The paranoid style, 2016
By 
“We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well.”
Here are some things that the current Republican nominee for president has asserted:
(1) That it’s unclear whether Barack Obama was born in the United States.
(2) That “the concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.”
(3) That Ted Cruz’s father Raphael met with Lee Harvey Oswald, and may have been part of a conspiracy that assassinated John F. Kennedy.
(4) That “Hillary Clinton meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty in order to enrich these global financial powers, her special-interest friends, and her donors.”
(5) That President Obama founded ISIS. (When they first heard this claim a lot of people, including me, just assumed this claim had to be some sort of figurative claim — that he meant Obama “founded” ISIS by allowing a power vacuum to grow in Iraq and so forth. Actually Trump meant this claim to be taken completely literally. Only after days of incredulous criticism did he reverse course and claim he was being “sarcastic” [sic]).
(6) That the Department of Labor employment numbers are faked by the federal government, to make people believe the unemployment rate is nearly ten times lower than it actually is.
(7) That the Department of Justice colluded with Hillary Clinton to exonerate her when it investigated her use of a private e-mail server while she was the Secretary of State.
(8) That the American mainstream media are conspiring to deny him the presidency by rigging the election.
(9) That the 2016 presidential election is already being rigged “at many polling places.”
This is a far from exhaustive list, but I’m already tired.
Basically Trump is a Breitbart comments thread personified. (If he is elected, he will be a Breibart comments thread with nuclear weapons.)
The optimistic take at this point is that the Trump campaign is no longer primarily about winning the 2016 election, but rather is morphing into a Steve Bannon scheme to found Trump TV, which will become the media centerpiece of a fascistic ethno-nationalist mass political movement, which will continue to fight to seize complete control of the Republican party. That’s the optimistic take.
It’s an open question whether Trump himself has become paranoid in a clinical sense, or whether he is consciously or semi-consciously taking cynical advantage of Hofstadter termed the “paranoid style” in American political life. An open question, and ultimately not a very interesting one, since the social effects are the same either way.