What Donald Trump and Ashley Madison Have In Common

They both appeal to our "shadow" side. That side of us that makes us sign up to cheat on the spouses we say we love, and possibly ruin the family we say we care more about than anything else in the whole world. That side of us that would say and do allof things we'd be ashamed of if we didn't keep it in check.
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Okay, you've seen the headline. So what do The Donald and Ashley Madison have in common?

Easy. They both appeal to our "shadow" side. That side of us that makes us sign up to cheat on the spouses we say we love, and possibly ruin the family we say we care more about than anything else in the whole world. That side of us that would say and do all kinds of things we'd be ashamed of if we didn't keep it in check.

Until a Donald Trump or a website that panders to that side of us comes along and we can let it rip.

You heard the guy in the video shout, "White power," right? That was nothin'.

Here's a quote from an audience member at Trump's recent Alabama rally, reported by Casey Toner of AL.com:

"The way I see it they ought to make it a vacation spot...OK, you want to come to the border, $25 for a permit, you can shoot all the people you want that cross illegally."

This is our shadow side, America. Coming out of the shadows for a last hurrah. Desperate people offering up a desperate rebel yell as "their" country marches straight to Hell. That's how many of them see it, anyway.

In movies about megalomaniacs like Trump, like A Face in the Crowd and All the King's Men, something always happens to expose the ugly truth about the "man of the people" up there on the podium. A live mic catches an acerbic swipe at the very people said "man of the people" professes to be fighting for. Or someone he crossed comes out of the shadows and tells all, very publicly, so there's no place to run.

This isn't a movie. And Trump wouldn't even flinch. Hasn't so far. Which is why those who keep saying he can't win shouldn't write him off so quickly. He's played his party, and the press, like a fiddle so far. When it's time to take a new route to that White House, he'll build one.

And a whole lot of real angry Americans will follow right behind him. Many hoping against hope that those statistics that show that they're about to become the "minority" in huge swaths of America won't be the end of "their" America. Hoping The Donald will save them from that fate worse than death.

Mind you, I don't think Trump set out to do this. Any more than McCain set out to embrace people like the people who got up to speak to him at a rally in 2008 and scared him so bad he finally had to say something sensible to distance himself from them:

But that shadow side, boy, it's tough to rein in once it's out. Kinda like Trump himself.

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