Trump on "60 Minutes"

Saturday night I watched, for probably the 20th time, Basil Rathbone, Lionel Atwill, Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi in the divine Third Coming of 1930s horror, The Son of Frankenstein. (The Bride of was the Second Coming.) I was in heaven.

Then, last night I watched, for at least the 21st time, Donald Trump in the somewhat less than divine Third Coming of contemporary conservative horror — yet another son of Frankenstein. (The original starred Ronald Reagan; the ghastly sequel, George W.) I was in hell.

Yet today's hell, I once again discovered, is a rather amusing place of endless parody.

Trump's segment on "60 Minutes" seemed longer than that, which I guess is a regular feature of chthonic burlesque. Lucifer — a still-populist orangutan in an Italian suit — was grilled by Scott Pelley, and thus the anti-Revelations gushed. We can have everything, we can have it all, it's there for the taking — at a wee price. We must pledge our loyal cretinism to the most cretinous mumbo-jumbo imaginable.

Trump kindly laid it out, and his collective swindle was magnificent. He'll give "a substantial reduction" in taxes to the middle class, a corporate reduction as well. This will provide "a tremendous incentive to grow the economy." The federal government, miraculously, will "take in the same or more money." No doubt the latter. So with that surplus he'll inaugurate a massive infrastructure program, a massive military buildup and a massively costly, anti-ISIS adventure in Iraq.

President Trump will also repeal Obamacare and replace it with some sort of (original) Obamacare — the Supreme Court, Congress and obstructionist red states be damned. He will "take care of everybody." The uninsured class? "The government's gonna pay for it." As for everyone else (somehow, everyone else will buy into this), "it's going to be a private plan and people are going to be able to go out and negotiate great plans with lots of different competition…. They can have everything," concluded Trump.

He'll bring jobs back from China, Japan and Mexico through presidential extortion. "They're going to behave" (whatever that means) — or it's a trade war, vowed Trump. That should help.

The land shall also be cleansed of filthy "illegals," but he'll be "rounding 'em up in a very humane way, in a very nice way. And they're going to be happy because they want to be legalized." Sound nice? That's what Trump said, only to add, "I know it doesn't sound nice. But not everything is nice." Go figure. The orangutan Beelzebub works in mysterious ways.

We must have sympathy for such devilish quackery. It's slumping in the polls, and Trump's slump may well be (and almost certainly is) as endless as his revised, innovative parody of modern conservatism's patchwork of Frankensteinian deceit. The cretinous swarm has seen this monkey show and it's ready to move on. Ben Carson promises a fresh kind of bigotry and Carly Fiorina offers many an old fraud in a fiery way. Trump may get a bit of a boost from his national exposure last night. But I'm afraid he's spit-roasting.

Comments

I know you were looking forward to the Donald lasting as long as he can at the top by being over the top, but what about the likes of Ben Carson or Carly Fiorina, two other political novices, who are also stirring up the most hateful and bigoted of the base? Maybe one of them could go all the way to the nomination?

Posted by: Anne J | September 28, 2015 at 09:12 AM

I don't think the human treatment of "illegals" is quite what your average Trump supporter has in mind. They strike me as the more cattle car solution type of folks.

Posted by: Peter G | September 28, 2015 at 10:15 AM

The European, 40 or 8, variety.

Posted by: shsavage | September 28, 2015 at 11:41 AM

Don't count El Trumpo out yet. He's still adding 10k twitter followers a day. To put that in perspective, he's added more followers in the last month than Bush has in total.

Posted by: Jeff | September 28, 2015 at 12:46 PM