March 13, 2016
THE BELTWAY ISN'T ABOUT PRINCIPLE:
In a Slow-Motion Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Media Figures Embrace Trump One by One (Jonah Goldberg, March 12, 2016, National Review)I'm losing the will to rebut Donald Trump's "arguments" because he really doesn't make any. First of all, most of his interviews are rapidly becoming as journalistically adversarial as the infomercial host asking, "Mr. Foreman, is it really true I'll lose weight and save money by using the George Foreman grill?"
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But more importantly, if you listen to Trump's answers to almost any question about how he will fix a problem, he uses up the first 95 percent of his time explaining, re-explaining and demagoguing about how bad the problem is. (That is, if he's not talking about polls.) Then in the last few seconds, he says we'll fix the problem by being really smart or by winning or by hiring the best people.
In other words, he has no idea how to fix it.
Before Trump gelded him, or before he went to sleep and awoke from his husk with a strange, new, Renfield-like respect for his master, Chris Christie was very good at pointing out how Trump can't explain how he will do anything. Now no one seems to care.
What I can't get my head around is how other people can listen to this stuff and hear something substantive or serious. I truly don't understand it. Or maybe I do understand it, and I just don't want to because I don't like what it might say about a lot of people I respect.
Posted by Orrin Judd at March 13, 2016 6:49 AM
