COMMENTARY

Hyperbolic Holocaust

Conservative columnist George Will sat on a pundit panel Sunday on Fox News—of course—and got asked what eventually would become of this red-hot Donald Trump mania.

Will began his answer by making the full disclosure that his wife, Mari, works for rival Republican presidential candidate Scott Walker, the Koch-favored governor and union-crusher. Actually, she is a paid adviser to Walker’s super-PAC.

You’ll find a lot of overlap of that sort between Republican pundits and Republican media and Republican political operations.

Having so disclosed, Will proceeded to regurgitate what surely was drawn at least in part from opposition research for his wife’s employer. Thus he provided what amounted to an advance view of the negative assaults on Trump soon to come when serious rivals decide it’s time to try to stamp out this out-of-control blaze that Trump currently is.

If Trump can’t kill himself even by ridiculing prisoners of war, then the other candidates will have to take a shot.

Will said we were about to find out that Trump is not only uncouth, but unprincipled.

He said Trump was until recently “very pro-choice” and that he had given money to Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer and Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi. He said Trump had availed himself supportively of the 5-4 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2005 allowing private developers such as himself to take private property from others by eminent domain for supposed public good.

Will said we’d see how conservatives like it when they got a load of that.

It would be hilarious if Republicans found Trump such a peculiar monster of their own making—their own trivialization of American politics—that they couldn’t destroy him by their conventional political weapons, meaning Koch brothers’ riches fueling unregulated and unrestricted super-PAC personal attacks.

But for the time being we seem to be confronting this calculus: You have the serious top-tier candidates, Walker and Jeb Bush, mainly, who will have to take a shot at destroying Trump if he doesn’t destroy himself or burn out.

Then you have the zany low-tier fringe candidates—Our Boy Mike Huckabee prominent among them—who want to keep their powder dry against Trump in hopes that, if and when he is destroyed by others or fades on his own, the irrationally disaffected folks now favoring him would look to them as the best available imitation.

Huckabee has bona fides as such an imitation. He is credibly Trump-ish.

He is media-trained. He is a blowhard. He says wild and irresponsible and incendiary things. He seems to be running for his own amusement, to get away with saying outlandish things because there is a substantial Republican constituency for outlandish pronouncements and notions.

By the calculus Huckabee practices, there is nothing so crazed as to go unsaid. And there is nothing so golden as having the hated Democratic president respond disapprovingly to your crazed statement directly—while traipsing around Africa, no less—and anoint you as a Trump-caliber wingnut worthy of his personal notice and dismissive disdain.

That is to say Our Boy Mike had a good weekend, going all Trumpy and having President Barack Obama take personal notice when asked about him on the African tour.

Blabbering on one or another of those abundant right-wing talk shows, Huckabee got so lathered up in his assault on Obama’s attempted agreement with Iran that he likened Obama to a Nazi. He said Obama, by seeking to make a deal limiting Iran’s nuclear development, was leading Israel to “the door of the oven.”

He was invoking concentration camps and incineration of Jews by Nazis in World War II.

It was vintage Huckabee, which is to say it was a breathtakingly overstated allusion, grotesque and even evil. Most Holocaust metaphors are.

And it’s spectacular nonsense. Israel is widely assumed to be a nuclear power already, not restricted by world oversight as Iran would be by the proposed agreement.

And Obama couldn’t lead Benjamin Netanyahu anywhere if he wanted.

Yes, the irresponsible hyperbole—Huckabee mastered it more than a decade ago as governor of Arkansas. Then he plied the over-the-top metaphor ably enough as a Republican presidential candidate in 2008 to waltz through modern American conservatism’s revolving door into a Fox studio for his own show. Now he maneuvers to be like Don, an assignment for which he is not without aptitude or relevant experience.

So then came the icing on Huckabee’ poisonous cake: Obama was in Africa and got asked about what Huckabee had said, and the president responded, with typical understatement, that it was ridiculous and sad.

Huckabee rushed out a statement celebrating that the president had spoken ill of him.

So for now we can only wait to see if George Will and his wife and Scott Walker can slay the Trump monster, and, if so, whether the Huckabee monster can rise from those ashes.

Somebody is apt to emerge from all of this having advanced from a Fox talk show on Saturday night to a prime-time reality show on a main network.

“Celebrity Hyperbolizer,” it might be called, pitting fading stars against Huckabee in a contest won by the most outrageous and offensive exaggeration, with Our Boy Mike telling losers “you’re incinerated.”

John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

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