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UPDATE IX: "Conservatives love Donald Trump’s racism, lies, and lslamophobia."
Read Slate, Trump’s Week of Fearmongering and Falsehoods.
UPDATE VIII: "GOP voters are attracted to Trump for his bravado and belligerent rhetoric against real and perceived foreign threats. Far from undermining his campaign, the Paris attacks strengthen the atavistic nationalism that fuels his campaign."
Read Slate, Why the Paris Attacks Will Only Boost Donald Trump.
UPDATE VII: "'One of the reasons why Donald Trump is doing so well is because he's saying things people believe. . . People are angry out there, and he's striking a nerve.'"
Read the Washington Post, Donald Trump is leading for a simple reason, according to Mike Huckabee.
UPDATE VI: "Mr Trump’s detractors, who form arguably one of the largest bipartisan coalitions in memory, comfort themselves that he is simply on an ego trip that will turn sour. That may be true. But they are missing the point. The legions of Republicans flocking to Mr Trump’s banner are not going anywhere. If he crashes, which he eventually must, they will find another champion. . .
The latest poll shows that only 8 per cent of Republican graduates support Mr Trump against 32 per cent of those without a degree.
These are the angry swaths of America that feel left behind, belittled and insulted. They want to take their country back but cannot put their finger on what exactly they mean. For them it is evening in America. Nobody argues their case.
Then along comes Mr Trump. Foreigners may be tempted to see him as uniquely American. But he has his equivalents everywhere. Think of Silvio Berlusconi in Italy or even the UK’s Nigel Farage.
The worse they sound, the better they do. That is the power of anti-politics. Mr Trump is merely a symptom. His Republican rivals should beware. Trump Towers will fall. Other skyscrapers loom. "
Read the Financial Times (subscription may be required), Donald Trump leaves indelible mark on Republicans.
UPDATE V: For more on the Republi-con Party's Franken-Trump/Trumpenstein (© NoBullU.com) dilemma, read the Washington Post, Trump has the GOP establishment’s number, which again notes:
"The problems that bother us most are the ones we bring on ourselves. This is why Republicans are so out of sorts with Donald Trump. The party created the rough beast it is now trying to slay. . .
[T]he real Donald Trump has been in full view for a long time, and Perry’s new glasses can’t explain his newfound clarity. I don’t credit Trump with much. But he deserves an award for exposing the double-standards of Republican politicians. They put their outrage in a blind trust as long as Trump was, in Perry’s words, 'throwing invectives in this hyperbolic rhetoric out there' against Obama and the GOP’s other enemies.
Only now are they willing to say: 'You’re fired.' No wonder Trump is laughing."
UPDATE IV: Who made Trump the Republi-con candidate he is?
You can thank Hedgehog News, which has "set quite a standard for sycophancy.
It was a steady engagement: Trump would share his views on the issues of the day with the 'Fox & Friends' crew on Monday mornings. He’d talk and talk and talk as the hosts nodded in agreement. Anyone who has listened to a Trump speech these days would recognize the talking points . .
The Republican establishment has worried that Trump’s travels in recent weeks have dragged down the party’s brand. Those worries may well prove legitimate. Yet 'Fox & Friends' needn’t be concerned about a similar dynamic stemming from its association with Trump, given its already-well-proven awfulness. This is one brand that not even Trump can sully."
Read the Washington Post, ‘Fox & Friends': Donald Trump’s very own media bubble.
UPDATE III: "Do not worry about Donald Trump becoming president. Worry, instead, about what his current — emphasis on current — stratospheric standing in the polls says about two things: the Republican Party and the other GOP candidates."
Read the Washington Post, Donald Trump and the anger of conservatives.
UPDATE II: Joseph McCarthy was a 'notorious Republi-con demagogue'.
But initially, "McCarthy, like Trump, was an opportunist, not a zealot. Although the Wisconsin senator later grew famous hunting communists, communists in the Milwaukee branch of the Congress of Industrial Organizations played a key role in his initial Senate victory in 1946. In his first three years in the Senate, McCarthy hunted for an issue on which to make his name. He considered proposing a national pension plan or championing the St. Lawrence Seaway. But by 1950, the U.S.S.R. had tested an atomic weapon, communists had won China’s civil war, and alleged Soviet spy Alger Hiss had been convicted of perjury. Midwesterners, long suspicious of the East Coast’s foreign-policy class, and Catholics, bitter over Moscow’s domination of their co-religionists in Eastern Europe, were particularly receptive to claims that Washington elites had sold out America to the U.S.S.R. So in February 1950, McCarthy began loudly exploiting those grievances, famously declaring in Wheeling, West Virginia, that 'I have here in my hand a list of 205 [communists] working and shaping policy in the State Department.'
In his search for scapegoats, Trump has proved ideologically flexible too. In 1988, when he first publicly mulled a presidential campaign, the scapegoat du jour was Japan, whose economy appeared to be overtaking America’s. 'The Japanese, when they negotiate with us, they have long faces,' Trump told a New Hampshire crowd in 1987. 'But when the negotiations are over, it is my belief—I’ve never seen this—they laugh like hell.' His suggestion: 'Whatever Japan wants, do the opposite.'
When Trump flirted with a presidential campaign again, in 2000, he played the centrist. He was leaving the GOP for Ross Perot’s Reform Party, he announced, because 'the Republicans are just too crazy right.' He even attacked his likely Reform Party opponent, Pat Buchanan, for being anti-black.
In the Obama era, however, Trump has discovered the power of racial and ethnic grievances himself. As early as 2007, when Obama began running for president, pollster Mark Penn sent Hillary Clinton a memo declaring that Obama was 'not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and values.' Obama critics relentlessly questioned his connection to, and love of, the United States. Polls showed that a plurality of Republicans believed Obama was not born in the United States.
Like McCarthy during the red scare, Trump saw his opening. 'I have people that have been studying [Obama’s birth certificate] and they cannot believe what they’re finding,' Trump declared in 2011. 'If he wasn’t born in this country, which is a real possibility…then he has pulled one of the great cons in the history of politics.' . . .
If McCarthy and Trump are similarly opportunistic, their party’s initial response to them was similarly craven."
Read The Atlantic, The New McCarthyism of Donald Trump.
UPDATE: "Donald Trump is now the 2016 GOP frontrunner. . .
[W]hat do people see in the guy?
A lot, as it turns out. On a recent trip to rural Upstate New York I was surprised by the intensity of support for Trump among friends and family members I talked to. In many cases, their support for Trump boiled down to a simple fact: they were angry.
Angry at Obama, angry at congressional leaders, and angry at the political establishment as a whole. And they're not alone -- surveys show that anger toward the government, particularly among Republicans, has been rising over the course of Obama's two terms in office. When asked how they felt toward the federal government, 37 percent of Republicans said "angry" in a Washington Post poll from last fall. By contrast, in September 1998, at the height of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, only 14 percent of Republicans said they were angry.
Anger toward the establishment is a powerful motivating force. And Donald Trump is currently the candidate in the best position to channel it. . ."
Read the Washington Post, The real reason so many Americans support Donald Trump.
Go Donald, Go!
"You might think that the recent poll showing Donald Trump spiking among Republicans is about Donald Trump. It is not. It is about the Republican Party and its very dark soul when it comes to immigration. The rank and file didn’t much care for Trump as recently as May. It swooned this month when it discovered he’s a bigot.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump gestures and declares "You're fired!" at a campaign rally in Manchester, N.H., in this file photo taken June 17, 2015. (Dominick Reuter/Reuters) Donald Trump gestures and declares “You’re fired!” at a campaign rally last month in Manchester, N.H. (Dominick Reuter/Reuters)
In May, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll, 65 percent of Republicans saw Trump unfavorably. In their relative and blissful ignorance, these Republicans had it about right. But then Trump declared his candidacy in a frothing statement about Mexican rapists, and the GOP’s heart started to pound. The numbers got reversed. All of a sudden only 40 percent of them view him unfavorably. The rest — about 60 percent — can hardly quiet their hearts.
This stunning turnabout — this depressing and somewhat scary endorsement of frustration, fear and old-fashioned hate — is sure to be noticed by the other GOP candidates. . .
What Trump is showing is not just that a hard line on illegal immigration pays off, but it pays off big if the overall message contains, like a rock in a snowball, a core of anger. As The Donald himself knows, his text is just a piece of his message. More important is his demeanor. He’s giving the GOP establishment the finger. . .
At the moment, no one is more anti-establishment than Trump. Americans frightened by a changing and, when it comes to good middle-class jobs, constricting economy are looking for a champion. They see one in Trump, a Mussolini with a comb-over, who is now as much admired for the enemies he’s making as for his inflammatory statements on immigration. For the moment, he stands alone. If his numbers stay high, he won’t be alone for long."
Read the Washington Post, Donald Trump illuminates the GOP’s dark soul.
Go Donald, Go!!
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