Everything Trump Touches Dies: A Republican Strategist Gets Real About the Worst President Ever

It speaks to the fact that Trump’s notorious base is impervious to reason and immune to irony and is still a deep mystery to many who aren’t Trump supporters. They are willful, petulant, and full of pointless defiance. They’ve become defined by an obsession with Trump as the sole remedy for the offenses imposed on them by a rotating cast of villains and evildoers. In the process, they’ve become easy marks for every flavor of conspiratorial lunacy and gimcrack appeals to their worst instincts.

STEPHEN MILLER The ideological zampolit of the Trump administration, Stephen Miller is brilliant, dangerous, and also needs to spend a week getting laid. My God, does it show. All that pent-up fury at Mexicans and Muslims is a bad look on anyone. One-time college besties with pudgy racist thought leader Richard Spencer, Miller is the thinking man’s racist on Team Trump.

Facts, as Reagan famously said, are stubborn things. Truth and honesty are vital pillars of presidential leadership; they create an ineffable reservoir of goodwill for the moments when the man in the Oval Office can’t tell Americans all the details of a military or law enforcement operation. They are a buttress against attacks on his programs, his intentions, and his statements. Leadership demands trust. Trust that the president will keep his word, do as he promises, and deliver on commitments. Donald Trump, the Münchhausen of presidents, is a notorious serial liar and fabulist. He is a man who has boasted about his own dishonesty in life, marriage, and business.

It’s one of the things I find most depressing about Trump. He’s trained his docile followers to believe in an America that is weaker, sadder, and smaller than we really are. I remain militantly optimistic about America, our rich talent and our amazing, messy, wonderful, ridiculous, crazy, passionate people. It’s too bad a central tenet of Trumpism is to run down the people of this country and describe a nation so lost and weak it requires an authoritarian strongman.

No, not every Trump supporter is a racist, xenophobic, alt-right man-child. However, every racist, xenophobic alt-right man-child is a Trump supporter.

Bannon’s confidence he is the smartest guy in the room isn’t misplaced in Trump World, and certainly not in the presence of Trump.

If there’s a sharper critique of America’s failed education system than the breathless, mindless Trump voter, I can’t name it.

industrial-scale ass-kissing, and the worst instincts and beliefs scraped from the darkest corners of our national shame closet.

In the history of American politics, no campaign and no administration can rival the sideshow cast of characters who compose Trump World. Instead of smart, dignified men and women striving to serve the nation in the People’s House, they more closely resemble a casting call for the set of Real Housewives of Vulgaria. Team Trump is the dross in the American political melting pot, combining raging crony capitalism, conflicts of interest, ideological dead ends, industrial-scale ass-kissing, and the worst instincts and beliefs scraped from the darkest corners of our national shame closet.

Hell, I would have picked a random guy walking out of a bus station over Trump.

Sadly, the Trump right is just as intolerant of people who vary from their narrow set of beliefs and values as the most fervent Social Justice Warrior on the left. They’re just as dedicated to suppressing speech they dislike; ask Michelle Wolff or any NFL player who took a knee to protest police misconduct.

Globalist” is Bannonese for “Jew,” y’all. Just letting you know, in case you’ve been living under a rock.

Bannon’s tenure in the Trump White House went about as well as expected; he’s a sloppy thinker, largely disorganized, and given to impulses that run him into political and ideological box canyons. He’s also a man who loves to have enemies. He needs enemies—real and imagined—to function.

Trump’s base is the logical end point of both the anti-intellectualism and the oft-cited “paranoid style of American politics” predicted by the great historian and observer of American political life Richard Hofstadter in 1964.

Donald Trump is like a monster from the laboratory of a jackass mad scientist, built to represent the perfect antithesis of Washington’s example.

Trumpism exists in the shallow end of the rhetorical pool—the very, very shallow end, where its users ignored the "No Diving" sign and still suffer some rocking head trauma from the experience. ... The wordfinder Republicans aren't making arguments. They're just venting, pecking like chickens for tiny fragments of snark, hoping to seem witty without actually possessing even the slightest wit.

Some say America's forgotten workin' men rose up in a single, inchoate scream of rage at a system that for too long had provided them with nothing but empty promises, bad trade deals, and government-subsidized carbs. Some claim it's from a generation weaned on talk radio, Fox News, and the comments sections of a million tea party websites. Some say it's a sign of a merciless god testing us to the breaking point. I still think it's because we didn't let that old gypsy woman vote when she couldn't produce a photo ID back in 2012.

Changing hearts and minds in a society that has passed them by on many issues is boring and hard work. They’d rather compromise with a candidate who will nominate their preferred judges than uphold their values. Instead of working to change society through moral suasion, exemplars of faith, or even just better communications, they’d rather trust the federal government in the hands of Donald Trump to deliver their desired social end states. Call me crazy, but I thought that was the other team’s modus operandi.

Sure, I want to save the Republic from Trump and Trumpism, but I don’t mind telling members of my party and movement to fuck themselves on the way there.

The increasingly hideous tone of the GOP is a long-term brand killer; we need to stop reveling in the fuck-you culture of constant, always-on outrage and offense. It’s juvenile, repellent, and self-limiting. Outrage has a reason, and a place. When it’s over everything, it’s about nothing.

With all things Trump, the vaguely ludicrous proposition that the president of the United States is watching a morning talk show with the intellectual weight and policy depth of a Katy Perry video would be risible if it wasn’t so damn terrifying.

Trump supporters are older, whiter, less educated, and more southern and Midwestern than the mean, and their income ranks in the average range. They love God, television, and Fox News.

Trump’s election gave the national, professional mainstream media a moment and a mission that has produced a golden age of journalism. The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Daily Beast, the Atlantic, the Los Angeles Times, CNN, and MSNBC are expanding their audiences and prospering like never before.

Leadership takes two things Donald Trump notoriously and evidently lacks: character and an ability to engage in political acts that go beyond oneself.

We kept feeding the monster.

Conservatives Who Love Donald but Aren’t Smart and Want to Seem Smart to Other People Who Aren’t Smart.