Could the Latest Trump Stories Be Different From the Rest?
The latest stories I’m talking about are those involving the “John Miller” and “John Barron” hoaxes, in which a man whose accent and cadence are identical to Trump’s brags in the third-person about Trump’s greatness and sexual appeal; and the NYT’s big take-out this morning on Trump’s patterns in dealing with women, complementing previous reports of his assessing the physical hotness of one of his daughters as a toddler and of the other as a grown woman. If you’re ready for a can’t-unsee-it version of the toddler case, try this.
No previous stories have stopped Trump, or even slowed him down. Last summer I wrongly assumed that the rules of political gravity that have applied to other media-age candidates would affect Trump as well. Just as Rick Perry had run into trouble four years ago for his debate brain-freeze, just as Marco Rubio suffered serious damage this year for a similar unfortunate minute, so Donald Trump might have problems for mocking John McCain as a loser, or attacking George W. Bush as a liar, or inventing stories about Muslims rioting in New Jersey or a military background for himself or his own opposition to the Iraq war.
But of course he didn’t have problems. So I am hesitant to speculate about what else might dampen his appeal. But here is why the latest stories seem potentially different. They are about something everyone can understand.
Read more from The Atlantic:
This article was originally published on The Atlantic.
