This week it’s the Democrats’ turn to make empty promises while they officially nominate a candidate almost as unpopular as Donald Trump. Hillary Clinton is a war hawk in the style of her friend Henry Kissinger; a shapeshifting phony on issues ranging from gay marriage to TPP to the minimum wage; an elitist who made speeches to Goldman Sachs at $250K a pop and sat on the board of freaking Walmart.

However…she’s not Trump, the cartoon fascist and the first truly postmodern candidate, in that he has no ideology and thumbs his nose at the very idea of truth. What you see is what you get — a raving narcissist who stokes fear and resentment, or gales of laughter, whenever he speaks. A fraud who doesn’t have enough business sense to make casinos profitable.

Trump needed a lot of help from the media to create his image as a great dealmaker, and he got it. Tony Schwartz, the ghostwriter of Trump’s bestseller The Art of the Deal, put it this way in his confessions to the New Yorker:

I put lipstick on a pig. I feel a deep sense of remorse that I contributed to presenting Trump in a way that brought him wider attention and made him more appealing than he is.

But it doesn’t matter at this point what anybody in the media says about Trump. Thanks in part to the nonstop positive coverage he received over the years — except from a few truth tellers like David Cay Johnston — millions of know-nothings are convinced he’s the only force that can save America from blacks and Mexicans, ISIS, taxes, cop killers, China and NATO and maybe even the Dark Lord of Mordor. He is not Hillary. He will make America great again.

Here’s The Intercept quoting Plato quoting Socrates in The Republic:

This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs: when he first appears above ground he is a protector.

There’s nothing really new about our home-grown would-be tyrant except for the orange skunk pelt on his head. But how can you know this if you’re a know-nothing?