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Calling it

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Who said this?

They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction, there were none. And they knew there were none. There were no weapons of mass destruction.

If you guessed Noam Chomsky or Michael Moore you guessed wrong. (They’ve said this many times, just not in those exact words).

The answer is Donald Trump, at last night’s GOP debate. As Jon Chait notes, to say such a thing, especially so straightforwardly, is the heresy of heresies for the post-9/11 Republican party:

Republicans invoke Bush’s response to the 9/11 attacks, but they must discuss his record on terrorism as if he took office only after the attacks. The copious evidence that the administration received, and ignored, extensive warnings of a forthcoming attack has never pierced the Republican bubble. Conservative intellectuals treat any indictment of the administration’s terrorism record as conspiratorial blather tantamount to denying 9/11. Rubio, whose mastery of Republican consensus outstrips that of all his competitors, stated what all good Republicans believe when he blamed the 9/11 attacks on Bill Clinton. “The World Trade Center came down because Bill Clinton didn’t kill Osama bin Laden when he had the chance to kill him.”

That Trump brought up this fact is incredible. That he did so in South Carolina is even more so. South Carolina is a military state, with a hierarchical political culture that makes its conservative voters loyal to their past leaders. It is not an accident that Jeb Bush waited until South Carolina to bring his brother out to the stump, or that it is the state where Ted Cruz emphasized his opposition to drafting women in the military. It is the worst possible place to associate yourself with the concept that the president who oversaw the deadliest terrorist attack in American history had anything but a stellar record in the field of counter-terrorism, or that the war he launched afterward was mistaken.

As Trump has defied his skeptics, evaluations of his political acumen have grudgingly embraced the conclusion that there is a method to his madness. But on Saturday night, he took the madness to a completely new level. By the normal standards of politics, Trump swallowed enough poison to kill himself ten times over. If he survives, it will be the strongest evidence that he has forged a connection with Republican voters that resides beyond any plane visible to the rest of us.

I’ve been fascinated by Trump’s ascent since its beginnings last summer. How many times since then have people said “OK this is it. Now he’s really gone too far?” And yet his popularity only grows.

I suspect that Trump has decided that the way to win, not only the GOP nomination but the presidency itself, is to run a deeply counter-cultural campaign: that is, a campaign that violates every rule of political consulting and horse race punditry. And the evidence continues to mount that he may well be right about that.

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