No, he’s not. It took Clive awhile to figure it all out, but now it’s all coming into focus. Says Clive, a British chap who hangs his hat at Bloomberg after previous stints at the Economist and the Financial Times,
The country should be terrified by this looming absurdity [a second term for Trump], as well as deeply perplexed. Trump’s critics are surely right that his second term would be more dangerous than the first — though they’re right for the wrong reasons. Support for Trump is not just a vote of confidence in a leader with nakedly authoritarian appetites. Second time around, it’s also a conscious and deliberate vote of no confidence in the country’s most vital institutions.
It’s “necessary” for Clive’s rap that Trump’s “critics” have to be “right for the wrong reasons”, because otherwise Clive would have to say “I’ve been a moral idiot and unconscious slave to an amoral monster for the past seven years, and I apologize to all those liberals that I’ve been sneering at for most of my self-indulgent and pretentious career.” Because, as Clive continues to “explain”, “In 2016, I thought that Democrats were exaggerating the dangers Trump posed.” Uh, dude, couldn’t you figure out for yourself what dangers Trump posed by, you know, listening to Donald Trump? You couldn’t figure out that it might be a bad idea to elect as president a man who thought it was cool to make fun of people with disabilities, who “promised” to throw fourteen million illegal immigrants out of the country, who insisted that Barack Obama was lying about being born in Hawaii, a man who bragged about cheating on his wife, who claimed that he couldn’t get “justice” from an Hispanic judge, who claimed he’d seen Muslims celebrating 9/11? Well, better late than never, Clive, better late than never. But I’m sure wondering why I’m bothering to read your columns. Because you come across as pretty goddamn dumb.
