Today's "Trump is a Monster" Post

I haven't done one of these lately but I'm sure you've had no trouble finding examples on your own.

Today's has to do with Trump's assertions that he's in favor of waterboarding — "and worse." It does not seem to matter to him that he's advocating for the U.S. committing war crimes…the kind of practices that we cite to prove that Nazis or other savage entities are or were evil and that they're the bad guys because they do that and we're the good guys because we don't.

It also doesn't seem to matter that inquiries like the Senate report on the CIA's detention and interrogation program concluded torture just plain didn't work; that whatever information it produced was highly unreliable.

Ed Kilgore wonders why Trump would stake out such a position when there's zero evidence that voters prefer that approach over the legal, less barbaric options. I think it's simple. Trump knows that the kind of people who turn out for Donald Trump rallies will cheer that position. Some of them like the idea of America just being a big tough guy bully who'll step on anyone who crosses us. And some of them just like the idea of torturing and maybe killing foreigners.

It has long seemed to me that Mr. Trump says a lot of the nutty things that he says for no other reason than that he thinks they'll get cheers from the people at the rally and also get him press coverage. He's right about that. He also seems to think that by getting both those things, he will get to be President of the United States. I think hope he's wrong about that.