http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
Over the course of the past three-and-a-half decades the Republican far right has resembled the successive generations of William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, offering up politicians who act more and more inbred over time.
The novelty [Trump] brings to the current Tea Party mix is: vulgarity. His speech has brought an element of the coarse, the bellicose, the unprincipled, which is a qualitative leap beyond the feisty maleducated discourse we have become familiar with among Tea Party candidates.
It is the vulgarity we expect to encounter from a barroom loudmouth. It bespeaks a dedicated connection between brain and mouth where messages whiz past any mechanism of censorship. Truth or realism counts for little or nothing in Trump's boasts; rather, he invites his supporters to participate in his fantasies of omnipotence.
Trump's characteristic argument-by-insult follows in the trail blazed in the 1970s by Archie Bunker. Archie's foil was his son-in-law Michael, and Trump summarizes Archie's core beef against Michael when he says, "I think the big problem this country has is being politically correct." Archie could not abide when his well-worn ways of thinking and speaking ran into Michael's new-fangled judgments.
And Archie summed up Trump's unfailing habit of labeling his targets stupid or ugly by simply referring to Michael as Meathead
Analysts who marvel that Trump's over-the-top gaffes do not dent his lead in the polls (rather, they seem to enhance it!) miss the point that his Archie Bunker appeal inoculates him against declines owing to gaffes. Gaffes are fully part of the appeal....The Tea Party base looms as a potential whirlwind on the ready, seeking that transcendent individual around whom to take shape. This is the game that Trump is playing.