Donald Trump's staff just issued a press release titled "Re: You" & reading (everything sic'd), "Sike! Sike sike sike!" signed "Super Sike."
— Big Sexy Jeb! Lund (@Mobute) December 3, 2015
Okay, okay, pedants: The proper spelling would be Psych!
Oliva Nuzzi, in the Daily Beast, “Golden Hair, Meet Tinfoil Hat”:
… If you were “reading the tea leaves,” as Alex Jones might say, you would’ve felt deeply in your bones that it was just a matter of time before Trump’s courting of the nation’s foremost crackpots and conspiracy theorists went mainstream. The dog whistles would transform into shouts, the winking and nodding into bear hugs…
Alex Jones is the Hulk Hogan of conspiracy theorists. A Texas native, he is big and loud and the color of a ripe tomato. He thinks the government was involved in the Oklahoma City Bombing, the New World Order is being run by “clockwork elves,” and shrimp are suicidal because of Prozac poisoning the water supply. He is the founder of Infowars.com, the sort of publication that peddles 9/11 truther propaganda and runs headlines like, “Subliminal Super Bowl Illuminati Secrets Revealed.”
“I’ve got so many questions,” Jones, who in October endorsed Rand Paul, told Trump. “But you are vindicated—this has gotta be the 50th time the last six months—on the radical Muslims celebrating, not just in New Jersey, but in New York, Palestine, all over! What do you have to say? They’re still attacking you!” (Jones didn’t reply when asked if he was switching his allegiance from Paul to Trump.)
From the unfortunate angle of Trump’s webcam, his neck disappeared into the collar of his shirt and his head looked sunburned and misshapen, like a wad of Silly Putty that had recently been set on fire.
“Well, I took a lot of heat and I was very strong on it and I held my line and then all of a sudden hundreds of people were calling up my office,” Trump said…
A few hours later, Jones had moved off the topics on which he and Trump see eye to eye—Muslims cheering on 9/11, the Iraq War—and on to promoting the idea that the mass shooting at a San Bernardino, California, center for the disabled on Wednesday afternoon was “highly suspicious” and seemingly “geared to elicit widespread public outrage,” much like the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School had been…
The storied meeting was arranged by Roger Stone, a longtime friend of Trump’s who left the campaign, where he had served as an adviser, in August amid infighting.
Reached by phone on Wednesday, as Trump and Jones were still chatting, Stone said that he had “recommended” the interview to Trump after he had been a guest on Jones’ show himself on Nov. 9 to promote his new book, The Clintons’ War on Women.
Stone was adamant that he wasn’t working for Trump again, not in a “formal or informal” capacity, despite recommending interviews to him during their conversations and supporting his candidacy with the frequent employment of the Twitter hashtag #YUGE…
The thrust of Trump’s case for his candidacy is this: The system is broken, the powerful (including himself) are exploiting it to their advantage behind the scenes with the help of a corrupt and complicit media that is concerned only with protecting the establishment and the status quo. Just what your average bros populating a comment thread on a YouTube video about false-flag operations suspect, but Trump may not know the full extent to which this new base of supporters he has tapped into has gone off the deep end. It’s one thing to suggest, as Trump does, that the government and the media are rigged to screw over the Everyman—lots of politicians say that. It’s something else entirely to say government actors are pretending to be the family members of slain Americans who never existed in the first place.
Then again, Trump has been making shit up for longer than he has been a candidate. It would be unwise to underestimate him…
Eric Levitz, at NYMag:
Last night, Fox News host Bill O’Reilly proved himself to be the Hannibal Lecter of right-wing demagoguery. Just as Dr. Lecter used his insights as a cannibal killer to help police get inside the minds of murderers, so O’Reilly drew on his experience as a serial liar to help America get inside the mind of Donald Trump…
“Here’s what happens,” O’Reilly said. “Sometimes, when you’re up there, you get overly excited and you’re speaking extemporaneously. And then you say things, as anybody would, because the crowd is cheering and everything is going wild, that you don’t know to be true but you believe to be true.”
Trenchant insight and the absence of self-awareness have never been so neatly bound.
Open Thread: It’s Not Lying If You <em>Believe</em> Your Own BSPost + Comments (140)