The most perplexing mystery of our time, other than Duck Dynasty and the Kardashians, has been how Donald Trump can say so many stupid things and continue to be a viable presidential candidate. Let me crack that cold case with one word: volume. He says so many stupid things that they evolve into an anesthetic blur. Under the power of that anesthesia, well over 40 percent of likely voters are ready to extend their middle finger to the political establishment and send this clown to the White House.
Take the past 24 hours as an example. Trump came clean about his fabricated conspiracy over President Obama’s birthplace, falsely accused Hillary Clinton of creating the issue, and then suggested that her Secret Service agents disarm and see if anyone tries to kill her. And Al Gore paid a price because he claimed to have invented the internet. But don’t you see? That’s the point. We remember Gore’s internet gaffe because it was one of the very few stupid things he said. He spent the rest of time talking about boring stuff, like carbon footprints and Social Security lock boxes.
If Trump had been intently focused on well thought out policy issues for the last 10 months and then, in a weak moment, advocated the assassination of his opponent, it would have been curtains on his campaign. It’s all people would have talked about from now until the election. Instead, in a matter of hours, he will have pushed that thought from our minds and replaced it with another outrage. The human brain is not equipped to simultaneously concentrate on multiple atrocities.
Broadcaster Keith Obermann took a stab at it this week, much to the delight of the progressive community. In a well scripted and delivered 17-minute rant, Obermann listed 176 truly outrageous things Trump has said or done. He included the attack on the Pope and the Gold Star parents, his history of not renting to black people, his claim that Obama invented ISIS, his suggestion that Russia hack Clinton’s emails, his insistence that his buddy, Valdimir Putin, would never go into Ukraine, which he invaded two years ago, and 170 other equally bizarre comments and actions. Yet, days later, when I started to write this paragraph, I had to download a transcript of Obermann’s rant because I couldn’t remember the laundry list. It’s like laughing your head off at a comedy club but being unable, the next day, to remember more than one or two of the jokes.
This is why it seems like the media is hounding Clinton on the email and foundation stuff while not holding Trump to his foibles. In one instance you have two issues with long shelf lives. In the other, you have serial defects, each succumbing to its successor. In the history of dumb political stuff, nobody holds a candle to Trump’s volume. That’s why it is easy to recall those other non-Trump blunders. Remember how John Kerry “voted for the bill before I voted against it”? Or, Howard Dean’s scream? Or Dan Quayle’s misspelling of potato? Or Rick Perry’s “Oops”? Or a helmeted Michael Dukakis ridding in an armored tank? Or Gerald Ford promising no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe when such domination was already well in place? Or Sarah Palin’s foreign policy bonafides based on the proximity of her back yard to Russia?
Donald Trump outdoes all of them combined, before breakfast. On a rational level, it is eminently sensible to suggest that the American people would be embarrassed to have as their leader someone so thoroughly entrenched in ignorance and buffoonery. For a sizeable portion of the electorate, however, this campaign is not about rationality. It is about their utter disgust for our government. It’s not so much that Donald Trump is their savior. He’s their middle finger, their protest vote against a changing world they’ve come to hate. They are united in anger and there is no revelation, no October surprise, that will deter them from trying to foist their candidate of rage onto the source of their scorn. Instead, the only path to hope in this election rests with those who, despite all that is wrong with this country, care enough to change it rather than blow it up with a middle finger.