Why Trump’s Endorsements Should Scare Your Pants Off
Amidst all of this, the Trump endorsements have been coming fast and furious, with pyramid-lover and knife-combat enthusiast Ben Carson being the latest.
Until recently, most of the celebrity Trump-supporters have been exactly the sort of swollen-headed, oxygen-deprived has-beens one would expect to find backing a reality TV spectacle like Trump’s campaign. Gary Busey, Hulk Hogan, Mike Ditka, John Daly, Stephen Baldwin, John Rocker and Bobby Knight are all aboard the Trump train. Celebrity white dudes with anger management issues, unite!
Famed ex-centerfielder and not-smart-person Johnny Damon is another recent Trump devotee, citing among other things Trump’s “first class” golf courses as a reason for his support. Wrestler Jerry “The King” Lawler, most famous for his faux-showdowns with the late Andy Kaufman, says supporting Trump is “great.” This is funny because there is a growing theory on the Internet that Trump is actually Kaufman’s foul-mouthed alter ego Tony Clifton, exhumed for one last bold, brilliant prank. And beyond that there has been a list of assorted freaks and weirdos from the political margins, from Ann Coulter to Pat Buchanan to Michael Savage to Phyllis Schlafly to Sarah Palin (whose endorsement speech seemed at times like a public service ad about the dangers of household inhalants) who have cast their lot with the Trumpster.
But the more troubling pattern came when the so-called “establishment” endorsements started to flow in. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who appeared to be blinking a cry for help in Morse code during Trump’s Super Tuesday victory speech, was the first and most craven of the Trump-converts from the GOP mainstream. Christie brought with him one of his own former supporters, Maine’s Paul LePage, making it two sitting governors now in Trump’s tent.
Then there was Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, a major Iraq War supporter who apparently doesn’t mind sharing a stage with that war’s most ardent GOP critic. Even Trump joked at the Sessions announcement, “I hate to say it, but I’m becoming mainstream.”
NASCAR CEO Brian France, who is not the most loathsome sports official alive only because God keeps forgetting to hit Roger Goodell with lightning, was another relatively important “mainstream” endorsement. Criticized for his announcement, France claimed he didn’t know what Trump stood for. “I don’t even know all [his] policies, truthfully,” he said.
The significance of all of these endorsements can’t be understated. The way you build a truly vicious nationalist movement is to wed a relatively small core of belligerent idiots to a much larger group of opportunists and spineless fellow travelers whose primary function is to turn a blind eye to things. We may not have that many outright Nazis in America, but we have plenty of cowards and bootlickers, and once those fleshy dominoes start tumbling into the Trump camp, the game is up.
People like Chris Christie and Paul LePage and Jeff Sessions surely know what Donald Trump is all about. Under normal circumstances, they wouldn’t be debasing themselves by endorsing him. After all, they didn’t, at least not until he became the practically inevitable nominee.