Pundits occasionally opine that someone or other is the face of a given political party. The Week blogger Paul Waldman implies that Donald Trump would be a fitting choice as the Republican party’s face, presumably drawn by a cartoonist, since Trump is “a walking caricature…created from everything Republicans believe” about matters such as money and patriotism.
“Trump is the essence of contemporary Republicanism,” wrote Waldman in a Wednesday post. “It's a distilled essence, boiled down to a viscous and sour consistency…From his jingoism to his willingness to present all kinds of weird ideas as facts…to his relentless oversimplification of complex issues…[it's] what you get when you take a typical Republican politician and make him a little dumber and more extreme — but just a little.”
From Waldman’s post (bolding added):
I imagine RNC chair Reince Priebus and his aides…saying to each other, "Jesus, now we have to deal with this buffoon? Didn't we have enough problems already?"
They certainly did, and Trump makes it worse...Watching him at those debates should be nothing if not entertaining, as he employs his signature style of barely-coherent bluster, and the other candidates struggle to determine how to deal with him.
Here's the problem, though: Donald Trump is the essence of contemporary Republicanism. It's a distilled essence, boiled down to a viscous and sour consistency. But if you want to know what Republicans believe and who they are, you don't need to look much further. He's a walking caricature, but it's a caricature created from everything Republicans believe.
Start with his wealth. For a long time, but more intensely in the last few years, Republicans have held that wealth is a sign of virtue and the wealthy are deserving of our highest consideration and attention. It is the investors and inheritors and "job creators" to whom we must attend — showering them with favors, relieving their burdens, tiptoeing around their tender feelings — for they are truly the best of us. And nobody talks more about his own wealth than Donald Trump…
Trump's hilarious insistence that everything he touches is the best, the absolute elite, the most high-end and top-shelf and super-classy, is an echo of how Republicans say we must talk about America itself. Not for them the thoughtful consideration that the country has made mistakes, no sir — they believe that urgent proclamations of "American exceptionalism," that we're not just the wealthiest or the strongest country but the very best in all things, just as God intends us to be, are mandatory for all politicians.
The elements of Trump's style — from his jingoism to his willingness to present all kinds of weird ideas as facts to his obsession with right-wing shibboleths (remember how much time he spent trying to convince everyone that President Obama was born in Kenya?) to his relentless oversimplification of complex issues — are all what you get when you take a typical Republican politician and make him a little dumber and more extreme — but just a little.
