Insane Clown President: Dispatches from the 2016 Circus

by Matt Taibbi

Every mechanism our mighty oligarchy had devised to keep people like Trump out of power failed.

most all of the talk on the Bus ended up being concerned with the narrow question of which party-approved candidate pushing acceptably non-populist ideas would edge out the other.

Sixty million people were announcing that they preferred one reality to another. Inherent in this decision was the revolutionary idea that you can choose your own set of facts.

Facts, they protested, are facts! But Trump voters did not agree. They believed facts were a choice. We had made ours, choosing to ignore certain things, and they would make theirs, doing the same.

Donald Trump’s innovation was to recognize what a bad TV show the campaign was. Any program that tried to make stars out of human sedatives like Scott Walker and Lindsey Graham needed new producers and a new script. So here came Trump, bloviating and farting his way through his early campaign stops, saying outrageous things, acting like Hitler one minute and Andrew Dice Clay the next, and gee, what a surprise, TV couldn’t take its eyes off him.

Where I screwed up—and this is a glaring error in my coverage—was in dismissing Trump’s chances in the general election. I fell for a lot of the popular myths about the invincibility of the multicultural consensus Barack Obama twice rode to victory. I thought Trump’s legacy would be the destruction of the Republican Party. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

We were a shallow country, held together by stale rituals and muscle memory. And now it is a shallow man who will take us wherever he pleases.

For the first time I started to see and hear people at Republican events who sounded very much like the dissidents on the fringes of American liberalism.

What made them distinctly American was that, while actually the victims of an obvious, unhidden conspiracy of corrupt political power, they chose to battle bugbears that were completely idiotic, fanciful, and imaginary.

We don’t respond to problems as communities, but as demographics.

The media had long ignored the implications of polls that showed that half the country believed in angels and the inerrancy of the Bible, or of the fact that the Left Behind series of books had sold in the tens of millions. But on the ground the political consequences of magical thinking were becoming clearer.

Our national politics was doomed because voters were no longer debating one another using a commonly accepted set of facts.

Rush Limbaugh, who denounced “Barack Hussein Kardashian” for being “Celebrity of the United States,” backed reality star Donald Trump.

Rubio cruised through the early portion of the race, when voters were impressed by his sideswept, anal-retentive, Cuban-Alex-Keaton persona, rising as high as 14 percent in the polls.

it’s a microcosm of the campaign: simultaneously disgusting and entertaining.

this was supposed to be the year when the Republicans opened the tent up, made a sincere play for the Hispanic vote, and perhaps softened up a bit on gays and other vermin. But then the lights went on in the race and voters flocked to a guy whose main policy plank was the construction of a giant Game of Thrones–style wall to keep rape-happy ethnics off our lawns.

Once every four years, commentators in New York and Washington will fall in love with some “crossover” politician who’s mean enough to be accepted by the right wing, but also knows a gay person or once read a French novel or something.

Santorum actually won the Iowa race four years ago with his overcaffeinated, kiss-the-most-babies approach. But watching both him and Christie put their chips on the shoe-leather approach to campaigning feels like watching a pair of Neanderthals scout for mammoth. In the Age of Trump, this stuff doesn’t play anymore.

Politics used to be a simple, predictable con.

There’s no hidden platform behind the shallow facade. With Trump, the facade is the whole deal.

It may not seem funny now, because it’s happening to us, but centuries from this moment, people will laugh in wonder.

Win or lose, Trump’s campaign threatens to unleash the Great American Stupid

even as Donald Trump said and did horrible things during this year’s incredible run at the White House, most sane people took solace in the fact that he could never win.

Trump is probably too dumb to realize it, or maybe he isn’t, but he doesn’t need to win anything to become the most dangerous person in America. He can do plenty of damage just by encouraging people to be as uninhibited in their stupidity as he is.

The political right in America has been flirting with dangerous ideas for a while now, particularly on issues involving immigrants and minorities. But in the last few years the rhetoric has gotten particularly crazy.

Then there’s Iowa’s Steve King, who is unusually stupid even for a congressman.

When a politician says dumb thing X, it normally takes ’Murica about two days to start flirting publicly with X + way worse.

Trump isn’t really a politician, of course. He’s a strongman act, a ridiculous parody of a Nietzschean superman.

America has been trending stupid for a long time. Now the stupid wants out of its cage, and Trump is urging it on. There are a lot of ways this can go wrong, no matter who wins in 2016.

They particularly hate being lectured about alienating minorities, especially by members of their own party.

establishment GOP spokesghoul George Will

It’s not clear how forcing 11 million people to wear yellow patches saves money, but whatever.

Trump clearly feels he can afford to flip off the Hispanic community and win with a whites-only strategy. And his supporters are loving the idea that he’s trying.

In the elaborate con that is American electoral politics, the Republican voter has long been the easiest mark in the game, the biggest dope in the room. Everyone inside the Beltway knows this. The Republican voters themselves are the only ones who never saw it.

They donate heavily to both parties, essentially hiring two different sets of politicians to market their needs to the population. The Republicans give them everything that they want, while the Democrats only give them mostly everything.

While it’s certainly been fun laughing about the lunacies of people like Bachmann and John Ashcroft and Ted Cruz, who see the face of Jesus in every tree stump and believe the globalist left is planning to abolish golf courses and force country-dwellers to live in city apartments lit by energy-efficient light bulbs, the truth is that the voters they represented have been irrelevant for decades.

They made sure their voters’ idea of an elitist was Sean Penn hanging out with Hugo Chavez, instead of a Wall Street bank financing the construction of Chinese factories.

This will make for excellent theater, but what Trump’s audiences will see is their candidate being pestered by one GOP puppet and two reporters from CNN, which in ’Murica is widely understood to be a wing of the Democratic Party.

So what Cassidy really meant is that the Sanders campaign was allowing people who are justifiably pissed about our corrupted system to blow off steam, before they ultimately surrender to give their support to the system candidate.

Sanders is just the latest in a long line of candidates—Howard Dean, Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul, to name a few—whom my media colleagues decided in advance were not electable, and covered accordingly, with a sneer.

it makes some sense to interrogate candidates accordingly, to make sure they’re acceptable to both sides. The flaw in this reasoning is that it assumes that Wall Street and Silicon Valley and Big Pharma and the rest need the help of us reporters to weed out the undesirables. They don’t, of course. Big money already has a stranglehold on the process of government.

the line because, hey, this is America. Donald Trump, if elected, would find a way to turn being the president into a moneymaking operation.

the Bush campaign was supposed to be a milestone in the history of post–Citizens United aristocratic scale-tipping. The infamous 2010 Supreme Court case that deregulated political fundraising birthed a monster called the Super PAC, also known as the “independent-expenditure-only committee.”

Minus the family imperative, Bush is easily imagined as a laid-back commercial lawyer in some Florida exurb, the kind of guy who can crack dirty jokes while he runs a meeting about a new mixed-use development outside Tallahassee. He doesn’t seem at all like a power-crazed, delusionally self-worshipping lunatic, and that’s basically his problem.

Bush doesn’t seem crazy, nor even like a particularly disgusting person by presidential-campaign standards, which probably disqualifies him from this race.

2008 Obama sold tolerance and genial intellectualism, perfect for roping in armchair liberals.

So is our tradition of campaign journalism, which, going back to the days of Nixon, trains reporters to imagine that the winner is probably the slickest Washington-crafted liar, not some loon with a reality show.

Of course, Fiorina’s claim that she had actually seen a video of someone trying to harvest the brain of a fetus with its legs kicking turned out to be false.

#justsayin

in the reality-show format of the 2016 race, all press attention is positive, and nobody particularly cares if you lie, so long as you’re entertaining.

We just keep the cameras rolling. The ratings stay high, and the voters don’t abandon their candidates—they just tune in to hate us media smartasses more.