New Yorker: “It’s easy to mock Trump for his thin-skinned fixation on the size of his audiences, but that misses a deeper point: you can’t have a riot without a mob. Even before he was a candidate, Trump displayed a rare gift for cultivating the dark power of a crowd. In his role as the primary advocate of the ‘birther’ fiction, he proved himself to be a maestro of the mob mentality, capable of conducting his fans through crescendos of rage and self-pity and suspicion.”
“And therein lies the key to Trump’s ability to introduce menace into the convention: he does not need to call upon his supporters to do anything but protect their newfound sense of identity and purpose. Stone, the political operative and self-described practitioner of ‘dirty tricks’—a man who (again, no metaphor) has a tattoo of Nixon on his back—has mapped out the fantasy that they will offer to their people, to explain what happens if Trump falls short of the twelve hundred and thirty-seven delegates he needs to secure the nomination.”
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