In building on yesterday's post, I happened to look at the Mencken quote at the top of the blog. It's been up there for years, well before Trump. The most obvious example was the lying to get us into the Iraq war, but "Al Qaeda will kill you in your sleep" eventually morphed into Trump's deranged Aurora klan-bake the other day.
What makes Trump "special" goes back a little to Lee Atwater's famous dictum about how to leverage racism to win elections. Atwater described how you could no longer throw our the n-word with abandon, you had to talk about things like "busing" or "welfare queens". He's describing what became known as "dog whistle" rhetoric, that didn't quite tip over into repellent language, but was couched in less offensive terms.
Trump basically says out loud the sort of naked racism and hate that Republican politicians have been trying to soft pedal for decades. What makes Trumpistan so freaking awful is how devoted millions of Americans have become to obvious falsehoods.
Part of my vibe-based optimism is that this sort of reckless lying is not going to be very persuasive outside of Cult 45, and 45% might just be where he winds up, if I'm right.
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