The Why of Trump… theartfulcodger …
“They sow the wind and reap the whirlwind. The stalk has no head; it will produce no flour.” – Hosea 8:7 (NIV)
Mr. Trump’s candidacy is the culmination of a process that began nearly thirty years ago, when the RNC allowed the despicable Lee Atwater to implement his “Southern Strategy”. It consisted of freezing out any Republican who dared to contemplate political compromise and realpolitik, and whipping up Southern evangelicals, libertarian kooks and states-rights radicals into an unthinking frenzy of blind ideological and theological mania, calculated to overwhelm any and all balanced views and reasonable analyses of what the party’s – or the nation’s – longterm and practical political objectives might actually be.
Since first being infected by the Atwater brain-disease, the Republican Party has acted like a horse breeder gone mad; instead of trying to improve the vigor of their political stable, they have actively and enthusiastically crossbred to increase its genetic susceptibility to political diseases: demagoguery, parochialism, falseness, paranoia, maliciousness, dogmatism, jingoism, racism, sexism, anti-intellectualism, close-mindedness and arrogance. These are all, of course, highly contagious conditions even under normal circumstances, but the GOP long ago decided to make their breeding stock doubly susceptible to such chronic infections.
Now, a wealthy outsider has appeared out of nowhere to enter the race – and from the way he struts around the parade ring, he appears quite capable of taking home the cup. While the GOP is still slowly training awkward colts to be political starters, he is already a fully finished product that has suddenly shown up, and is standing at the post.
The GOP’s problem is that Trump The Donald (by Fred, out of Mary Anne) is not of the purebred Republican line, and has no GOP pedigree. Rather, he is a random, one-in-three-hundred-million genetic fluke, a human Seabiscuit, created and trained entirely outside the soundproof bubble of the GOP paddock. So it is no wonder these self-absorbed stable owners, who have not bothered to look at the competition beyond their own fence rail in three decades, sneeringly discount his potential to win.
In their arrogance, they fail to see that Trump’s unique and privileged rich-boy upbringing has instilled within him not just some, but virtually all of the political deformities they have so long tried to breed into their own stock. And they stupidly remain unaware that he in fact carries them all in much higher concentrations than they could ever achieve with a candidate who meekly toes the party line for a decade or two, and passively allows himself to be groomed for The Big Race by those cautious billionaire owners and chart-gazing strategist-trainers that make up the very innermost of the GOP’s inner circles.
This is the reason for Trump’s remarkable popularity among the hoi polloi punters that populate the Republican grandstand: his appeal to the crude, the lowbrow and the unthinking is so strong because he is the concentrated sum total of exactly those racing qualities which the GOP has been promising to deliver to their base for the last three decades. And now, if the Republican establishment wants to win this race, they must take the desperate gamble of saturating the field with the rest of its stable, and sacrificing every single yearling it has left in its unfinished breeding program – however temperamentally unready to race, malformed, misshapen, and uncoordinated they may be.
And that is why Trump will remain the betting favourite on the GOP totalizer board, until the very moment the convention gates are flung open, and Mr. Priebus hollers, “Annnd they’rrre OFF!”
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Hans Howe 