Ezra Klein gets scammed

THE WORST THING WE READ™

A Pundit Still Believes in Donald Trump 

"WE’VE NEVER HAD good language for talking about Donald Trump," Ezra Klein of the New York Times declared in an "audio essay" on his podcast. Haven't we? Isn't the American English language well enough stocked with words like "crook," "liar," "blowhard," "bigot," "bully," "charlatan," and "demagogue"? Aren't the courts on record certifying him as a "fraud" and "rapist"? Didn't Gen. Mark Milley, Trump's former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, write everyone a permission slip to go ahead and say "fascist"? 

What Klein was trying to express—but lacked the vocabulary or conceptual range to say—was that mainstream professional pundits and campaign journalists don't know how to reconcile an accurate account of Trump with their model of how the world works. Klein continued: 

We’ve never had good language for talking about the way he thinks and the way in which it is different from how other people think and talk and act. And so we circle it. We imply it. I don’t think this is bias so much as it’s confusion. In order to talk about something, you need the words for it. 

The way Trump thinks is not hard to understand: he's predatory, cowardly, vain, and impulsive. He is contemptuous toward the rest of humanity. He is obsessed with the idea of inflicting harm, fascinated by primal violence. He's childishly ignorant of how anything works, and happy to break things if breaking them will make him temporarily feel less uncomfortable. 

And tens of millions of Americans have voted for him to be president and will vote for him again. They don't care. They too want to break anything that makes them uncomfortable. They want to break other people, especially.

Ezra Klein wasn't trained or hired to think about evil. Instead, he was out to find some kernel of reason in the Trump phenomenon.