Listen: If Rachel Dolezal can self-identify as black, “the Donald” can self-identify as a presidential candidate.
Today, he officially threw his (clown) hat in ring, announcing:
Our country needs a truly great leader, and we need a truly great leader now. We need a leader that wrote the art of the deal; we need a leader that can bring back our jobs, manufacturers, military, to take care of our vets. We need somebody that can take the brand of the United States and make it great again. Ladies and gentlemen, I am officially running for president of the United States. We are going to make our country great again!
That’s Donald J. Trump — billionaire real-estate mogul, reality show host, holder of one of the largest egos in the world, and bloviating birtherist — and he wants your vote.
While many liberals have called the GOP field a “clown bus,” the only real clown in the race is Trump. His announcement (at Trump Tower, natch) seemed more like Rodney Dangerfield’s speech about contractors in “Back To School” than a vision of the future.
The speech, a sample of which follows, was a rambling potpourri of which countries he hates interspersed with anecdotal references peppered with the words and phrases, “I,” “me,” “they don’t know what they’re doing,” “they’re killing us,” “I have,” and “can you believe.”
While most people agree with what Trump identifies as America’s problems, his solutions are naïve, to say the least. He seems to think he can bark orders and that China and Mexico will listen (and that we should have taken all the oil when we left Iraq). He believes all of our leaders are stupid and political hacks (a point on which he is at least partly right). He believes he could wave his hand and all of the environmental regulations would disappear, and that as president he would be the boss of Congress (who would immediately cozy up to his idea for a 35% tariff on cars being made overseas).
Trump’s biggest problem (be thankful for small things) is that Americans aren’t as dumb as he thinks. According to the New York Times Five-Thirty-Eight column, he is the least liked candidate of all 106 presidential candidates since 1980.
A whopping 57 percent of Republicans have an unfavorable view of Trump, according to an average of the three most recent polls. That beats former record holder Pat Buchanan, who had a 43 percent unfavorable rating at this point in the 2000 election cycle…. Buchanan, of course, ended up running as an independent.
If there is good news attending Trump’s announcement, it is that it will distract no one with a genuine interest in electoral politics from evaluating the real field of candidates.
Cross-posted at The Lid
