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Six months before the Iowa caucuses, the political debate has become so unfathomably absurd it may be worthwhile to retrace how we got here. It is a little over four years since Donald Trump opened what has proved to be a new epoch in American politics by coming down the escalator in Trump Tower and announcing his campaign for president. He elicited a pandemic of almost hysterical ridicule. The Bill Maher-Stephen Colbert-Chelsea Handler echelon of late-night public comment, and their even more banal and imbecilic day-time television analogues, ghoulishly lavished hundreds of millions of free airtime on the Trumps. I cannot face the aforementioned people on a screen for more than a few minutes without requiring an airsickness bag to be confident of avoiding an unpleasant incident, but just surfing along has helped maintain perspective as the correlation of political forces has inexorably shifted.
The Republican nonchalance about the Trump branding exercise quickly gave way to concern about his apparent strength among Republican voters. (Having changed parties seven times in 13 years, he wasn’t a dyed-in-the-wool party loyalist.) The large crowds Trump pulled wherever he went and his rise in the polls rattled the Republican establishment but, if this were possible, elevated the mirth of the low-brow talking and mocking heads: if the reactionary Republicans, who in their view hadn’t produced a respectable candidate since Eisenhower, if not Lincoln, tore itself to pieces, so much the more jubilant Hillary’s cakewalk triumph as the Clinton pay-to-play casino moved back into the White House. Mitch McConnell advised Republican congressional candidates that if Trump were nominated, the rest of the party would “drop him like a hot rock.”
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See Also:
(1) Joe Biden is turning into a human piñata
(2) Donald Trump called Putin to offer help fighting Siberian wildfires, Kremlin says
(3) Don Lemon, as Debate Moderator, Suggests Trump Voters Are Racist. Trump Just Responded.
(4) AG William Barr will deliver justice to any Obama officials who committed crimes
(5) The Myth of the Clinton Surplus
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