Josh Marshall: Understanding the Trump/Star of David Blow Up – TPM

Racism and authoritarianism are core Trump values that predate and are separate from this campaign. The other thing that’s very apparent about Trump is that he’s shockingly, almost totally ignorant of the details of almost every public policy issue – much, much more than even your typically caricatured politician who knows little about the issues of public life without their advisors feeding them lines. This makes him more porous to the views and desires of his supporters because he has little to no matrix of pre-existing knowledge or core beliefs to reference them against or challenge them with.

Because of this – intuiting his audience and almost total ignorance and indifference to policy questions — Trump’s core racism and authoritarianism have been amplified and accentuated, even radicalized to an almost unprecedented, perhaps unique degree by his interaction with his supporters. This is not to exonerate Trump in any way. But it’s important to see that ‘beliefs’ isn’t really a metric that is very useful with Trump. If you see a chameleon who is orange, it doesn’t tell you much about the chameleon. It just means he’s standing in front of an orange background. Trump may himself be intrinsically orange. But the analogy definitely applies.

Trump started with a racist, authoritarian message, drew around him a supporter base of racists and authoritarians and has been in a feedback loop of mutual radicalization and openness ever since.

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