Althouse cuts to the quick

Why do people love Trump? Or at least some people? As Ann Althouse suggests, maybe it's not who he is, but rather who he isn't. More to the point, he's not Richard Cohen, whose WaPo column Althouse eviscerates: This is one of the better takedowns of smug liberalism that you'll see:

Cohen has exactly one sentence that tries to say why people like Trump, and it's incredibly weak:

My guess is that it’s a low-boil rage against a vague and threatening liberalism — urbane, educated, affluent, secular, diverse and sexually tolerant. 

Yes, yes, I know. You're so sure you and your friends are the good people. Your unshakeable love for yourself and your friends is glaringly evident, as usual. By the way, if the Trumpsters are raging against the sexually tolerant, why are they they tolerating Trump's sexual behavior?

It's that "unshakeable love for yourself" that gets liberals in trouble. Self-regard is never attractive and while Trump himself is a vast sea of self-regard, he finds ways to give people a wink that shows he knows it's a game. Consider this tweet, which sent one of my lefty college friends into a paroxysm of sputtering rage :

Everybody's favorite!

 "Your favorite President" is a wink to his audience. Trump knows full well that millions of Americans, like my college friend, go ballistic at such rhetorical tropes. Not in My Name, you orange-y Hitler! Back to Althouse:

A more accurate headline would be a question, "Why do people like Trump?," not what looks like a promise to answer that question. Elite media people like Cohen should finally come around to asking the question humbly, confessing to their abject failure even to admit that they've needed to ask it and rejecting their imperious concentration on telling people what they should think. Look at all these reasons to loathe Trump. Come on, you idiots, you're embarrassing yourselves by not loathing him yet. It hasn't worked, and yet you continue to do it.

And because they continue to do it, they are Bourbons, forgetting nothing and learning nothing.