The whole Donald Trump phenomenon has me baffled. I’ve been following Trump’s career since I was young, and he has always struck me as an obvious fraud. One would think that after his first bankruptcy, investors would have been leery of him. Yet he’s never had trouble finding people willing to throw money into his half-baked schemes. P.T. Barnum famously said, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” Trump seems to have dedicated his life to proving this statement.
There are some on the left who argue that Trump would be a better president than Clinton. They make this argument by quoting Trump selectively. At times, he sounds like an isolationist, and they contrast this to Clinton’s hawkishness. Yet Trump also sounds hawkish at times. (He says he is going to destroy ISIS. Gosh, how do you think he’s going to do that?) He has also expressed a creepy enthusiasm for torture. (“I like waterboarding”, he said.)
Trump embodies everything that is wrong with our culture: the emphasis on style over substance, the inclination towards macho bluster, the worship of hype, the mindless jingoism, and, of course, the racism. He must be defeated.
The Spanish Prisoner 