Trump Says Germany Being Liberated From Nazis Was "Not a Great Day"

[Kid Berwyn]

8. One NAZI Gasbag Puffed Up Another

How Rush Limbaugh Invented Donald Trump

By Isaac Chotiner
The New Yorker, February 19, 2021

EXCERPT…

As he got older and richer, he was fond of half-jokingly talking about his wealth and success. He boasted of “talent on loan from God,” and once stated, “I can’t even destroy myself. I’ve tried a couple times myself and it doesn’t work. I’m literally indestructible.” Like Trump, who enjoys informing audiences about his Ivy League education and telling them that he has better things to do than come to their rallies, Limbaugh relished the fact that those vaunted tax cuts he always talked up were going to people like himself.

An endless stream of articles and books over the past five years have wrestled with the question of how Trump was able to pull off his particular act, appealing to audiences that didn’t attend any college, let alone one in the Ivy League. Limbaugh’s success offers a clue. His radio program was home to Club for Growth bromides about the beauty of the private sector, but it also had another side, which consisted largely of bigotry. This was a man who featured a segment called “aids Updates,” in which he mockingly read the names of victims of the disease to the sounds of Dionne Warwick. He said that feminism was invented to “allow unattractive women easier access to the mainstream of society.” He uttered too many racist comments to count, but displayed a special hostility toward Barack Obama. “In Obama’s America, the white kids now get beat up with the Black kids cheering,” he once said.

SNIP…

And yet, as much as Limbaugh was willing to lie to his audience about the details of Obamacare—he even claimed it would increase the divorce rate—he did seem to have a kernel of principle in his fealty to low taxes, less regulation, and free markets. Thus, Limbaugh could have viewed the rise of Trump in two ways. One would have been to say that here was someone who didn’t care at all about movement conservatism; who probably only dimly knew who William F. Buckley, Jr., was; who broke with right-wing orthodoxy on trade and tariffs; and who had no vision of capitalism beyond its usefulness in making him richer and more famous. The other way was to view Trump as someone who had the same catalogue of resentments as Limbaugh did, and—perhaps more importantly—was hated by the same people.

Limbaugh didn’t wait long before making his decision: he was all in. By early 2016, he was defending Trump daily, and, perhaps more significantly, striking the same rhetorical tones. “The Republican Party doesn’t like the Republican base,” he said, in January of that year, explaining that élitism was the establishment’s reason for opposing Trump. If Trump’s takeover of the G.O.P. revealed the degree to which cultural resentment mattered more to conservative voters than any single issue, Limbaugh’s journey served as an exemplar of this fact. When Trump took a stance that Limbaugh would have once objected to—such as imposing new tariffs—Limbaugh simply changed his opinion and backed Trump.

CONTINUES…

https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/how-rush-limbaugh-invented-donald-trump

“A conservative is a man who is too cowardly to fight and too fat to run.” — Elbert Hubbard