“Those morons out there? Shucks, I could take chicken fertilizer and sell it to them as caviar. I could make them eat dog food and think it was steak. … You know what the public’s like? A cage of guinea pigs. Good night, you stupid idiots. Good night, you miserable slobs. They’re a lot of trained seals. I toss them a dead fish and they’ll flap their flippers.”

This eloquent expression of ultra-cynicism makes me think of a certain presidential candidate. If you’ve been keeping track of Donald Trump’s sentiments over the past while, e.g., things like “I could shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” Or: “How stupid are the people of Iowa … to believe this crap?” (He was referring to Ben Carson, but ironically it could have referred to some of his own utterings.)

No, the quote up top about “Those morons out there” is actually from the 1957 movie, A Face in the Crowd, and was spoken by Andy Griffith’s character, Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes – when he didn’t realize the microphone was still on at the end of a TV appearance.The bit starts at 3:22.

It’s what brought him down. Until then, he’d been extremely adept at hoodwinking thousands at rallies full of cheering, adoring crowds, eating up his “good ol’ boy” act.

I’m not even sure that if Trump said such things, it would even matter to his acolytes. Scary, indeed.