I think my main problem is that Trump, whether you see him as dumb or a very skilled conman, wouldn’t have gotten as far as he had without a structure that rewarded him for his bullshit even when it was clear that it was bullshit. The difference in coverage between Trump’s chicken eating habits and Gillenbrand’s is key: Trump has been inoculated by enablers all his life. And now he’s stumbled into the biggest enablist structure in the history of the country: the Republican Party.