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Bluster of The Donald

Ruth Marcus on

WASHINGTON -- The emperor has no clothes. The Donald has no policy.

This is not exactly news, but it is too often forgotten in the substance-free carnival that is the 2016 presidential race. Donald Trump's bright-shiny-object campaign style serves to obscure the substantive void, leaving reporters endlessly chasing after his latest rhetorical bomb rather than pressing him on policy.

Not, of course, that such questioning produces answers. Trump evades questions about how he would approach a particular problem with airy assurances about management and deal-making. There's only so much follow-up that can be done in the face of this bombast.

Join me on a trip through a typical Trump stump speech, this one an hourlong stream-of-consciousness ramble just before the new year in South Carolina:

The crowd size. His poll numbers. Why he must attack Hillary Clinton. The media is the worst. The trade deficit with China. How much money Jeb Bush has wasted. Has he mentioned the polls? Matt Drudge, great guy. How bad a job Clinton did at State. How nice of Vladimir Putin to praise him. (No sarcasm intended.) His Ivy League pedigree and big vocabulary. Back to Clinton: "She just gives me a headache."

He's going to build the strongest military ever. Obamacare is a disaster. Common Core's dead. Trump's spent no money on his campaign and he's No. 1. Marco Rubio, nice guy but what about those somber ads with a black background? What great ratings those debates got.

 

Not smart to answer questions about ISIS -- he wants to be unpredictable. How bad the Iran nuclear deal is. The Iraq War, huge mistake. The environmentalists' attack on Trump's hairspray and how the spray is much better than the pump, with those blobs that get stuck and he needs to take a shower. By the way, he lives in a very nice apartment, and "nothing gets out" into the atmosphere.

The hoax of global warming and the threat to the universe. Speaking of the universe, Miss Universe, and "oh, did I get rich" off the pageant.

How many televisions he orders a year from South Korea and how we are using our military to support countries like that who don't need our help. His wall versus the Great Wall of China. Even his hats are made in America, and you can buy other things on his website, too.

Carly's a nice woman.

...continued

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Copyright 2016 Washington Post Writers Group

 

 

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