George Will's most recent column, "Who will follow Trump off the cliff," begins:
Speaking on "Fox and Friends," of course, Trump revealed something he learned from the National Enquirer, of course.
The implicit equating, by a conservative pundit with a reputation for egg-headedness (because he wears bow ties), of the Fox network with the Enquirer suggests to me that Trumpism has the potential to make some right-handers spit out the poison. Will proceeds to quote the whole absurd exchange between Trump and the Fox host on the subject of Ted Cruz's father and Lee Harvey Oswald before concluding:
Parsing Trump sentences is a challenge, but is rewarding because it frequently reveals that he actually has said nothing at all. When silence descends, there lingers in the air only gauzy innuendo.
This business of speaking and saying nothing has become a sort of poor cousin of a Republican "talking point," now that Trump is the party's presumptive nominee. Thus Kelly Ayotte, the imperiled Republican incumbent in this year's US Senate race in New Hampshire, on her view of her party's standard bearer: she will "support" but not "endorse" Trump. The phrase "distinction without a difference" is frequently trotted out to complain about a certain kind of rhetorical trick, but I don't think Sen. Ayotte's gambit comes up to that level. There's neither a difference nor a distinction between endorsing Trump and supporting him. Both verbs refer to an action, x, that is accurately defined as supporting (or endorsing) Trump for president.
What lingers in the air isn't in this case particularly gauzy, however. Will, being a columnist, can say what he thinks. Ayotte, however, is trying to win re-election, and, being a Republican, perceives that she needs the votes of the Trump demographic as well as those of casual middle-of-the-roaders who could go either way. So the pissed off white guys are supposed to hear that she supports Trump while the married ladies are supposed to hear that she doesn't endorse him.
Can this possibly work? It seems it'd be better just to spit out the poison.
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