A Salon reader asks iconoclast Camille Paglia:
I’m dying for an update from you on Donald Trump. Last summer you called him “not a president” and a “carnival barker.” Do you still feel the same? If you loved Trump, would Salon even let you proclaim it? I mean, they’re kind of as liberal as they come, no?
… to which she responds:
Well, Trump may still be a carnival barker, but he’s looking more and more like a president!…
But only a few weeks after that interview of mine in Salon, I suddenly realized that Trump’s candidacy had a broad support that few had expected or discerned….
… Trump was directly engaging with a diverse coalition in ways that the mainstream media had completely missed. I felt, and still do, that Trump is far too impetuous and thin-skinned in his amusingly rambling, improvisational style. The American president, who can spook markets or spark a war with a rash phrase, must be more coolly circumspect. And aspirants to the presidency shouldn’t care what small fry like bobble-head TV hosts say or do. A leader must have the long view and show an instinctive capacity to focus and prioritize.
Nevertheless, Trump’s fearless candor and brash energy feel like a great gust of fresh air, sweeping the tedious clichés and constant guilt-tripping of political correctness out to sea. Unlike Hillary Clinton, whose every word and policy statement on the campaign trail are spoon-fed to her by a giant paid staff and army of shadowy advisors, Trump is his own man, with a steely “damn the torpedoes” attitude. He has a swaggering retro machismo that will give hives to the Steinem cabal. He lives large, with the urban flash and bling of a Frank Sinatra. But Trump is a workaholic…
Primary voters nationwide are clearly responding to Trump’s brand of classic can-do American moxie. There has been a sense of weary paralysis in our increasingly Byzantine and monstrously wasteful government bureaucracies. Putting a bottom-line businessman with executive experience into the White House has probably been long overdue…
From my perspective as a fervent supporter of the ruggedly honest and principled Bernie Sanders, Trump with his pragmatic real-life record is a far more palatable national figure than Ted Cruz…
