The surreal roadshow continues
by digby
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| He’ll shave the deficit like he shaved Vince McMahon’s head |
I wrote a little bit about Trump’s surreal interview with Bob Woodward and Robert Costa over the week-end for Salon this morning:
A 7th grader recently gave this answer when he was asked why Abraham Lincoln succeeded:
“Well, I think Lincoln succeeded for numerous reasons. He was a man who was of great intelligence, which most presidents would be. But he was a man of great intelligence, but he was also a man that did something that was a very vital thing to do at that time. Ten years before or 20 years before, what he was doing would never have even been thought possible. So he did something that was a very important thing to do, and especially at that time.”
No, that wasn’t actually a 7th grader who didn’t do his homework. That was the frontrunner for the Republican nomination, Donald Trump, who has obviously not given a thought to history of any kind since he put away his Prince Valiant comics. That comment is from the latest in a series of bizarre long form interviews with the press which was conducted by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa of the Washington Post and may give the most insight into the mind of Donald Trump of all of them.
Many politicians robotically stick to their talking points. (Recall Marco Rubio’s spectacular meltdown earlier this year.) But that is a calculated and practiced tactic in which the candidate uses every opportunity to get his or her message out regardless of the question. Trump appears to be doing something much more common and prosaic: He changes the subject when he doesn’t have an answer to the question. He does return again and again to his talking points, but they are unrelated to policies and issues. Everything is personalized and refers back to his own experiences which appear to be quite limited for a man of his wealth and opportunity. Indeed, he seems to have decided very early in life on a set of simple beliefs about the way the world works and has never questioned them.
Pressed by Bob Woodward on the fact that he’s alienated so many people in the party and will need to reach out and build alliances, he said this:
“The coalition building for me will be when I win. Vince Lombardi, I saw this. He was not a big man. And I was sitting in a place with some very, very tough football players. Big, strong football players. He came in — these are tough cookies — he came in, years ago — and I’ll never forget it, I was a young man. He came in, screaming, into this place. And screaming at one of these guys who was three times bigger than him, literally. And very physical, grabbing him by the shirt. Now, this guy could’ve whisked him away and thrown him out the window in two seconds. This guy — the player — was shaking. A friend of mine. There were four players, and Vince Lombardi walked in. He was angry. And he grabbed — I was a young guy — he grabbed him by the shirt, screaming at him, and the guy was literally. . . . And I said, wow. And I realized the only way Vince Lombardi got away with that was because he won. This was after he had won so much, okay? And when you have these coaches that are just as tough as him but they don’t win, there’s revolutions. Okay? Nobody. . . . But Vince Lombardi was able to win, and he got — I have never seen anything like it. It was such a vivid impression. You had this big powerful guy, and you had Vince Lombardi, and he grabbed him by the shirt and he was screaming at him, he was angry at him.”
The assumption is that once he vanquishes all his rivals everyone will fear him and do his bidding. In other words, if you win you can get away with anything. That is his definition of leadership.
Lately the public and the political establishment are pressing him harder on substance — or perhaps they’re just taking him seriously at long last. Last week he stunned the country with his comments about punishing women for having abortions, a position he meandered into by failing to understand that the right has its own kind of political correctness. But what he has been saying about nuclear policy is so reckless that President Obama was moved to comment on it, saying “the person who made the statements doesn’t know much about foreign policy or nuclear policy or the Korean Peninsula or the world generally.”
Unfortunately, Trump didn’t get the message and continued to insist that Japan and South Korea either hand over more money to the United States or build their own nuclear weapons. This comment at a campaign event on Saturday was chilling:
“I would rather have them not arm, but I’m not going to continue to lose this tremendous amount of money. And frankly, the case could be made that let them protect themselves against North Korea. They’d probably wipe them out pretty quick. If they fight, you know what, that’d be a terrible thing. Terrible. … But if they do, they do.”
Nuclear war would certainly be a terrible thing, no doubt about it. But what are you going to do?