By Matt Taibbi:
Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, the Mohegan Sun Arena, two days later. As he has done multiple times in the past year, Trump has seemingly rebounded from certain disaster. A second debate with Hillary Clinton did not go quite so disastrously as the first, despite horrible optics (he appeared obese from stress and stalked Clinton onstage, as if wanting to bite her back รก la Marv Albert) and even worse behavior (he threatened to jail his opponent, a straight-up dictator move you'd expect from a Mobutu, Pinochet or Putin).
Whether or not he "won" the debate was immaterial. He at least impressed pious Mike Pence, Trump's sad-sack running mate, who reportedly had been considering withdrawing from the ticket over the whole pussy thing. "Big debate win!" Pence tweeted, ending rumors of an internal mutiny. "Proud to stand with you as we #MAGA!"
That's hashtag Make America Great Again, in case you didn't believe Mike Pence is hip. (The new white-power movement, like a lot of fraternities, is short on brains, but long on secret passwords and handshakes.) The man who once opposed clean needles on moral grounds was now ready to march through history with a serial groper and tit-gazer.
In Wilkes-Barre, home to a recent Klan leafleting, and a key electoral-map battleground, the turnout for Trump's rally was a vast sea of white faces and profane signage. SHE'S A CUNT – VOTE TRUMP read the T-shirt of one attendee. BILL! MONICA GAVE YOU WHAT? read the caption over a photo of a grinning Hillary, plastered on the side of one of a scary triad of 18-wheelers decked out in anti-Clinton invective. On line going into the event, some more mild-mannered visitors explained why there was nothing that could dissuade them from voting Trump. "Even if it's small, there's a chance that he's going to do something completely different, and that's why I like him," said Trent Gower, a soft-spoken young man. "And when he talks, I actually understand what he's saying. But, like, when fricking Hillary Clinton talks, it just sounds like a bunch of bullshit."
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In the far-right world, every successive villain has always been worse than the last. It's quaint now to think about how Al Gore was once regarded as the second coming of Lenin, or that John Kerry was a secret communist agent. Then the race element took Obama-hatred to new and horrifying places. But Trumpian license has pushed hatred of Hillary Clinton beyond all reason. If you don't connect with it emotionally, you won't get it. For grown men and women to throw around words like "bitch" and "cunt" in front of their kids, it means things have moved way beyond the analytical.
The Full Story (October 14, 2016)
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