Donald Trump: Come Kiss the Ring

Right, right, right. He decided to just go with it. But he didn't set out to troll people. He took the idea and ran with it.

 

Yeah, I get the ceiling idea, and it makes sense. The reporting doesn't always seem to explain that.

 

Indeed. I have friends that are nominally Democrats (socially conservative, blue-collar Democrats who have no use for Liz Warren types) who are big Trump fans and went to see him at the DCU Center in Worcester the other night. Most Republicans I know here are also the Trump type -- men in their 40s and 50s who listen to Howie Carr and Dennis and Callahan religiously, loved it when Tim Thomas refused to go to the White House to meet Obama after the B's won the Cup and still think Trot Nixon is one of the greatest players ever to wear a Red Sox uniform.

 

My unscientific Facebook friend research has always indicated that the pro-union, teamster-type Democrats are pretty far right on national security.

 

These guys aren't really blue-collar themselves necessarily -- though from that background. They're more the state patronage employee / career prosecutor type

 

As in most states or countries dominated by one party, the Democratic party in Massachusetts contains many factions, and some of those factions would be Republicans in more competitive states.

 

Trump's appeal is obvious. He's not a politician beholden to special interests. He's this cycle's "change" candidate. But I think his ultimate undoing will be the very thing that makes him appealing. Because he's not a politician (and because wealth makes him beholden to none), he doesn't grasp the importance of bullshitting his way through a campaign. Voters like honesty, but you can't win the presidency without a healthy dose of calculated doublespeak.

 

I agree with much of that analysis, but voters don't like honesty. They like fake honesty, that is, the premise that all problems have simple solutions that require no effort by them. This is a bipartisan phenomenon. Think how many Democrats in 2008 thought Obama could solve problems through sheer personal awesomeness.

 

Yeah, a little honesty goes a long way. Very little.

 

Exactly. The argument is always some form of: This is actually easy. Everyone that preceded me has just been either too stupid or corrupt to fix it.

 

The last part is usually the truth, though.

 

And that is exactly the premise of Trump's campaign.

Well, a variation of it: It's not that it's easy, it's that he's so great he can fix it anyway.