Donald Trump's toxicity, splattered all over Fox and Friend's:
They give you a certificate of live birth which anybody can get. Just walk into the hospital. This guy either has a birth certificate or he doesn't. I didn't think it was such a big deal, but I will tell you, it is turning out to be a very big deal. People are calling me from all over saying please don't give up on this issue. If you weren't born in this country, you cannot be President. You have no doctors that remember, you have no nurses -- this is the President of the United States -- that remember. Why can't he produce a birth certificate? I brought it up just routinely, and all of a sudden, a lot of facts are emerging and I'm starting to wonder myself whether he was born in this country?
That gibberish elicited this pointed response from Politico's Ben Smith: "There's really no excuse for this."
But of course there is. Though diseased, Trump is a symptom -- a symptom of a mass media culture that can keep even a Sarah Palin afloat; a culture that conflates celebrity with wisdom, notoriety with insight, name-recognition with gravitas. In a way, Trump would be a fool to deny his toxic inner-self.
Yet he is also, to my mind, a walking billboard for a 100 percent -- or damn close to it -- inheritance tax. Like George W., without pop's money this clown would have been managing a McDonald's franchise somewhere.
God save us from America's ever-narrowing "aristocracy" of so little merit and no conscience.