DEFINING REPUBLICANISM DOWN.

There's been a lot of sucking up to Trump, God knows. Matthew Continetti is making a specialty of it ("He draws strength from his gut connection with Jacksonian America" -- imagine Trump responding to that: "Yes, Michael Jackson was a tremendous entertainer, absolutely terrific. Ben Carson reminds me a lot of Michael Jackson").

But history should specially note this offering by David P. Goldman -- author of "Jay Z's American Fascism" and other gibberish ("Why can't we get 14 million people into the streets to proclaim that Obama is an idiot like the Egyptians did?"). In "Donald Trump, American hero," he invokes Jackson, of course, and also characters created by Mark Twain, Zane Grey, Louis L’Amour, John Bunyan, Sinclair Lewis, Frank Capra, and David Peoples. What do they have to do with Il Douche? Why, like them Trump is an American hero -- see, it's in the title. And what distinguishes these heroes? Maybe Goldman's comparison of Trump to Abraham Fucking Lincoln will clarify. Yes, he actually does, and Goldman knows what you're thinking:

That seems blasphemous, for Trump is no Lincoln; he is brittle where Lincoln was tolerant, resentful where Lincoln was self-deprecating, Philistine where Lincoln was intellectual, and often cruel where Lincoln was unfailingly kind. But the parallel remains.

Seems like everything we admire in Lincoln has been ruled out. So what's left?

Not since 1860 have American voters rejected their elite and chosen a candidate without apparent qualifications.

Ah, I see; so in 1860 Americans (40 percent of them, anyway) were sick of this shit and rolled the dice on a former Congressman at the head of a burgeoning movement and party who had stood for the Senate and whose debates with Stephen Douglas, a watershed in American political discourse, had been widely circulated... which lines up pretty good with "former reality TV star" and "famous bankrupt rageclown."

That is, they are both "outsiders," in the same sense that Cincinnatus and Rod Blagojevich were both outsiders. Unlike Lincoln, the new model outsider is unencumbered by toleration, self-deprecation, intellectualism or unfailing kindness. Neither Goldman nor his fellow Trumpkins seem to miss these attributes. In fact, from what I'm seeing they consider it good riddance.