QOTD: Molly Ball
by digby
From the campaign trail with Trump:
Despite all the negativity and fear, the energy in this room does not feel dark and aggressive and threatening. It doesn’t feel like a powder keg about to blow, a lynch mob about to rampage. It feels joyous.
“There is so much love in every room I go to,” Trump says, near the end of nearly an hour and a half of free-associative bombast, silly and sometimes offensive impressions, and insane pronouncements. “We want our country to be great again, and we know it can be done!”
[...]
This is the thing Trump knows: You can stand around fretting about truth and propriety and the danger of pandering to baser instincts.
Or you can give the people what they want.
Read the piece to see what it is they want.
It's going to be interesting to see just how many of these folks there are out there.
Update: This New York Times piece adds more detail about what makes these rallies so joyful:
At recent Trump rallies, supporters have spit in protesters’ faces, tackled demonstrators in Miami, and shoved and punched a Black Lives Matter activist in Alabama. (“Maybe he should have been roughed up,” Mr. Trump said after the episode.) Mostly, he has embraced the scuffles as a new and action-packed dimension of the Donald Trump experience.
“Isn’t a Trump rally much more exciting than these other ones?” Mr. Trump asked as the police ejected a protester shouting “Trump’s a racist” from a rally in Worcester, Mass., last week. “That kind of stuff only adds to the excitement.”
[...]
To supporters seeing him up close, the Trump experience was very real. They locked eyes on him and nodded religiously when he talked about “anchor babies” cast by unauthorized immigrants, or the “animals and savages” perpetrating terrorism, or the “scum” on the streets. Guarded by a line of Secret Service agents under the stage, he made his fans howl with laughter and shake their heads in disgust at “stupid” leaders who use teleprompters.
He even got them to mock their brethren who could not get into the hall. “You should have gotten here earlier,” Mr. Trump said to applause.
When he referred to the man identified as the ringleader of the Paris attacks this month as “the guy with the dirty, filthy hat,” the crowd chuckled, but one of the high school girls, unexpectedly appalled, shouted, “You bastard,” before lowering her head.
When Mr. Trump said he would bring back waterboarding as an interrogation tactic against terrorism suspects, and added, “If it doesn’t work, they deserve it anyway,” an older couple behind the group of teenagers threw back their heads in utter delight.
“Amen,” the woman said.
“Oh, my God,” one of the high school girls said. Another covered her mouth in shock.
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