Trump Has Always Been a Wolf in Wolf's Clothing - By Ezra Klein

[DonViejo]

By enabling the president anyway, Republican elites helped make the storming of the Capitol possible.

By Ezra Klein
Opinion Columnist

Jan. 7, 2021

For years, there has been a mantra that Republicans have recited to comfort themselves about President Trump — both about the things he says and the support they offer him. Trump, they’d say, should be taken seriously, not literally. The coinage comes from a 2016 article in The Atlantic by Salena Zito, in which she complained that the press took Trump “literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.”

For Republican elites, this was a helpful two-step. If Trump’s words were understood as layered in folksy exaggeration and schtick — designed to trigger media pedants, but perfectly legible to his salt-of-the-earth supporters — then much that would be too grotesque or false to embrace literally could be carefully endorsed at best and ignored as poor comedy at worst. And Republican elites could walk the line between eviscerating their reputations and enraging their party’s leader, all while blaming the media for caricaturing Trumpism by reporting Trump’s words accurately.

On Nov. 5, 2020, just days after the election, Vice President Mike Pence offered a classic of the genre. As Trump declared the election stolen, in terms as clear as a fist to the face, Pence tried to take him seriously, not literally; to signal solidarity with Trump’s fury while backing away from the actual claims. “I stand with President @RealDonaldTrump,” he tweeted. “We must count every LEGAL vote.”

But Trump did not want every legal vote counted. He wanted legally counted votes to be erased; he wanted new votes discovered in his favor. He wanted to win, not lose; whatever the cost, whatever the means. And every day since, he has turned up the pressure, leading to the bizarre theory that took hold of Trumpists in recent weeks that the vice president was empowered to accept or reject the results of the election on Jan. 6; that Pence could, single-handedly, right this wrong. And so, after years of loyal service, of daily debasements and constant humiliations, Trump came for Pence, too, declaring him just one more enemy of the people.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/07/opinion/trump-capitol-protests.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

[dchill]

1. He's always been an asshole in an asshole's clothing.

I've got eyes, and I know what I see.

[The Roux Comes First]

2. Tons of Media Culpability Here, Too

Including, prominently, formerly respected institutions (looking at you, Gray Lady). The parroting of every emission from his mouth for years as news or even of any value, has been disgusting.

And I look forward to much further dissection and analysis of what seems to me a totally specious, but long-standing claim of constant belittlement, disrespect, and bad treatment of the poor yam by dems and the press for his entire term. Of course this has long been one of the sniveler-in-chief's stocks in trade, always the victim, put-upon and never given the respect he feels he deserves. And this is of course an established talking point by now of apologists up and down the republican party. It's obvious that even total adulation and bootlicking could never satisfy this desperately insecure frail ego. Just ask Mike.