What Donald Trump is saying is both:

1. true and/or a real-world response to extreme conditions and at the same time is;
2. scandalous.

How can this be? What is missing here?

Liberal pieties.

What Trump is traducing is not the truth, but liberal pieties. But that means that liberal pieties, the “truths” of liberalism, are not literally true! They are untruths.

Why is this? Because liberalism is not built on the world the way that it is, but the way liberals think it should be. This is why all their programs fail, and all their “facts” are wrong, and this is why liberals go around looking as if they have just bitten down on a lemon. They are constantly being insulted by, being surprised by, being taken aback by…reality. They build papier-mâché worlds, but the truth keeps crashing through their walls.

In order to maintain their inflated self-regard, something other than themselves must be to blame. Who? The truth-tellers.

Donald Trump.

Truth is not kind. It just is. And liberals are not used to being confronted with it. So we have all this bluster, this outrage from both Democrats and Republicans who we see now are on the same side. (For instance, Paul Ryan had the chance to defund just a couple of liberal programs like refugee immigration and Planned Parenthood. He could not muster the fortitude to do so and carry those issues to the public if Obama “shut down’ the government over them. More significantly, the Republicans in the House elected Ryan Speaker, which tells us even more about them than about him. Lastly whatever Ryan did, if the Republican majorities in either the House or the Senate had voted against the budget it would not have passed.)

Since liberals control the vocabulary and the terms of debate in the public space, it takes both courage and skill to tell the truth in it. Donald Trump is the first one to do this since Reagan (and he is stronger than Reagan in this regard because we are much further gone as a society now than we were in 1980).

For the last 50 years, liberals have been the challengers. Now they are in charge. And we see how civilization collapses when that happens -- in national defense, in immigration, in the cities, in the universities, in public education. This is the first election in which liberals are not challenging, they are defending. They have made the long march through the institutions and now that they are in charge, are leaving in ruins the country first of all, but also themselves.

Trump is calling them on it and they don’t like it. More to the point, they don’t understand it. Donald Trump is challenging the liberal world. He is pointing out its failures. Trump is in the position of Harry Truman: he isn’t giving the liberals hell, he is telling the truth and they think it’s hell.

It has been surprising that some that one would have thought inoculated against liberalism -- the conservative commentariat for one (yes, that means you Charles and you George) -- are deeply penetrated by the liberal world-view. Who knew? Well, we know now.

Because of this, Trump has to be his own bell-ringer. He does not have an amen corner in the MSM like the liberals do. He has to be his own player on the field and his own cheerleader. But…who could do it better?

His speeches are like a bath in steel. What liberal observers think are disjointed ramblings are actually conservations with the audience. If you listen to one all the way through, Trump is candid, he reveals himself to the crowd, and he enthuses them. Quotes that seem deplorable out of context turn out on observation to be Trump playing with the crowd and they both understand it and love it -- for instance telling the Iowa voters they are stupid for not polling for him.

This effect is called a “cult-like following” by the ignorant. It isn’t. It is the response of people hearing the truth, knowing the Trump will follow the truth, and that the truth will stop the liberal assault on the load-bearing members of the greatest country in history.

Trump, by having the sensibility of an ordinary Joe in spite of his billions, is the anti-liberal. He looks at social disaster and sees…social disaster. Since liberals only produce social disaster, this makes him an extremist in their eyes. But not in the eyes of the public.

Trump can put across a complex idea in a rapier flash, in a single sentence, a single phrase. Philistines deplore this, regard it as vulgar, anti-intellectual, undisciplined, but it has always been a necessary qualification for leadership…to reach people emotionally, instinctively.

Any community has ramparts where in the end you are either inside those ramparts or outside them. And they have to be defended for the community to survive. Liberals will no longer defend the ramparts of the American community but Trump -- and the public -- will.

Trump is a natural. He is not sitting in a room with campaign consultants plotting this all out. His positions arise organically from who he is and from the logic of the situation. Professional observers cannot imagine that someone running for office would speak from genuine conviction rather than from focus-group calculation. (“Conviction” will join “authentic” as the next big thing in campaign consultation.)

Liberalism can liquidate a society; it cannot build one. We are now at the end of liberalism in America. Liberals have the commanding heights of most of our major institutions and they are consequently in the early stages of collapse.

Donald Trump is running instinctively against the failures, the disasters of liberalism issue by issue as they arise. That is the drama of this election.

Thrilling times.