You Can’t Pretend Trump’s Flaws Awayby Ben Shapiro October 5, 2016 2:05 PM
The delusion that leads so many to fall in love with a Fantasy Trump is dangerous.
I have a close friend who was recently dating a nasty fellow. He manipulated her emotionally; he drove a wedge between her and her family; he badmouthed her beliefs, tearing her down to build himself up. But she continued to date him, because apparently she loved him. She didn’t love the real him, of course — that guy was a jerk. She loved the fantasy she’d created for herself.
It’s bizarre to realize that for large swaths of the Republican party, Donald Trump has become that abusive boyfriend.
We’ve now watched Trump operate for well over a year. He hasn’t changed one iota during that time. He’s always been a man who says terrible things in defense of terrible ideas, who lets his ego run roughshod over whatever shred of self-control he maintains, who cares far more about insults to his ego than about the country he seeks to lead.
But that’s not the Trump that Trump defenders see. They see someone different entirely. They see a blow-up doll they could fall in love with, so long as they’re able to convince themselves he feels real.
Never was that more apparent than during last night’s vice-presidential debate, when Indiana governor Mike Pence set about describing Fantasy Trump, a character he could support sans compunction, and sans reckoning with the manifest ugliness of Reality Trump. Pence called Tim Kaine’s accurate claim that Trump had called for deportation of all illegal immigrants “nonsense.” He called Vladimir Putin “the small and bullying leader of Russia,” and when Kaine questioned him about Trump’s obvious warmth toward Putin, he claimed he was “offended.” He tut-tutted, “Oh, please, come on,” when Kaine noted (again, accurately) that Trump had called NATO obsolete, said he knew more than the generals, and said that more nations should have nuclear weapons.
When Kaine ran through the list of horribly offensive things Trump has said, from his Miss Universe insults to his “Mexican” judge comments, Pence simply pretended that the incidents in question had never happened: “If Donald Trump had said all of the things that you’ve said he said in the way you said he said them, he still wouldn’t have a fraction of the insults that Hillary Clinton leveled when she said that half of our supporters were a ‘basket of deplorables.’” Clinton’s comments were insulting. But there was no “if” regarding Trump. He said these things.
Now, some of this is politics. But the determination by many of Trump’s voters to whitewash the man in order to vote for him is astounding. An alternative universe has been constructed where Trump’s worst sins never happened, where anyone who refuses to back the lifelong big-government statist with a historic penchant for dishonesty is a traitor to conservatism. Some of the thinkers I most admire fall into this category — people who construct their own Fantasy Trump with whom to fall in love. These are the people who suggest that Trump must talk more about judges and Obamacare and the specifics of Clinton’s Egypt policy. That’s not who Trump is. Trump is the guy who couldn’t name the countries bordering Egypt, but once heard a rumor from a Breitbart commentator that Hillary stashes a lesbian lover there.
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http://www.nationalreview.com/article/440742/donald-trump-supporters-self-delusion
