The GOP has created a monster it cannot control

I have posted several times that Donald Trump reminds me of Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog. The artist and satirist Donkeyhotey apparently agrees with me.

Donald Trump is essentially a Twitter troll who insults anyone whom challenges his sense of superior breeding and privilege of great wealth. The New York Times has actually stooped to reporting “The Donald’s” trolling on Twitter as legitimate news. Introducing the Upshot’s Encyclopedia of Donald Trump’s Twitter Insults; Donald Trump’s Twitter Insults: The Complete List (So Far). How sad for the NY Times.

Dennis Prager at National Review has cataloged Donald Trump’s F-Bombs on the campaign trail, and laments that “the words render him unfit to be a presidential candidate, let alone president.”

Just before the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday “the Donald” called Iowa Caucus winner Sen. Ted Cruz a “pussy.” Donald Trump repeats crowd member’s Ted Cruz insult: ‘He’s a pussy.’

It is no mystery where his behavior comes from. “Donald Trump is a ‘WrestleMania’ institution,” and was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2013. Donald Trump and WWE – Rolling Stone; Donald Trump’s greatest WWE moments | WWE.com. Trump’s act is the stock and trade of fake wrestling.

Of course, there is “The Donald’s” reality TV show The Apprentice in which this bombastic  blow-hard is known for his catch phrase, “You’re fired!”

The real mystery is whether it was WrestleMania and bad reality TV show fans in New Hampshire who gave “The Donald” his decisive win. Former Federal Communications Commission Chairman Newton Minnow was right, television is a “vast wasteland.” Newton Minnow’s “Vast Wasteland” speech (1961). And your mother was right: “TV will rot your brain.”

Or as the New York Daily News cover on Wednesday suggested, Donald Trump is a psycho clown, and Trump supporters are “mindless zombies,” proclaiming his New Hampshire win the “Dawn of the Brain Dead.”

Donald Trump is just an actor on a stage, a Pied Piper playing the tune that the Tea-Publican electorate has come to demand after years of indoctrination from the Mighty Wurlitzer of the conservative media entertainment complex.

The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof correctly points out that The G.O.P. Created Donald Trump:

So how did we get to this stage where the leading Republican candidate is loathed by the Republican establishment?

In part, I think, Republican leaders brought this on themselves. Over the decades they pried open a Pandora’s box, a toxic politics of fear and resentment, sometimes brewed with a tinge of racial animus, and they could never satisfy the unrealistic expectations that they nurtured among supporters.

Perhaps it started in 1968 with Nixon’s “Southern strategy,” recruiting white segregationists infuriated by the civil rights movement. It then expanded to encompass immigration and the three G’s — God, guns and gays.

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Political nastiness and conspiracy theories were amplified by right-wing talk radio, television and websites — and, yes, there are left-wing versions as well, but they are much less influential. Democrats often felt disadvantaged by the rise of Rush Limbaugh and Fox News, but in retrospect Limbaugh and Fox created a conservative echo chamber that hurt the Republican Party by tugging it to the right and sometimes breeding a myopic extremism in which reality is irrelevant.

A poll released in September found that Republicans were more likely to think that Obama was born abroad than that Ted Cruz was. That poll found that Trump supporters believed by nearly a three-to-one ratio that Obama was born overseas.

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The Republican strategy also nurtured expectations at the grass roots that could never be met. “The Republican Party created Donald Trump,” said Erick Erickson, the conservative radio host, “because they made a lot of promises to their base and never kept them.”

This is a theme of a smart new book by E.J. Dionne Jr., “Why the Right Went Wrong,” who argues that Republican leaders repeatedly made unrealistic pledges — of smaller government, preservation of bygone values and an end to demographic change. “The history of contemporary American conservatism is a story of disappointment and betrayal,” he writes, and that helps explain the disenchantment with the Republican establishment.

Maybe Trump’s campaign will fall apart, but he has a huge lead in the polls in the South Carolina primary coming up, and he has already done enormous damage to the G.O.P. establishment.

So today the leading candidate for president in the party of Lincoln is an ill-informed, inexperienced, bigoted, sexist xenophobe. And he’s not a conservative at heart, just a pandering opportunist.

Donald Trump is the consequence of irresponsible politicking by Republican leaders, the culmination of decades of cultivating unrealistic expectations within the politics of resentment. It’s good to see leading Republicans standing up to him today, but the situation recalls the Chinese saying, qi hu nan xia — when you’re riding a tiger, the hard part is getting off.

Bloomberg’s Sahil Kapur reports that Republicans are descending on South Carolina with no idea how to stop Trump. Like Frankenstein’s monster, the GOP has created a monster it cannot control — not Donald Trump — but rather the GOP base electorate, who are entranced by the siren song of the radical extremists of the conservative media entertainment complex.

UPDATE: How Fox News Helped Create The Donald Trump-enstein: The Video.

UPDATE: The humor website Funny or Die on Wednesday began streaming a 50-minute comedy featuring Johnny Depp portraying the businessman turned politician in a Trump biopic — “Funny or Die Presents Donald Trump’s The Art of the Deal: The Movie.”