During the first prime-time Republican debate, in Cleveland, Ohio, Donald Trump delivered the same slogans and failed to flesh out positions. While the man is quick and engaging, he came unprepared.<\/p>\n
Ideas have not solidified Trump\u2019s success, but rather a powerful persona, true-blue patriotism and a willingness to put his substantial estate to the service of both. Trump now enjoys more support than he had prior to Cleveland, leading in national polls and in early voting states.<\/p>\n
Henpecked though he was by the \u201cMurdoch Media\u2019s<\/a>\u201d golden goose \u2013 Megyn Kelly \u2013 Trump demonstrated that he is what his constituency craves: a man in the old mold. Trump is not an excuse for a man who\u2019ll bolt like so many rabbits when a couple of girls get in his face and grab his mic. I allude to socialist-in-Seattle Bernie Sanders, over whom two African-American women recently rode racial roughshod.<\/p>\n When members of the media pontificate that Trump\u2019s ascent reflects the base\u2019s disgust with the establishment, they fail to include themselves in that detested clique.<\/p>\n To befuddle viewers and malign The Base, media even fib about who the establishment is. Steve Hayes, senior writer for The Weekly Standard, a bastion of the Republican establishment, asserted on Fox News that the Koch brothers of Koch industries, big bankers for the Republicans, are not of the establishment.<\/p>\n Central to the media enterprise is a worldview that looks to the state and its stooges as the sole repository of the public good. The idiot\u2019s lantern is monopolized by men and women who are of The System and for The System. Is there any wonder they are bucking the force of nature that is threatening their equilibrium?<\/p>\n Donald Trump must be observed from the standpoint not of policy, but of someone who could smash apart the political system and send its sycophants scattering to the four corners of the earth.<\/p>\n Trump is making this stagnant political spoils system<\/a> oscillate. The particles \u2013 political and media movers-and-shakers \u2013 hate him for it.<\/p>\n So it was that GOPer Jonah Goldberg accused Americans of throwing a tantrum at the politicians and the pundits. The word \u201ctantrum\u201d is meant to demean; it implies a hissy fit, a childish outburst of rage.<\/p>\n The establishment, Republican and Democrat, has a tendency to hunt in packs. Thus did compadre John King of the liberal network CNN offer a variation on the Goldberg theme: \u201cThe base wants to break all the glass.\u201d (I hope J.S. Bach forgives the pairing of his sublime \u201cGoldberg Variations\u201d<\/a> with Jonah.)<\/p>\n Amid sneers about Trump\u2019s \u201ccrazy, entertaining, simplistic talk,\u201d the none-too-bright Joan Walsh, Salon editor-in-chief, proclaimed (MSNBC): \u201cI look at those people and I feel sad. That is really such a low common denominator. They\u2019re all Republicans \u2026 they really don\u2019t have a firm grasp on reality.\u201d<\/p>\n For failing to foresee Trump\u2019s staying power, smarmy Michael Smerconish (CNN) scolded himself adoringly. He was what \u201cMr. Trump would call \u2018a loser.\u2019\u201d Smerconish\u2019s admission was a way of copping to his superiority. From such vertiginous intellectual heights, Smerconish was incapable of fathoming the atavistic instincts elicited by the candidate. Nevertheless, the broadcaster \u201cquadrupled down.\u201d The country would be delivered from Donald by Mexican drug lord El Chapo, who\u2019d scare Trump away.<\/p>\n Campbell Brown, another banal bloviator, ventured that Trump resonates with a fringe and was fast approaching a time when he would, like Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann, \u201cmax-out the craziness\u201d quotient.<\/p>\n Trump supporters were simply enamored of his vibe, said a dismissive Ellis Henican.<\/p>\n As derisive, another Fox News commentator spoke about the \u201cmeat and potatoes\u201d for which Trump cheerleaders hanker. I suspect he meant \u201cred meat.\u201d<\/p>\n National Journal\u2019s Ronald Brownstein divined his own taxonomy of the Republican base beast: the \u201cupscale Republicans and the blue-collar Republicans.\u201d The group of toothless rube-hicks Brownstein places in Trump\u2019s camp.<\/p>\n Like Megyn Kelly, pollster Frank Luntz stacks his focus groups with \u201cregimists.\u201d According to Luntz\u2019 own brand of asphyxiating agitprop, the little people want to elect someone they\u2019d have a beer with.<\/p>\n A British late-night anchor \u2013 a CNN hire! \u2013 offered this non sequitur: Trump painting himself as anti-establishment and at the same time owning hotels: This was a contradiction. In the mind of this asinine liberal, only a Smelly Rally like \u201cOccupy Wall Street\u201d instantiates the stuff of rebellion and individualism. (Never mind that the Occupy crowds were walking ads for the bounty business provides. The clothes they wore, the devices they used to transmit their sub-intelligent message, the food they bought cheaply at the corner stand to sustain their efforts \u2013 these were all produced or brought to market by the invisible hand of the despised John Galts and the derided working people.)<\/p>\n I know not what exactly the oracular Krauthammer said to anger Trump, but it was worth it: \u201cCharles Krauthammer is a totally overrated person. \u2026 I\u2019ve never met him. \u2026 He\u2019s a totally overrated guy, doesn\u2019t know what he\u2019s doing. He was totally in favor of the war in Iraq. He wanted to go into Iraq and he wanted to stay there forever. These are totally overrated people.\u201d<\/p>\n Even media mogul Rupert Murdoch moved in on Trump, calling him an embarrassment to his friends and to the country.<\/p>\n Inadvertently, one media strumpet came close to coming clean about the serial failures of analysis among her kind. Wonkette, or Wonkette Emerita, aka Ana Marie Cox, spoke of \u201cthe superfluousness of the media\u2019s predictions and [their] inability to perform the service of making sense of events.\u201d Like Smerconish, Cox is hoping against hope that the lumpenproletariat are having fun at her expense and \u201care in some way in on the joke\u201d that is Trump.<\/p>\n In case you think only liberals look down at the little people \u2013 by \u201cliberals\u201d I mean Democrats and Republicans \u2013 listen to Rand Paul\u2019s pronouncement on you little people who find merit in Donald Trump:<\/p>\n \u201cI think this is a temporary sort of loss of sanity. But we\u2019re going to come back to our senses and look for somebody serious to lead the country at some point.\u201d<\/p>\n ** During the first prime-time Republican debate, in Cleveland, Ohio, Donald Trump delivered the same slogans and failed to flesh out positions. While the man is quick and engaging, he came unprepared. Ideas have not solidified Trump\u2019s success, but rather a powerful persona, true-blue patriotism and a willingness to put his substantial estate to the service … Continue reading “Ilana Mercer: Trump could send the system’s sycophants scattering”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":16009,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[79,80],"tags":[2970,12221,2572],"class_list":["post-20052","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-columns","category-ilana-mercer","tag-donald-trump","tag-joan-walsh","tag-megyn-kelly"],"cc_featured_image_caption":{"caption_text":false,"source_text":false,"source_url":false},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/praag.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/09\/ilana_nuut2.jpeg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20052","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20052"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20052\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20054,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20052\/revisions\/20054"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/16009"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20052"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20052"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20052"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nIlana Mercer<\/a> is a paleolibertarian writer, based in the U.S. She is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies. Her latest book is \u201cInto the Cannibal\u2019s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa.\u201d<\/a> Her website is www.IlanaMercer.com.<\/a> Follow her on Twitter.<\/a> \u201cFriend\u201d<\/a> her on Facebook.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"