Donald Trump's stupid “white-trash” sycophants…

[KTJ]

from The Washington Post....

Trump's angry white men

By MICHAEL GERSON | 7:26PM EDT - Monday, October 03, 2016


Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump speaks at a rally on September 30th in Novi, Michigan.
— Photograph: Spencer Platt/Getty Images.

WHAT DO most of the chief advisers and surrogates of the Trump campaign have in common? I'm thinking of Chris Christie, Roger Ailes, Stephen Bannon, Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich.

What could possibly unite this diverse group? They are white, middle-aged (and older) males — not that there is anything wrong with that. They are almost psychotically sycophantic. (According to Gingrich, Donald Trump won an “enormous, historic victory” in the first presidential debate. Both Christie and Giuliani have called Trump a “genius” for avoiding federal taxes.) They are very forgiving about certain foibles (“everybody” commits adultery, explains Giuliani) and rather tough on others (Miss Universe Alicia Machado, says Gingrich, was “not supposed to gain 60 pounds”). They apparently lack the gene for irony (“America's mayor” is smitten with a candidate who has flirted with 9/11 conspiracy theories).

But most of all, they are very unhappy about the state of America. “There's no next election,” Giuliani has declared. “This is it! There is no more time for us left to revive our great country.”

The ascendance of people such as Gingrich, Giuliani and Trump in the Republican Party, from one perspective, is succeeding. A campaign of shouting, apocalyptic, white men has undeniably appealed to white men. A recent Washington Post-ABC News poll found Trump up 40 points against Hillary Clinton in this category. Up nearly 60 points among white men with no college degree. These results are remarkable, indicating both the limits of Clinton as a candidate and the fury in portions of middle-class and blue-collar America.

If the United States is truly in the midst of a wave election, fed by the fears and discontent of white males, it will have enormous consequences in a country that has moved considerably in the direction of diversity, tolerance and inclusion. A very real culture war will be in full swing, not between social conservatives and social liberals, but between a movement of white economic and cultural grievances and a party of social elites and ascendant minorities. This struggle — rooted in race and class — would be far more bitter than the old culture war of ideas.

Trump is an odd leader for this populist revolt. Every presidential candidate presents not just a vision of the future but a certain construction of the past — both Millennium and Eden. Ronald Reagan's ideal, even though he was a product of Hollywood, was the small-town Midwest. For George W. Bush (who chewed tobacco in the back of the class at Harvard Business School), Eden was always West Texas.

What is the mythic content of Trump's nostalgia? In the telling of PBS's excellent political documentary “The Choice”, the young Trump was captured by Norman Vincent Peale's optimistic self-confidence and Hugh Hefner's vision of the good life. “He had a very Hugh Hefner, Playboy magazine view of success,” recalls classmate Michael D'Antonio. Others left the Playboy philosophy behind along with their adolescence. Trump did not.

Trump's version of Eden is lounging at the grotto at the Playboy Mansion or smoking cigars in the back room at the Sands, with a little Studio 54 thrown in. This is the man who reportedly pressured his future wife Marla Maples to appear in Playboy and negotiated the deal; who appeared in a soft-core porn video himself (not naked, thank goodness, but breaking a champagne bottle over a limo); and who recently took to Twitter to urge Americans to view a sex tape. This is the man who boasted about his penis size and made a menstruation joke during debates and has a consistent history of demeaning women as “pigs” and “dogs”.

America is seeing a movement of white grievance led by an avatar of the Playboy philosophy. In light of this, Trump's deep support among evangelical Christians is the hardest for me to account for. I wonder how Trump evangelicals explain to their sons and daughters that this man is a suitable leader for a great country. I know that people in some minority groups are genuinely frightened by the possibility of Trump's election. (“We should frankly test every person here who is of a Muslim background,” Gingrich has said, “and if they believe in sharia, they should be deported.”) I also know that if Trump ends up losing in November, it will be because women rallied in large numbers to defeat him.

Conservatives oriented toward reform and outreach — longing for the leadership of Nikki Haley, Tim Scott and Marco Rubio — are largely waiting in shelters for the storm to pass. But what of the Republican Party will be left?

• Michael Gerson is a nationally syndicated columnist who appears twice weekly in The Washington Post.

__________________________________________________________________________

Read more on this topic:

• Ronald Rizzi: Ethics rules would have little impact on a President Trump

• George Will: Donald Trump's rise reflects American conservatism's decay

www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trumps-angry-white-men/2016/10/03/32af5f4e-898b-11e6-875e-2c1bfe943b66_story.html

[KTJ]

from The Washington Post....

Trump backers realize they've been played
as WikiLeaks fails to deliver October surprise

By GRIFF WITTE | 7:37AM EDT - Tuesday, October 04, 2016


“We have on schedule, and it's a very hard schedule, all the U.S. election-related documents to come out before November 8th,”
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange said in a video news conference on October 4th. — Picture: Associated Press.

LONDON — The expectations were breathless.

For weeks, backers of Republican nominee Donald Trump hyped the tantalizing possibility that the anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks was on the verge of publishing a set of documents that would doom Hillary Clinton's chances in November.

“@hillaryclinton is done,” longtime Trump associate Roger Stone tweeted on Saturday. “#Wikileaks”.

The group's founder, Julian Assange, did nothing to dampen the enthusiasm, suggesting to Fox News hosts that his scoops could upend the race with documents “associated with the election campaign, some quite unexpected angles, some quite interesting.”

The announcement by WikiLeaks that it would host a major news conference on Tuesday only seemed to confirm that the bombshell was ready to burst. The pro-Trump, anti-Clinton media world rippled with fevered speculation.

But if an October surprise about the Democratic nominee really is coming, it will have to wait a little longer.

Over the course of two hours on Tuesday — with the world's media and bleary-eyed Trump die-hards across the United States tuning in — Assange and other WikiLeaks officials railed against “neo-McCarthyist hysteria”, blasted the mainstream media, appealed for donations and plugged their books (“40 percent off!”).

But what they didn't do was provide any new information about Clinton — or about anything else, really.



The much-vaunted news conference, as it turned out, was little more than an extended infomercial for WikiLeaks on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of its founding.

Assange, whose group released a trove of hacked Democratic National Committee documents on the eve of the party's convention this summer, breezily dismissed the idea that anyone should have expected any news at his news conference.

“If we are going to make a major publication about the U.S., we wouldn't do it at 3 a.m.,” Assange said at one point, referring to the Eastern daylight start time for the event.

That didn't go over well with Trump backers who had stayed up through the night, thinking they'd be watching live the unveiling of the death blow to the Clinton campaign.

Assange, as it turns out, had taken a page from Trump's own playbook by drawing an audience with a tease, only to leave those tuning in feeling that they'd been tricked.

Infowars, the pro-Trump and virulently anti-Clinton media vehicle launched by Texas radio host Alex Jones, had touted the WikiLeaks news conference as “historic” and promised that “the Clintons will be devastated.”



Before Assange took the stage, Jones — who broadcast through the wee hours of the American morning — told viewers and listeners that he was so excited he was worried his heart couldn't stand it.

But by the end, Jones realized he’d been played — or in his words, “#wikirolled”.



He wasn't the only one. Sleep-deprived Trump backers and Hillary-haters all across the country took to Twitter to convey their displeasure.







But perhaps those waiting for an October surprise shouldn't lose all hope just yet. Or at least that was the message from Assange, who spoke via video link from the Ecuadoran Embassy in London, where he has been holed up for four years as Swedish authorities seek his extradition over sexual assault allegations.

He promised to reveal documents every week for the next ten. He said some will have a direct bearing on the U.S. election.

“We think they're significant,” he coyly informed his worldwide audience.

But what will they reveal? And when will they come? Assange wouldn't say.

• Karla Adam contributed to this report.

• Griff Witte is The Washington Post's London bureau chief. He previously served as the paper's deputy foreign editor and as the bureau chief in Kabul, Islamabad and Jerusalem.

www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/10/04/trump-backers-feel-played-as-wikileaks-fails-to-come-through-on-october-surprise

[KTJ]