So how come Trump has got this far?
First off we must not forget his good fortune in facing such weak, even pathetic, rivals.
Yes, he is a constant liar and tireless bullshit artist, with contempt for just about everybody, especially his women. He is incurious and ignorant. He has almost created his own brand of narcissism.
Long ago, Merv Griffin ate his lunch and he then managed to boast anyway about his Art of the Deal. His “deals” from New Jersey to Scotland are shams and scams. He is not particularly rich in wholly owned assets, like say, John Kerry or John McCain, but he is a genius at leveraging credit and Other Peoples’ Money.
Despite all this, he is a formidable candidate because his vices and defects are a perfect fit to the superficiality of media formulaic coverage of wooden narratives and lowest common denominator moral assumptions all wrapped up in cheap rhetoric.
Trump is a walking short-term business plan in an area that has become a low-grade downmarket sale-athon.
Peculiar to the GOP arrangement [increasingly shared by Democrats]The Long Con – The BafflerRight Rules State GovernmentsThe Triumph of the Hard Right by Garry Wills | The New York Review of Books is the marriage of very big money, very rationally dispersed by hired experts for the maximum desired triumph of our oligarchy.
It is a social control machine whose well-oiled pistons keep the robo-rabble [in part created by the same money over a longer term] spinning on command. So we have the media endorsing the cover story that we must stay indefinitely in the Middle East to “maintain peace”. This means perpetual “war” (really endless armed struggle for the sake of immensely profitable cash machines like the F-35, aircraft carriers, and crackpot applications of expensively procured minds-and-hearts programs that are really not judged on whether they work but on how much money they can reliably chew up, etc.) – in short, ensuring the entrenchment of the National Security State with an enormous infrastructure and truly unaccountable bureaucracy (except to lobbyists) — an essential part of this machine. The whole thing almost perfectly transfers wealth from the middle class to the top one percent or so. Orwell meets Marx.
All this can happen because we have created an unprecedented promotional culture, a perpetual pageant of deceit that has obliterated taste and decency for the sake of control. Trapped “consumers” in hospital waiting rooms, car dealership lounges, airports and malls are subjected to a constant buzz of vacuous singing and dancing sales pitches and product placement. Mostly they don’t listen or look, but they are thus trained not to listen or look carefully at anything. The money pouring into campaign goes in large part to fill those same screens with a scream version of the same mindless buzz alternating with the Iago tones of suspicious resentment.
Aldous Huxley meets Chomsky.