What both fascinates and appalls me about Donald Trump and his altogether dreadful presidency is less how awful the president is (that was to be expected) than how zealously his base embraces him — and that his hardcore base could extend to as much as one-third of the adult population.

Never would I have guessed that America housed so many wretched hypocrites and pathetic stinkers, those so-called "real Americans" who for years had advertised themselves as the embodiment of entrenched American values; a self-righteousness based mostly on what they had opposed — the nation's crooked Hillarys, its unAmerican Obamas, essentially, in their minds, the Democratic Party's mountebanks, panderers and poseurs of a kind of alien ideology. This was the stuff, on the right, that intense "negative partisanship" was made of. Real Americans objected to Democratic pols and their blue base because both had rejected real America and its really red values of honesty, uprightness, self-reliance and national unity.

And then came Donald J. Trump, at first almost universally disdained or ridiculed as presidential material by the Republican base. (A preference for Trump originally came in at 3 percent.) If there was any question as to his unsuitability for the presidency, his 16 June 2015 announcement speech confirmed it; a rambling, confused, utterly counterfactual rhetorical cesspool of racism, xenophobia and policy ignorance. Trump's campaign opener should have been a first-night closer. But a funny thing happened on the way to GOP insanity: His numbers, post-announcement, began creeping up. The cruder and crazier he sounded, the higher his popularity went.

Which was odd, since if anyone in American politics ever brazenly, gauchely rejected the ruby-red values claimed by "real America," it was Trump. Here was a self-professed billionaire (another of his lies) who not only made a virtue of dishonesty, he had spent much of his business career swindling the very people who increasingly supported him — the subcontractors he stiffed, for instance, or the students he defrauded. With each added revelation of Trump's personal and professional corruption — plus his many scandalous campaign antics — sane observers believed that his numbers would soon collapse. Instead, they swelled.

What evidence there was of political mountebankism and antiAmerican values was falling more and more — undeniably — into the Trump column. And yet those real Americans dismissed it all. They continued dismissing even more evidence of Trump's unfitness after he made it perfectly clear as the chief executive of the most corrupt, inept administration in American history.

And now comes James Comey's pained memoir of his disturbing time with this colossally sordid little man, which, of course, Trump's real Americans will also dismiss. These pious churchgoers and upright "conservatives" enthralled with the very idea of a moral America will side instead with the likes of a Gambino mobster. "'This president is unethical, and untethered to truth and institutional values,' Mr. Comey writes in the book, saying his service to Mr. Trump recalled for him the days when he investigated the mob in New York. 'The silent circle of assent. The boss in complete control. The loyalty oaths. The us-versus-them worldview. The lying about all things, large and small, in service to some code of loyalty that put the organization above morality and above the truth.'"

Comey reflects on a career spent largely pursuing the top thugs of NY's Five Families to serving under the head-of-the-household hooligan of the nation's First Family, who has ignited "a 'forest fire' that is doing serious damage to the country’s norms and traditions." Comey's book, A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership, is anything but controversial. Reviewers have noted en masse that it offers nothing that is newly shocking in terms of insight into Trump's depraved personality — publicly known for at least three years.

Thus known, that is, by decent Americans, who — and this is the upside — comprise roughly two-thirds of the adult population. Among the vast American majority Trump is known as a punk, a thug, a know-nothing gangster of wholly unAmerican strengths — chiefly, the pathological mendacity of a tinpot banana Republican. But then there's the disgraceful minority that, in supporting the debauchery that is Trump, fancies itself the defender of traditional American values. Never has a sicker, more hypocritical prank been pulled on the American political system. And never did I imagine that its numbers, though a distinct minority, could be so sizable. I am genuinely embarrassed for my country.







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