Trump wants "to be unpredictable, because, you know, we need unpredictability. Everything is so predictable with our country."

That's his clever answer in case you're looking for specifics about anything he can't or doesn't want to answer, as stated on "Fox News Sunday" this morning when Chris Wallace asked him about how he'd use the debt limit. Pushed, he used the magic word again: "I do not want to say that because I want to show unpredictability. You have to. You can't just go around and say that." What a concept! It reminded me of Nixon's secret plan to end the Vietnam War back in 1968, but Meade said Nixon never said he had a "secret plan." That was how his opponent's put it, mocking him. So Trump isn't like Nixon in that respect. He's getting out ahead of his opponents. It can't be mockery or he's self-mocking. It's a mockery inoculation, an inmockulation.

Later, in the panel discussion, WaPo's Charles Lane said about exactly what I had been thinking:

... I found myself smiling, and laughing at times at his performance, and feeling very entertained, but when I actually read the transcript of it, right, and looked at the actual words coming out of his mouth, none of it made any sense.  He said we have too much predictability in this country.  I want to be unpredictable.  Well, that is a new campaign slogan, right?  Vote for me, who knows what I'll do in the White House?  I mean, the next minute after he says how great it is to be unpredictable, he says we absolutely must defund Planned Parenthood.  Right?  He waffled on affirmative action.  That's an issue that has been out there many years.  It's a fully digested issue in the political system. Lots of people have a position on that, one way or another.  Not Donald Trump, who wants to be the leader of the conservative party in this country.  So it is this incredible disconnect between the affect, and the demeanor and the show that he puts on, and the actual substance behind it, which I insist is still lacking....

I guess from Trump's point of view, Lane is lagging, not getting it, thrown off by all that wonderful unpredictability that we need so much. Americans don't want details, we want unpredictability.

What echoed in my head as I wrote that last sentence was: I don’t want realism. I want magic! Yes, yes, magic!



I try to give that to people. I misrepresent things to them. I don’t tell the truth, I tell what ought to be truth. And if that is sinful, then let me be damned for it! – Don’t turn the light on!