title:  This One Sentence BEAUTIFULLY Nails Down Exactly What Kind Of ‘Leader’ Trump Will Be
text: The double-talk that spews forth from King Cheeto s mouth is astonishing, if for no other reason than so many people believe all of it. He s a liar, he s a hypocrite, he s an autocrat, he s a narcissist. And he promises to continue talking out of both sides of his mouth the same as he did on the campaign trail.And his audiences will continue to eat up every syllable. Why on earth do they do that? Matt Bai, a political columnist at Yahoo! News, boils it down to this one sentence: Trump is a pure opportunist, a pitch-perfect crooner of whatever note resonates.  [emphasis mine]BOOM! There it is, right there. Trump knows exactly what will make people respond favorably to him and he says it. In doing so, he renders anything he said before irrelevant, no matter how contradictory. Look at all his cabinet picks that followed his promise of  draining the swamp  of Washington insiders, elites and cronies. His cabinet is Wall Street bankers. It s establishment politicians. It s members of the very same military leadership he called stupid during his campaign.Trump embodies a type of leader known as the  charismatic leader,  and that s not necessarily a good thing. True, not all charismatic leaders are bad, but they aren t all good either. In Trump s case, this is a very bad thing. In Management Today, columnist Adam Gale says the world that Trump comes from is one where  force of personality is more important than collaboration or cold reasoning. That s all that matters, and why we re suddenly living in a post-fact world. Facts, truths, and reason don t matter if Trump can convince people they don t matter. And he himself admitted to playing his audiences like the violins they re not in The Art of the Deal: I play to people s fantasies. People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do. That s why a little hyperbole never hurts.  [emphasis mine]Think he won t do that as President? Think again   he s already done it. His loyal subjects still bleat about how amazing he is to have struck a deal with Carrier to keep jobs here in the U.S. They completely ignore the facts that Carrier is still sending jobs to Mexico and is planning to raise prices. They don t seem to care that they re going to automate their Indiana plant, which will destroy some of those jobs Trump supposedly saved so they can keep their costs down. Their parent company s CEO, Greg Hayes, said that outright: We re going to automate to drive the cost down so that we can continue to be competitive. Is it as cheap as moving to Mexico with lower cost labor? No. But we will make that plant competitive just because we ll make the capital investments there. But what that ultimately means is there will be fewer jobs. In the case of the Carrier deal, Trumpkins  specific fantasy is the idea that Trump can coerce, cajole, and even strongarm companies, one by one, into not only keep jobs here, but also into at least maintaining their current workforce, or adding more jobs. The fantasy is that Trump is going to be able to erase every individual s personal economic distress.That s impossible, but that s what they see through their rose-colored glasses. There are other fantasies, too, like this: My whole life I ve been greedy, greedy, greedy. I ve grabbed all the money I could get. I m so greedy. But now I d like to be greedy for the United States. Washington Post columnist and The Nation publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel hit the nail of that Trumpkin fantasy on the head with this: It was a compelling story: the rapacious mogul turned Robin Hood, setting out to reform the rigged system that made him rich in the name of the common good. She went on to describe how that s an illusion that Trump has created for his faithful subjects, but which his actual policy positions during his campaign should have shattered.This is how Trump s followers can keep right on crowing about Trump s awesomeness and how he s the president we need to be great again. One could even say that they re brainwashed in a very real way (they also seem to be too stupid to see how stupid they are, but that s a different subject).Oh sure, there are a few who are angry. There are a few who have woken up. Former Congressman Joe Walsh, of Illinois, is one such person (and agreeing with that man on anything at all makes us feel like we re in a bizarre alternate reality where night is day, hell is cold, and dragons really do exist, but, well, there it is).Sarah Palin called out his deal with Carrier as crony capitalism.But so many others? They re on social media being as trashy as ever toward the press, toward Democrats, toward anyone who doesn t march exactly to Trump s drumbeat. They re calling any news that doesn t reinforce the golden crown they see on Cheetolini s head  fake news,  and completely ignoring how many campaign promises Trump has already broken. They trust him implicitly because he knows exactly how to sing their tune in perfect time and pitch. Whether he means it is irrelevant.And he ll keep right on playing them. Bai said he ll do it until someone can prove to him that there s a real cost. Bai is right.Featured image by Chip Somodevilla via Getty Images