The bottomless strangeness of the Trump presidential candidacy is not in that he’s succeeding it’s that people are surprised he’s succeeding. It’s that the United States, a ‘democracy’ turned its electoral politics into a two-year long reality TV show with a relatively meaningless trophy at the end of it all, and people are surprised that a gross, thoughtless billionaire who failed upwards into attention-driven world of reality TV decided to jump into this race and is doing well. I am not surprised when I hear Iowa voters defend Trump’s Christian-ness. I’m not surprised when I watch Rand Paul take pot-shots at Chris Christie on a stage. I’m not surprised to see craven opportunists squall around one another as if they feel they can just survive the bully on the stage, they can just skulk away. As if Trump is not an apex predator to this environment of thought-free id-driven monstrosity politics that they have been spending the past twenty years cultivating.
You gotta remember: American politics are determined by who turns up. And who turns up are diehard believers, and people lucky enough to have the time and money to spend on Being Politically Engaged. The latter and the former do have some overlap – but trust me, the former group aren’t going to care what Trump makes them think, they’re going to care about the R after his name, and until he has that, they’re going to care about how he makes them feel.
There is no way to properly express how unreal these politics are. They’re a space beyond spaces, a time between times, a world full of people convinced that they should be deporting American citizens because of their religion and that that is protected by the Constitution.
And Trump is the school bully to a room full of people who whenever they saw that guy beating up someone between classes thought to themselves one day, that’ll be me.