http://www.dailywire.com/news/4786/supporters-trumps-ignorance-and-stupidity-just-ben-shapiro#.VwgDT3uyWQs.twitterFor Supporters, Trump's Ignorance And Stupidity Just Make Him The 'Outsider' America NeedsBY: BEN SHAPIRO APRIL 8, 2016
Donald Trump doesn’t know anything about policy. He’s incredibly ignorant, tremendously lazy, and flippant about both his ignorance and his laziness. But many of Trump’s supporters love it.
That’s because Trump is an outsider.
The New York Times reports today on Trump’s muddled healthcare policy. Trump has said he likes the Scottish and Canadian nationalized healthcare systems, but said they won’t work here; he says Obamacare is a disaster, but the federal government must intervene to prevent people from “dying in the streets.” He says that he wants to use tax breaks to help people buy insurance, but then says that if you’re too poor to pay taxes, we’ll use Medicaid instead.
People who have actual very good brains, not Trump-style “very good brains,” find all of this exasperating. But the Trump campaign calls it good politics:
This whipsaw of ideas is exasperating Republican experts on health care, who call his proposals an incoherent mishmash that could jeopardize coverage for millions of newly insured people. But for Mr. Trump’s campaign, such criticism appears only to bolster the candidate’s outsider status. His chief policy adviser, Sam Clovis, said that Mr. Trump was running against the political establishment in Washington and was therefore not relying on advice from “traditional establishment Republican people.”
And here’s the thing: the Trump campaign is right. It is good politics for Trump to remain ignorant. It means he can take advantage of two mutually exclusive arguments: first, that being an “outsider” allows you to say honest things no one else will; and second, that being an “outsider” allows you to shift your positions ad nauseum while you “learn.” The first argument suggests that “outsider” status correlates with honesty; the second suggests that “outsider” status correlates with dishonesty. But Trump takes advantage of both.
Thus, Trump trots out extreme policy proposals to the cheers of his followers; if he’s questioned, he immediately shifts away from those proposals to the cheers of his followers, who say he’s “learning.” All popular hard-core positions reflect Trump’s “honest opinions”; all unpopular opinions he abandons reflect that he’s just figuring this out, and that doing so takes time.
This makes a mockery of the democratic process. No matter what Trump says, he wins, because his followers expect both immoderation and unending changeability. This amounts to following the Great Leader, in the end: you trust Trump so much that you’re willing to grant him credibility whether he’s right or wrong. You don’t know what Trump believes, because Trump doesn’t know what Trump believes. Many of the same people who rightly labeled the left’s embrace of Barack Obama cultic are now engaged in that exact same cult of personality, writing off all of Trump’s sins against decency, principle and intelligence on the flimsy excuse that Trump isn’t a politician – which, these same people say, is his chief qualification for higher office.
This all works because of the justified hatred for establishment politicians. Trump simply poses himself as anti-establishment – as though that term reflected governmental experience rather than big government cronyism – and his followers nod along. Trump says he’s an outsider, even though he’s been on the inside of the system by signing checks to Democrats for decades, and his followers go along with that. Trump has carved the heart out of the meaning of the terms “establishment” and “insider”; they now mean, according to him and his supporters, anybody who isn’t Trump.
Don’t expect Trump to change his ways. His campaign says that Trump will roll out a series of pre-scripted policy speeches; Trump will probably learn his positions for the first time from the teleprompter as he reads them aloud. But there’s only one thing Trump has truly learned from this campaign, and it’s something he already knew: there’s no substitute for cultivating personal loyalty and surrounding yourself with yes-people who excuse every error and celebrate every mistake.
