the coolest part about Trump is that he’s such a reprobate that lesser moral cretins can claim the high ground

— Simon Maloy (@SimonMaloy) August 8, 2015

That’s actually the problem with Trump, from my perspective as someone who is making plans for an EU passport application should he win the nomination and then the election, ie, Not The Target Audience. The problem with Trump is that he lets everyone believe the problem is Trump.

1. He lets the GOP pretend they don’t have major pundits who’ve said, about Hillary Clinton, that she is a shrill old bitch, among the nicer things. He lets the GOP pretend they don’t have major candidates who’ve said that women’s health care is a trivial concern, that it should be cut based on made-up bullshit from complete frauds.
2. He lets the press pretend that aside from Trump, the Republican party is made up not of criminally insane psychopaths but of reasonable people who simply disagree with Democrats’ point of view and are sincere and passionate in their beliefs.
3. He lets the press further pretend that stating one’s views strongly is more of a virtue than what those views actually are, and what consequences they have pale in comparison to the spectacle of their expression.

He lets everybody keep getting away with it, the fraud of the last 7 years, our elections are a dispassionate debate between two parties — one of which wants people to be able to read and for us to reduce the amount of preventable disease and the other of which believes the Department of Ed is enslaving our minds and universal health care will lead to death panels. He lets everybody push all this bullshit off onto him, to say Donald Trump, Donald Trump is the problem. Donald Trump is racist and sexist and stupid and that’s not what we stand for. We won’t have Donald Trump in our party!

No, but you had Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond, welcomed them with open arms when they fled the very idea of equality under the law. You had Norm Coleman, who barely understood the Constitution he swore to uphold, and you have Louis Gohmert, who cannot find his ass with both hands and a posse. You had Todd Akin, Joe Walsh Wilson yelling “YOU LIE” in the middle of the State of the Union, and Michele For the Love of God  Bachmann. You don’t get to pretend Donald Trump is an outlier.

And you, O Political Pundits, do not get to do so either. You don’t get to write these interminable HAS DONALD TRUMP GONE TOO FAR FOR THE GOP and let other candidates denounce him as forever unclean and forget the slightly more polite and subtle versions of those same sentiments uttered by every other candidate on the stage. You don’t get to keep up the fiction that prevents your world blowing apart: That both sides do it, that no one has malice in his heart, that people really want everyone to agree on everything and if we just don’t report enough of the rough edges everything will look smooth.

Admitting Donald Trump just flat-out says what 5/6 of the GOP is thinking means admitting this is what 5/6 of the GOP is thinking, and that means we don’t have two arguments of equal weight to present to the public, which we could just get to if the clown car would clear out a little. That means we don’t have some secret stash of serious Republicans who are being drowned out by the stunts and the carny barkers.

That means this is the party, and this is what there is to deal with.

Which any dirty fucking hippie blogger could have told you a decade ago, but that was in the days when a rude T-shirt got you disinvited from the rulers’ audience. Nowadays you just go around making jokes about women’s periods and Fox has to invite you on the stage.

A.