Vox's Matthew Yglesias finally gets it through his thick head that Trump isn't "funny" or "delightfully chaotic" or "what the Republicans need in order to clean out the pool drain" but that he is truly dangerous and that his rhetoric is going to get someone hurt or killed.
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I was a liberal Donald Trump apologist. Not a liberal enjoying the chaos Trump was sowing in the Republican Party, but someone who welcomed his ideological heterodoxy as a step away from the cliff of endless polarization that offered a more moderate substantive agenda than Marco Rubio's. I held on to that conviction through Friday's protest violence and Saturday's torrent of "enough is enough"takes.
I was wrong. Sunday morning, in the context of what he knew to be a growing controversy about violent behavior on the part of his supporters, Trump tweeted what can really only be interpreted as a threat to send goons to beat up Bernie Sanders supporters.
.Bernie Sanders is lying when he says his disruptors aren't told to go to my events. Be careful Bernie, or my supporters will go to yours!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 13, 2016
He then followed this up by suggesting that he would use the resources at his disposal to help his supporters obtain immunity from legal consequence for violent acts they undertook on his behalf.
There are those of us that had Trump pegged as a Father Charles Coughlin-style demagogue from the beginning, a vessel to make acceptable the rancor and the hatred that infests the Republican party and has been clearly on display nationally since Barack Obama became President and well before that regionally with the likes of assholes like GOP Sen. Jesse Helms, the national shame I grew up with as a North Carolinian.
I'm glad that Yggy here has finally seen the light. But he should have been denouncing this jackass nine months ago, where Trump should have been run out of the party instead of being enabled by Yglesias and the Village because Trump somehow represented the "legitimate and very real grievances of working-class white men", with folks telling themselves that Trump would "moderate" in the general and couldn't possibly be as awful as his critics were warning us:
There have been clear signs all year that this was the direction the Trump phenomenon was heading, but I assumed that as he got closer to the Republican nomination Trump would tone down his extreme behavior in order to demonstrate his acceptability to mainstream voters. In fact, he has done the opposite. It's a surprising decision that has truly scary implications for how he might behave were he to actually win the presidency.
He was worse. Now he may be President. Was it worth your professional reputation to say "Hey guys maybe he's not so bad", Matt? Because my question is if you're making judgment calls this badly, exactly why should we listen to you in the future?
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