I don't think you need to consciously follow an ideology to be grouped within its categorization.
And with the best cheers of the night being for the imprisonment of a political opponent for imaginary crimes, problems being blaming on the parasitic and traitorous internal enemies, and demonization of foreigners, I don't really think we need to split hairs here.
I have come to the conclusion that we've been willing to happily stick Trump with the slicky-buffoon label and may have seriously missed all the signs.
He didn't get with a Jeff Sessions because he was a semi-known name and Trump bumbled into naming him his advisor on immigration. This is just a "for instance", but I can well recall a lot of moderates and liberals saying at the time, "Whoa, what a fool. He wants to sound like he has a policy so he goes to the most extreme and worst possible source? How's that gonna work? What a maroon."
Sessions' speechwriter wrote more than half of that speech. That dark, fearful and fearsome view is their view of the world. Trump went to Sessions and to his holy roller advisor and various other turds like Mantafort because these are his kindred spirits. He's been laying it out there all along, and we've been thinking these were just ego-driven mistakes, and he's been showing us who he really is. Any time a moderate on his "team" tempered some of his bravado, like on the building of the wall, the next day Trump corrected them: "And make no mistake. I will build it." Ha ha, what an idiot.
Alex Jones and Roger Stone were credentialed at the convention and both said they had met with Trump people. They had the crazy crying mom in a primetime speaking spot, Steve King was treated like a person and not a pariah, crazy general guy was nearly the veep candidate, they had some crazy ultimate fighting guy screaming at the crowd and no one even noticed. The Trump tried to stage a shootout at the OK Corral staredown and had his handlers whip the crowd into booing at just the wrong moments.... "Vote your conscience." "Boo. Boo. Boo." The platform reads like something written by the more conservative wing of the elders of Salem Village. Everyone thinks that was just an accident? Ridiculous. The party leadership has sold their souls to the TP [tea party] devil and just double-mortgaged it to the TP [Trump Pence] apocalypse.
He believes in the ugliness, the hate, the fear, the darkness. And he probably actually believes it when he says he's the only person who can change all this. He's the worst sort of demagogue - a self-convinced one.
