Proto-Trump

How do you know what's proto-? You must infer it back from when you get there, wherever it is you were going before you knew it. Take Trump.

I mean, who knew? Pre-presidential he seemed like kitsch, something that plays off of something else and has a surrogate, cheesy status.

Herr Donald embraces inauthenticity to the point of being authentic about it, an exaggerated case of something inauthentic to begin with, being his own hawker.

It's hard to get a handle on, the layers of inauthenticity. Now the Republicanism of the past 50 years all looks like proto-Trump. They cultivated this. Look at Reagan. 

Look at Nixon and the Bushes. Appearance is everything. Reality is whatever you can spin it into. It gives you Trump, the spin-master and man of illusion.

He's obviously, overtly about ten un-American things at once and it passes as patriotism. Wow, we are kitsch, our entire country: exaggerated, cheesy and inauthentic.

What an odd feeling, like being a shell of yourself.