In Orthodox Christianity, a “holy fool” is a type of saint, someone who appears to be absurd, but who embeds the truth in his or her own apparent madness. Is Donald Trump a political version of this? Eric Levitt points out that if Trump weren’t saying true things — things that Republicans aren’t supposed to say — he wouldn’t have gotten this far in the GOP primary. Excerpts listing what Levitt, who derides the candidate as a “narcissistic reality star,” says are Trump’s “truth bombs”:
The world would be safer if Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gadhafi were still in power.
Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gadhafi were brutal dictators. But the world would probably be a safer place if they were both still brutally dictating.
In Iraq, hundreds of thousands of people died in the wake of the American invasion. For its part, the United States lost thousands of soldiers and trillions of dollars. And the result was a decimated economy and civil society, an Iraqi government aligned with Iran, and a fascist death cult carrying out a theocratic fever dream along the country’s Syrian border.
In Libya, 400,000 people have been forced to flee their homes because of pervasive violence. The nation’s biggest cities routinely go without power for up to 18 hours a day, while oil output — and, consequently, the nation’s economic well-being — has fallen drastically from where it was during Gadhafi’s reign.
But the idea that overthrowing morally odious leaders does not always make the world a better place is irreconcilable with the Manichean fairy tale that is Republican foreign policy. So no one clapped when Trump summarized the failures of those interventions at November’s GOP debate:
“Look at Libya. Look at Iraq. Look at the mess we have after spending $2 trillion dollars, thousands of lives, wounded warriors all over the place — who I love, okay?”
And:
If we topple Bashar al-Assad, he could be replaced by something worse.
Admitting the failures of past interventions is uncouth. But suggesting that such failures should be considered when contemplating new overseas adventures is outright blasphemy. Back in November, Trump pressed that big red button:
“I don’t like Assad. Who’s going to like Assad? But, we have no idea who these people, and what they’re going to be, and what they’re going to represent. They may be far worse than Assad.”
NAFTA hurt blue-collar workers.
When the United States lowered its trade barriers in the mid-’90s, much of the GOP’s donor class benefited, while a portion of the party’s voting base was hurt. But to acknowledge this would be to acknowledge that there are instances in which the economic interests of the “job creators” and those of low-income white workers diverge — a notion distressingly evocative of the “class warfare” that the Republican Party exists to oppose. And so even though economic research has established that NAFTA drove down the wages of blue-collar workers in the industries affected, Republican presidential candidates rarely criticize the agreement. But back in September, Trump pulled the pin off a truth grenade and told 60 Minutes that the deal was “a disaster.”
And:
If the government stops subsidizing poor people’s health care, poor people will be dying in the streets.
If the government doesn’t subsidize the health care of very poor people, those people are more likely to suffer from preventable health problems. When poor people’s preventable health problems become severe, they go to hospitals, where they rack up bills they can’t afford to pay. That leads hospitals to increase charges to those who can pay, like the government. Thus, in many cases, it costs more over the long term to withhold health-care subsidies than to provide them. The only way for the government to completely wash its hands of sick poor people would be to deny the indigent access to hospitals and allow them to die in the streets. But Republicans rarely acknowledge this reality, because most of their budgetplans require cuts to health-care spending for the poor.
So when Trump said the following to Iowa radio host Simon Conway back in October, the radio station exploded in a hot white flash of truth.
“I don’t want to see people dying in the streets, Simon, and neither do you … and neither do great Republicans. I mean, the Republicans don’t want people dying in the street. There are gonna be some people that aren’t gonna be able to have — they don’t have any money!”
Whole thing here. Whatever else you think of Trump, he has liberated future conservative candidates from having to stick to the same old script, and tell the same old lies. Unfortunately, it’s no gain to trade in one set of lies for another.