[SALON] “It’s dizzying trying to keep up with the craziness in the presidential campaign of Republican nominee Donald Trump these days. On Wednesday we had rolling revelations of sexual assault and misconduct, lies about the WikiLeaks data dump of hacked private emails and Trump pretty much coming unraveled on the stump, with a Mussolini-esque speech promising to put Hillary Clinton’s lawyers in jail. It was quite a day.
It’s been well documented by now that Trump and his advisers are plugged into the far right on a level we’ve never seen before in a presidential campaign. He has a close connection to the fringe with campaign CEO Steve Bannon, former Breitbart head and godfather of the alt-right movement, and assistant campaign manager David Bossie, professional Clinton character assassin and founder of the right-wing “oppo” group Citizens United.
Even campaign manager Kellyanne Conway made her bones in the 1990s as a Bill Clinton TV “prosecutor,” who also happens to be married to a right-wing lawyer who was deeply involved in setting up the Paula Jones case. Trump’s kitchen cabinet includes dirty trickster Roger Stone and professional conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. And while he seems to compulsively watch more mainstream outlets like CNN and Fox News, it seems clear that Trump is also heavily influenced by the Drudge-driven paranoid narratives that have favored him throughout the 2016 race.
What this has led to is a campaign with millions of followers so deeply mired in convoluted conspiracy theories that they have completely lost touch with reality. Most obvious of these, of course, is the birther conspiracy that held that Barack Obama was not a native-born U.S. citizen and was therefore an illegitimate president. Trump didn’t publicly indulge in the more sinister of theories which suggested that Obama was some sort of “Manchurian candidate” planted by a foreign power. But it fits so well with his xenophobic worldview that it’s fair to assume it played some part in his obsession with the tall tale.”
Support And Vote Hillary Clinton For President And Elect A Democratic Controlled Congress To Keep America Moving Forward.
Twitter @sheriffali
sheriffali.wordpress.com 
You must be logged in to post a comment.