Donald Trump seduces America and its press corps.  You can tell from the lit-up face of Katy Tur, who endured Trump in an interview in which he sometimes berated her, that she's having fun covering the Trump Campaign which is right now (9:37 PM Eastern Daylight Time) in New Hampshire for the great man's first town hall meeting.
     Earlier this evening on MSNBC, Chris Matthews, an old political observer, spoke passionately, if not affirmatively, in favor of Trump's liveliness as contrasted with his dull Republican competition.  Only Trump and Bernie Sanders are bringing in the crowds.  They're both whipped up in their enthusiasm for the campaigning process.  It shows, while Scott Walker, Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Marco Rubio, Bobby Jindal, and other conventional candidates seem like containers of leftover soup forgotten in the refrigerator.
     I acknowledge Trump's excitement factor, while grimacing at his words, boasts, absolute statements, ego blasts, and wearisome vagueness.  Journalists, more and more, speak of his entertainment value.
     Jeb Bush, in spite of the exclamation point after his first name--the minimalistic slogan presented when he finally announced his run--is wooden and showing stress-related signs of craven politicking, as when he used, today, in an interview, the term anchor babies.  This frankly racist idea suggests that women of other nations (i.e. Mexico) sometimes seek to have babies in the United States so that they can take advantage of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which establishes that children born in this country are automatically American citizens.  Donald Trump has griped about this law, so some of his competitors do the same, even Bobby Jindal, who became an American citizen because of the law he now condemns (since he's far behind in the Republican race to prove who's the least principled).
     Trump stoops low, his competitors follow, not realizing, apparently, that Trump, having first engaged a large portion of voters with his nutty ideas, rules the idea, while his stupid imitators (Walker, Cruz, Jindal, et al) come across as the panderers they are.  I don't know if this is Trump's strategy, or just something that happens, but we now have a Republican frontrunner controlling his competition by making them sink to his lows.  Does Jeb Bush, married for decades to a Latina, realize how racist he sounds when he says, "...anchor babies..."?  I don't doubt his intelligence, so I assume he does understand the disgusting level he's stepping down to in order to match wits with a sharp-tongued businessman who nevertheless spins rhetorical circles around him, and manages to do so without saying anything substantial.
     Does Jeb Bush deserve that exclamation point?  Do any of the other Republican contenders, besides Trump?  Trump's competition suffers from their being unable to say shitty, uncompassionate things without seeming abhorrent.  Trump, because he is an experienced master pitchman, can be abhorrent, ride out subsequent negative commentary, and move on to even greater popularity.
     In Iowa, a Midwestern state where one would assume its voters, Republican, Democrat, or Independent, have their feet on the ground and aren't taken in by razzle dazzle, seemed to have enjoyed Trump's time there as he traveled by helicopter and golf cart.  Hillary Clinton, strolling at the Iowa State Fair wearing her usual long-sleeved pantsuit in the stuffy humid air of a Midwest August, seemed lifeless and stony, coming to life, in a miffed way, mostly when asked by reporters about her ongoing e-mail scandal.
     Today, for the first time in this eternal circus of the 2015-16 election campaign, I began to think Donald Trump has a serious chance of winning the Republican nomination.  Jeb Bush had a town meeting this evening in New Hampshire, a few blocks from Trump's.  Did MSNBC, the supposed liberal network, cover Jeb?  Fuck no.  They spent big blocks of time on Donald Trump metaphorically caressing his nipples.
     We desire an entertainer, a reality show host, a hypercapitalist with no ability to hold back his thoughts.  No journalist has yet asked Trump if, after he's elected president (we're assured by him that he will be), he will keep the same hairdo after it's turned white.
     He will, as our leader, discover, like Eisenhower knew, that fighting wars is very difficult.
     Trump likes to remind us of his opposition to the Iraq War.  He knows this is a sensitive topic for Jeb Bush, what with his older brother, so Trump needles him about it--a good campaign tactic.  But what did Trump think about the Iraq War in 2003?  Given his current declared bloodthirstiness when talking about ISIS, I suggest he doesn't have a problem with the United States using its military to devastate, and he had no qualms about it then.  In 2004, though, he said in an interview that the Iraq War was a mistake.  A year into an already evident disaster, an easy statement to make.  Iraq, in 2004, was wrenched by civil war, U.S. troops were fully engaged in fighting in cities and feeling the lessons of occupying a justifiably ungrateful country, and the Abu Ghraib human rights abuse tragedy (I won't use the mild and safe word, scandal) had been revealed.  Calling a horrible mess a horrible mess didn't take an insightful genius, no matter what Trump says now about his views on the Iraq War.
     According to David Corn in a recent Mother Jones article, one of Trump's military policy advisors is John Bolton, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, neoconservative, Israel supporter (no matter what horrifying actions that government takes against Palestinians--in other words, a typical American political thinker), and heavy-breathing paranoid alarmist.  Bolton also advises Bobby Jindal, but I suspect Trump's number is higher on his speed dial.  Bolton was one of the most enthusiastic supporters of the Iraq War, and still, like all of his fellow pundits and opinion-makers who pushed for that catastrophe, regards it as a success, marred, of course, by Barack Obama, who withdrew the troops "prematurely."  In the reality-based world, Obama followed to the letter George W. Bush's 2008 order that the troops be withdrawn by the end of 2011.  Obama has since put troops ("advisors") back in, and a whopping total thus far of sixty Syrian "freedom fighters" have been trained by the U.S. military to turn the tide in the Syrian Civil War.
     John Bolton, though, as a military policy advisor for Donald Trump?  Has he advised Bolton that he was dead wrong about Iraq in 2003?  Does Trump like Bolton for the latter's equally stupid view on attacking Iran?
     Trump, though he's fun to write about, is a horrible fucking person representing this country's historical nadir in public affairs, and the news media supporting, through publicizing, his ridiculous cause.  Candidates trying to sound serious aren't coming across, except Bernie Sanders, who resonates with a lot of people because, like Trump, he speaks plainly.  Unlike Trump, he really wants to help the majority of this country's citizens and go after Wall Street and the wealthy.  Sanders' supporters, I'm guessing, tend to be stronger in the brain department than Trump's.
     Trump, as I wrote in a previous post, has the idiot vote wrapped up, but I think he'll also attract smarter people who can't stand Hillary Clinton's aloof personality and sense of entitlement to the presidency which emanates from her imperious face.  The more intelligent Trump enthusiasts may also regard, with much justification, the Republican candidates as cretins (Jindal), loathsome (Cruz), or boring with baggage attached (Bush).  The country is in tense catapult mode, ready to fling away establishment politicians, while embracing new, assumedly untainted, private sector personalities with "fresh" ideas.
     Unfortunately, whether an establishment or anti-establishment candidate prevails in 2016, we may be doomed.
     Views to my blog from other countries have been increasing.  I'm glad my words go to other parts of the world.  My commentaries on America's bizarre political processes consist of my own perspective, based on allowing information in the news media and material I read on foreign websites, to enter my mind and move around in there until I write about whatever I feel like writing about.  If I've enlightened anyone in other nations about this particular 2015-16 election cycle, I'm glad I've done so, but bear in mind that my opinions on Trump and others are entirely my own. 
     Thank you, though, for reading these posts.  I always try, at least, to be interesting.

                                                                             Vic Neptune