Almost a quarter-century ago, Seal sang, “We're never gonna survive unless we get a little crazy.” These days, suggests Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall, it’s awfully hard to survive in the Republican presidential race if you’re only a little crazy, now that Donald Trump “has flooded the market with a new, purer brand of Crazy that has left the other candidates scrambling and basically unable to compete.”
“Trump is in many ways the logical end result of seven years -- really two-plus decades -- of Republican cultivation of anger and grievance as a method of conducting politics,” asserted Marshall in a Monday post, adding that Trump “has managed to boil modern Republicanism down to a hard precipitate form, shorn of the final vestiges of interest in actual governing.”
From Marshall’s post (bolding added):
Several days ago, perennial presidential candidate Mike Huckabee charged that President Obama was ready to lead Israeli Jews "to the ovens." A few days later, he said he might use not only the FBI but even the US military to prevent abortions. And around the same time, Ted Cruz called Obama the world's biggest funder of Islamic terrorism. There was a day when cracks like these would have stopped the political world in its tracks, spurring transgressive glee from supporters and outrage from liberals and normal people. But this summer, they've struggled to break through. And the reason is obvious: Donald Trump has flooded the market with a new, purer brand of Crazy that has left the other candidates scrambling and basically unable to compete…
…Trump is in many ways the logical end result of seven years -- really two-plus decades -- of Republican cultivation of anger and grievance as a method of conducting politics. This is what brought us the 2010 and 2014 election triumphs on the one hand, but also government shut-downs, debt crises based on nothing, and more.
In a crowded field, for almost everyone but Bush, it’s critical to grab hold of the mantle of anger and grievance. But the Huckabees and Cruzes simply cannot compete with Trump…[who] has managed to boil modern Republicanism down to a hard precipitate form, shorn of the final vestiges of interest in actual governing.
In the economics of Crazy, there is purity and volume. Trump has brought to market a purer and more widely deployable product. He has also radically increased volume. Like a high-flying tech start-up or new drug syndicate, he has radically devalued the product, while dominating the transformed market in a way that allows him to make a killing even against reduced prices and margins...
…Cruz's angle has been to be the one mainstream presidential contender who will take things just a little further than anyone else in the game…But [Trump’s] do anything, say anything mode of militant nonsense has frozen Cruz out almost entirely. And his dipping poll numbers show it…
...[N]ovelty and lack of normal political constraints is what is allowing [Trump] to run circles around his competitors who had hoped to play in the Crazy space. Showmanship, lack of touch with reality, and a palpable handle on the grievance and unrestrained self-assertion that is at the center of modern Republican base politics have made Trump, for now, almost impossible to outdo in a crowded field.
