That we have to take Donald Trump seriously confirms my longstanding prognosis that we’ve entered another dimension in which up is down, black is white, and reason is dethroned: in short, we’re living in BizarroWorld, and the landscape is not very inviting. Yet explore it I must, since the reality TV star and professional self-promoter is rising in the polls, and garnering an inordinate amount of media attention – and whether the latter is responsible for the former is something I’ll get into later, but for now let us focus on what practically no one else is paying much attention to, the Trumpian foreign policy.
Right off the bat, we run into trouble, however, since the signature sound-bites that characterize the Trump style don’t really qualify as anything close to a “policy.” Yet his various effusions on this topic do indeed translate into a mindset, which one might call blowhard-ism. And as much as it resembles the semi-coherent rantings of a drunk loudly pontificating in the dark recesses of some hotel bar at a Rotarians convention, it does reflect some “serious” trends to be found in the high-toned precincts of the foreign policy Establishment, not to mention among Trump’s fellow presidential aspirants in the GOP clown show.
On Iraq, The Donald makes much of his alleged opposition to the Iraq war – a position no one has documented to my satisfaction – but now that we’re back there, what’s Trump’s plan? "We shouldn’t have been there,” he opines, and yet “once we were there, we probably should have stayed.” While this may sound bafflingly counterintuitive, not to mention flat out contradictory, you have to remember two things: 1) In Bizarro World, contradictions do exist, A is B, and the sensible is the impossible, and 2) Similar things were said about the Vietnam war by politicians less obviously nutso than The Donald.
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Finally, one has to wonder about the provenance of the Trump phenomenon. Seemingly coming out of nowhere, it’s been attributed to a populist upsurge against the regnant elites, who are so out of touch with the people that they never saw what was coming. The media, we are told, are biased against Trump – this is one of The Donald’s chief complaints – and now The People are rising up against the Washington-New York know-it-alls with their “big words” and pretentious airs.
Yet this analysis is lacking in one key ingredient: the facts. For the reality is that the media, far from ignoring Trump, have lavished so much attention on him that he’s eating up coverage that would otherwise go to the rest of the crowded Republican field. And that may be a clue as to what’s really going on here….
The usual “mainstream” media tactics regarding a political outsider they hate is to ignore him or her: the example of Ron Paul should suffice to make this point. Indeed, Jon Stewart pointed this out in a memorable “Daily Show” segment, and it took Paul three runs for the White House to get their attention. Trump has suffered no such fate: quite the opposite, in fact. The Donald’s every demagogic pronouncement is faithfully recorded and broadcast far and wide. Over a hundred reporters crowded into his latest appearances in Las Vegas and Phoenix. Jeb Bush, for all the many millions stuffed into his campaign coffers, couldn’t buy that kind of exposure.
This gift to the Trump campaign is being celebrated by Democratic politicos and consultants as if it were manna from heaven. The Republican “brand,” they aver, is being sullied beyond redemption, and they’re watching this unanticipated and providential miracle from the peanut gallery with unalloyed glee.
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Trump has been playing the media with his supposed presidential ambitions for years, but it was clear then that it was just The Donald doing what he does best – promoting himself. So why now has he suddenly turned “serious”? I give that word scare quotes because 1) Serious is not a word one associates with a clown, and 2) It’s not at all clear that, for all his megalomania, he really thinks he can win the White House. He may be a lunatic but he’s far from stupid.
And so the question jumps out at us: Why now?
Although I have no concrete proof of my theory, there’s plenty of circumstantial evidence. His ties to the Clintons, his past pronouncements which are in such blatant contradiction to his current fulminations, and the cries of joy from the Clintonian gallery and the media (or do I repeat myself) all point to a single conclusion: the Trump campaign is a Democratic wrecking operation aimed straight at the GOP’s base.
Donald Trump is a false-flag candidate. It’s all an act, one that benefits his good friend Hillary Clinton and the Democratic party that, until recently, counted the reality show star among its adherents. Indeed, Trump’s pronouncements – the open racism, the demagogic appeals, the faux-populist rhetoric – sound like something out of a Democratic political consultant’s imagination, a caricature of conservatism as performed by a master actor.
Now I realize this is a “conspiracy theory,” and, as we all know, there are no conspiracies in politics. In that noble profession, everything is completely aboveboard and on the level – right?
Like hell it is.
