This is a cross-post by James Snell
The Republican nominee for the office of President of the United States is a man who spends time in his speeches talking about all the various products which bear his name. This is the same man who is seemingly unable to resist being baited into petty feuds, online and in the real world, with personalities great and small, and whose taste in personal décor is rather closer to that favoured by Saddam Hussein (a man he frequently professes to admire) than any of the latter French kings. He also likes to talk about the size of his hands, and to boast of his poll numbers (something which may become increasingly difficult if the events of this week are widely replicated), but this sort of thing is of less immediate importance.
What does matter, though, is the fact that the advent of Donald Trump as a serious politician (if the word ‘serious’ is held in, oddly, a rather unserious light) makes the political systems which govern the Western world look foolish. He brings the very process of representative democracy into a kind of disrepute.
In this light, it does not matter that his business career and time in the television industry may as well discount him as a serious person. His personality, too, is practically irrelevant, despite its capacity for real arrogance, a lack of sincerity, and the sort of genuine cognitive dissonance which allows for a remarkably laissez-faire attitude towards basic facts of life as it is lived in the United States. (It must be said that I do not think Trump believes he is lying when he says he remembers Muslims in America cheering the attacks on 9/11, or that he opposed the Iraq War at the time, or that Russia has not invaded Ukraine; I am not sure as yet whether this is a more comforting thought than the alternative.)
The Donald Trump phenomenon does not only elicit a great deal of idiocy – it also makes idiots of us all, almost by necessity.
Do read the rest here.
