don't normally pay attention to politics. I even thought of writing here the other day that I was considering voting for Jeb, because we already know what to expect since he has demonstrated that he would do pretty much everything his brother did or worse. I figured if we can't save the world, may as well blow it up. I agree that maybe we should just see what happens if he goes all the way.

Trump 2016: Burn down the country in order to save it?

[Infidel753]

Trouble is, if a belligerent know-nothing gets elected President of the US, a lot of innocent people in the Middle East would pay for it with their lives, and they didn't even get a chance to vote against the guy.

[Peter G]

NO. I'm not unsympathetic to the idea that every country's voters need a reality tune up from time to time. And the more frequent and smaller the tuneups the better. However, given the propensity for troubled chief executives, frustrated by their inability to deliver on any of their bullshit promises, to strike out blindly in search of foreign enemies, I would prefer you didn't. Speaking, as I think I may on behalf of everyone else in the world, you may be getting what in some sense you deserve but we will certainly be getting disasters we don't deserve. So..no practical joking at the polls please.

[Bob]

The column criticized here is Taibbi's featured yesterday but written in Dowd's Prozac-steeped, fussy style. The theme of the week seems to be the revelation that the US has idiots, some vote, and some even have violent political tendencies. As if no one had ever noticed. Not after Timothy McVeigh blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. Not after the idiot George W. Bush and his evil sidekick were re-elected. According to some relatively famous writers not only is DT no longer funny, he's the strongman America wants.

Somewhere over the media rainbow Jeb is slowly but slowly waiting to get trounced next year, passenger jets land safely, and a more unique writer points out that a larger percentage of the American public is made up of ingrates and ignoramuses than fashion-stunted Brownshirts. Good morning.

[chapworthy]

"Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public."
-- H. L. Mencken

[Peter G]

I've heard various over the top comparisons of Trump and fascism. Why even normally sensible fellows like that guy Carpenter was tweeting about brown shirts! It's like he never saw gravy stains before. Or Tobacco drool. For myself I think Trump is stylistically somewhat like Mussolini. But at least he isn't Ted Cruz.

[P.M. Carpenter]

Just to be clear (something humor evades), that was in colorful jest — blue-haired bats and creaky old white guys in brown shirts.

[Peter G]

I knew that. It was why I was teasing you. I did get the humor of Trump's tribe roaring about like the Wild One's on their Hoverrounds. Hence my own poor attempt at explaining how their shirts might become brown. It could have been worse. I was thinking of a riff on explaining their underwear brown streaks.

[jstuart902]

Many of us understandably take refuge in humor to reduce the pain of seeming to be surrounded by "fools and villains and sometimes worse". But sometimes it helps to look straight at what seems to be arising, and not soften the edges of the emerging image with irony. Now, I believe, is one of those times.

I think a strong argument can be made that the emergence of Trump as a possibly dominant force in the GOP is, quite likely, a real game changer. 47 years of recoding racism into something more presentable is cast aside. Finally "we" can say what we really mean - that the illegal brown people are a cancer on our white, American existence, and they all simply "have to go", even their citizen children. Screw the 14th Amendment. Screw due process. Get them out. NOW!!

This is, I am certain, a very great error. The US will put up with innuendo and dog whistles. It will not put up with straight-up racism. Believe Trump will either win the nomination or his folks will stay home next November. In either case Dems (and it won't matter who is the Dem nominee) will win by a minimum of 8 points, most likely more than 10.

We are observing the slow motion collapse of the GOP as a national party. And that is BIG news, worthy of direct (no irony needed) celebration!!

[teabow]

Exactly right.

[teabow]

How so??

[Bob]

Your explanation for the brown shirts is stuck in my mind's eye, and I might have to pluck it out. If you're right about DT and he goes all the way the Republicans would get to brag about making the trains on time, except they'd defund them all first.