Trump’s midterm campaign has distilled his vile message | Sidney Blumenthal

The president has spewed vulgar and hateful rhetoric even as he reveals his disdain for his followers Far from veering off his track, Trump in his ceaselessly vile midterm campaign statements has attained an optimal level of Trumpism. He has distilled the raw elements of misogyny, racism and nativism to the purified essence of his political philosophy. The Republican candidates and his vice-president have followed him down the trail of “defining deviancy down”, as explained by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, in his essay in The American Scholar in 1993, about lowering the bar to make abnormal criminal behavior seem normal, coping through denial of its obvious presence, and through that process trivializing “the manifest decline of American civic life”. Continue reading...