Many years ago, I worked for one of THOSE bosses, the kind we've all had, who would issue demands and proclamations with absolute certainty and was completely wrong about everything.
"British children don't have British accents until they become teenagers," he once observed. On another occasion: "Why are we all using Windows when we could just switch to Google?" He was convinced that Captain Planet remained a wildly popular youth fad into the 2000s.
For some leaders, the less they know about a subject, the more confidently they talk about it. Such is the case with Donald Trump, who knows nothing about anything.
Trump's fabrications are becoming so numerous it's difficult to remember or differentiate them all. This is at least in part because he's a very talented liar: he equivocates on most of his fabrications, so he can squirm his way out of them with an "I never said that."
His speech is littered with "maybe" and "I'll think about it" and "you tell me" and "we'll have to consider it." But his supporters don't hear those weasel-words, of course; they only hear that his insane racism is compatible with their own.
Just in the last week, Trump lent his support to a national Muslim database, to spying on mosques, to beating up a Black Lives Matter protestor, to building a magic wall to keep out Mexican Syrians. He retweeted lies about black people killing white people, and doubled down on lies about New Jersey Arabs celebrating the 9/11 attacks.
He did this not with clear, direct language, but with a confusing stream-of-consciousness that makes sense only to him. This is how truly terrible bosses operate: they've learned to hide their ignorance by not making any sense.
For example, here's what he told supporters: "If you don't mind, I want to be, I want to surveil. I want surveillance of these people that are coming in, the Trojan horse, I want to know who the hell they are."
What the fuck are you talking about, Donald Trump? These sentences do not make actual sense. But if you are a loathsome racist, searching for a candidate who sounds like they might be a racist too, this is the sort of garbage-nonsense you might say.
If there's a silver lining to any of this, and you've got to look really hard to find any, it's that Trump is a catastrophe for the GOP. The reality of the way polling works is that while he seems very popular right now, most people are not paying any attention to politics at all. Once normal Americans start getting interested in politics, which will happen around the time of their state primaries, they'll be horrified by Trump and will vote in huge numbers against him.
And then there's this: rumor is circulating about an organized effort behind the scenes of the GOP to destroy Trump's campaign. Sure, OK, good idea! Spend your money on that, Republicans, so there'll be none left over to buy votes next November.
