Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
Whether he wins
or loses this November’s Presidential election, 2016 has been the Year of
Donald Trump. He has forever changed the entire tenor of American politics. Any
thin veneer of civility, of mutual respect, of treating your political
opponents as reasonable people with whom you just happen to disagree, is now as
“obsolete and quaint” as the Geneva Conventions are at Guantánamo.
Through a
bizarre combination of the insult politics of a talk-radio host and the
billionaire-populist schtick invented by
Nelson Rockefeller when he ran for governor of New York in 1958 (plenty of rich
people had run for U.S. office before but Rockefeller was the first person to
tell voters, in essence, “I’ve already got more money than God, so I can’t be
corrupted or bribed”), Donald Trump has won the Republican nomination for
President and is within five to seven points of Democratic nominee Hillary
Clinton in the national polls.
What’s more, I
suspect, the polls actually underestimate
Trump’s support. After Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, an African-American, lost
his bid for the governorship of California in 1982 by 2 ½ percentage points,
when the final polls had had him leading by that much, political scientists coined the phrase “the Bradley
factor.” It meant that a Black candidate would always do five points worse than
the polls said because five percent of the poll respondents would be too racist
to vote for a Black candidate — but too ashamed of their racism to admit to a
pollster that they wouldn’t. I suspect Trump has a reverse Bradley-factor
working for him: five percent of
respondents are planning to vote for him but don’t want to admit it to a
poll-taker.
If I’m right,
the American presidential election of 2016, after both nominating conventions
and the so-called “bounces” from each, is a statistical tie. Despite his
innumerable gaffes — errors and outrages that would have sunk a lesser
politician overnight — Trump continues to remain competitive. Every time he’s
seemingly stuck his foot in his mouth, reporters and political commentators
have said, “This time. This is the one he won’t recover from.” And every time,
Trump has recovered and bounced
back in the polls as strong as or stronger than ever.
In the title of
this article I called Donald Trump “the modern Antaeus.” Antaeus, for those of
you who aren’t up on the minor characters of Greek mythology, was a giant whom,
as one of his 12 “labors,” the mighty strongman Hercules had to kill. The
problem was that Antaeus’s mother was Gaia, the earth goddess, so every time he
was knocked to the ground, his mom gave him renewed strength so he could get up
again and never be defeated. Hercules finally worked out a way of punching
Antaeus out with one arm while using the other to hold him in mid-air, so he
couldn’t come into contact with the earth and thereby fight back with the extra
strength from his mother.
Again and again,
Donald Trump has shown an Antaeus-like ability to recover from self-inflicted
blows that would be deadly to any merely mortal candidate. He began his
campaign by calling Mexican immigrants to the U.S. “rapists” and “criminals,”
and his poll numbers soared; he took an early lead for the Republican
nomination and never relinquished it. He dissed U.S. Senator John McCain
(R-Arizona), whose courage during years of imprisonment in North Viet Nam had
won him respect even among people who disagreed with his politics, saying,
“He’s not a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t
captured.”
Everyone in the
pundit class said Trump would never recover from that, especially running in a
party that virtually reveres the military and everything it stands for. Wrong
again: Trump’s standing in the polls went even higher. And it went higher still
when he responded to Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly’s criticism of his demeaning
remarks about women by making a demeaning remark about her as a woman — saying
she had “blood coming out of her eyes, or her wherever.” Not only did his poll
numbers go up after that remark, they went up even higher among Republican
women than among Republican men.
So when I heard
the pundits gang up on Trump again and say his outburst against Khizr Khan,
whose son Humayan was a U.S. servicemember in Iraq in 2004 when he was killed
by a suicide bomber, is going to be the final blow that destroys his
credibility, pardon my skepticism. What happened was that Khizr Khan got tired
of hearing Trump go on and on and on
about Muslims, saying that we need an indefinite ban on all Muslim immigration to the U.S. “until we figure out
what’s going on” and just what the connection between Islam and “radical
terror” is.
There is none,
decent, hard-working Muslim-Americans like Khizr Khan say. The intent of the
message he volunteered to deliver at the Democratic convention — which got lost
a bit when Khizr pulled out a pocket copy of the U.S. Constitution and asked
rhetorically if Trump had ever read it — was that Muslims can be as loyal to
the U.S. and its Constitution as any other American. They can even send their
sons off to America’s wars and face the real possibility that, like Humayun
Khan, they won’t come home again. The maniacs of al-Qaeda, al-Nusra and ISIS
don’t represent all Muslims — to which I would add, “just as the freaks who
murder abortion doctors in the name of ‘life’ don’t represent all Christians,
and the people who assassinated Yitzhak Rabin don’t represent all Jews.”
Khizr stood on
stage at the last night of the Democratic convention with his wife Ghazala at
his side. He whipped out his pocket copy of the Constitution and told Trump he
would gladly lend it to him. (Yet another in Trump’s long list of previous
gaffes had been when he said he would have no problem taking the oath to
“preserve and protect” the Constitution, especially Articles 1, 2 and 12. The
Constitution only has seven articles.) Khizr’s speech jacked up sales of his
edition of the Constitution on amazon.com, but it didn’t move Trump — or his
voters.
Trump gave an
interview to ABC three days after Khizr’s speech at the convention. He
ridiculed Khizr for having his wife up there with him but not letting her speak
— to which she responded in an op-ed in the Washington Post. “Donald Trump said that maybe I wasn’t allowed to
say anything,” Ghazala Khan wrote. “That is not true. My husband asked me if I
wanted to speak, but I told him I could not. “Donald Trump said he has made a
lot of sacrifices. He doesn’t know what the word sacrifice means.” Trump, you
see, had told ABC he’d had to “sacrifice” to get his buildings built in New
York City and elsewhere. To any rational person, that would hardly seem on the
same level of “sacrifice” as sending your son off to war and seeing him come
home in a box.
But Trump,
showing his dedication to the same strategy that has got him this far and
turned him into probably the unlikeliest Presidential candidate ever,
acknowledged that even in his world, in which John McCain wasn’t a war hero,
Humayan Khan was. “We should honor all
who have made the ultimate sacrifice to keep our country safe,” Trump said.
“The real problem here are [sic] the radical Islamic terrorists who killed him,
and the efforts of those radicals to enter our country to do us further harm.”
Then, as usual, Trump tried to make the whole thing about himself: “I was
viciously attacked by Mr. [Khizr] Khan at the Democratic convention. Am I not
allowed to defend myself? Hillary [Clinton] voted for the Iraq war, not me!”
First off,
Donald, just because you have the “right” to say or do something doesn’t
necessarily mean it’s a good idea to use it. Anyone less mindlessly adored by
his supporters than Donald Trump would have thought twice before attacking the
grieving father of a dead war hero just because the grieving father said a few
scornful and rather nasty things about him on TV. Second, Hillary Clinton had
the opportunity to vote for or against the Iraq war because as part of her
long-term commitment to public service she’d been elected Senator from New York
and it was her job to do so.
I think she made
the wrong decision — and both Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders agree with me —
but the point is that it was her decision to make. She had been credentialed by
the voters of New York state to make that decision for them, and she did it on
the public record in full knowledge that if the war turned out badly, she’d be
subject to legitimate political criticism for it. Barack Obama wasn’t in the
U.S. Senate when the Iraq war vote took place, but he made a speech at the time
indicating he thought the war was a bad idea and he would have voted against it if he’d had the chance. Donald
Trump claims he was against the Iraq war all along, but there is zero documentary evidence of that.
Not that that
matters. As Tony Schwartz, who ghost-wrote Trump’s 1987 book The Art of the
Deal and therefore did more than anyone
else besides Trump himself to create the “Trump mythos,” recently told The New Yorker (http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/donald-trumps-ghostwriter-tells-all),
“Lying is second nature to him. More than anyone
else I have ever met, Trump has the ability to convince himself that whatever
he is saying at any given moment is true, or sort of true, or at least ought to be true.” During the George W. Bush administration,
his advisor Karl Rove was criticized for claiming Bush’s government had the
power to make lies true by the sheer force of will — “We’re an empire, and we
create our own reality,” Rove said — but Trump seems to go Bush and Rove one
better and believe he personally can
make whatever he believes is the truth.
We’ve seen it over and over again in Trump’s years in
public life. In 1987, when he was just riding the best-seller success of The
Art of the Deal and transforming himself
from just another scummy New York developer into a national (and, later,
international) symbol of wealth, power and success (he’d call his second book Surviving
at the Top), he took out an ad saying
that the U.S. wasn’t militaristic enough and the nation had lost its
“backbone.” At the time, the President was Ronald Reagan, who rightly or
wrongly was proud of having reversed the alleged “decline” of the U.S. military
and authorized a huge buildup in U.S. “defense” spending.
Later he asserted that President Obama had been born in
Kenya and was therefore ineligible to serve in that office because the U.S.
Constitution requires that the President be a “native-born citizen.” No amount
of documentary evidence that Obama was born exactly when and where he said he
was — August 4, 1961 in Honolulu, Hawai’i, U.S.A. — could dissuade Trump. In
the Trump world, Muslim-Americans held a rally in New Jersey right after the
September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in which they cheered — and he claimed to
have seen this on video. The video was real, all right — but it had been shot
in Saudi Arabia.
Trump pulled this one again recently when he claimed to
have seen a video of millions of dollars of cash being off-loaded to the
government of Iran by the U.S. as part of the U.S.-Iran nuclear deal. Once
again, the video was real, but it didn’t show cash being given to the Iranians;
it showed Iranian prisoners being released to the U.S., also as part of the
nuclear deal Trump is so insistent was a bad deal for this country. What’s
more, while the Iranians did get money out of the arms deal, it was their money that we had been sitting on, using the millions
that rightfully belonged to Iran as leverage to get them to agree to mothball
their nuclear weapons program.
What’s more, the last few weeks have seen more than their
share of Trump saying things that … well, let’s just politely say that their
connection between the Trump reality and the one the rest of us live in is
minimal at best. From his open call to Russia’s government to see if they can
successfully hack into Hillary Clinton’s e-mail server and discover the 33,000
e-mails she and her attorneys, without any outside review, declared “private”
and deleted, to his bizarre assertion that President Obama and Hillary Clinton
“founded ISIS” — which he later said he “maybe” meant as sarcasm — Trump is
painting a picture of himself as almost terminally unhinged. Time magazine’s latest cover story on him is illustrated with
a picture of his face melting, and the headline “Meltdown.”
It also doesn’t help his cause that he’s sometimes seemed
to revisit old controversies he’d be better advised just to leave alone — like
when he brought up his “blood coming out of her wherever” comment about Megyn
Kelly and insisted he meant her nose, or when he reminded people of the
disabled reporter he’d insulted at a rally — or that he wreaked new ones on
himself, like when he got upset when a baby was crying at his rally and told
its mother to take her kid home. Indeed, Trump sometimes seems, both as a
businessman and a politician, to have taken his cue for success from an obscure
1942 film called The Meanest Man in the World, in which Jack Benny plays a small-town lawyer who moves
to New York City and bombs financially until he starts getting his
picture in the paper as a man who steals candy from kids, forecloses on poor
old widows and acts in general like the total S.O.B. of the title — whereupon
he’s got all the wealthy, unscrupulous clients he can handle.
The Secret
of Trump’s Success
Nonetheless, Trump has an intensely loyal base that seems
committed to follow him wherever he leads them. It’s partly that he has
consciously built himself up as the candidate of white male reaction. From his
opening salvos against immigrants to his weird references to a Black person in
one of his crowds as “my African-American” and the speech in which he said “I
love Hispanics” and then proceeded to praise the taco salad at Trump Tower,
Trump has deliberately preached a tone-deafness to contemporary sensibilities
about people of color that his white male fans eat up. He proudly boasts that
he’s not “politically correct” — a phrase that, ironically, was actually coined
by Leftists in the 1970’s to criticize other Leftists for being too dogmatic,
but which was taken up by the Right in the 1980’s and has come to encapsulate
the resentment many non-college white males feel about their heartfelt
attitudes towards Blacks, Latinos and women denounced as racist, sexist and no
longer acceptable.
When the Republican Party regained control of the House
of Representatives in 2010, I could sense the palpable sense of relief felt
among millions of rank-and-file Republicans not only that their party had
prevailed, but that that (ugh) woman
Speaker, Democrat Nancy Pelosi, would be replaced by a white man, John Boehner.
Likewise there are millions of white male voters who have been counting the
days for the past eight years when that n----r President is finally out of the
White House and what they consider the natural order of the universe is
restored as a white man takes his place. Needless to say, they’ll be even more
ballistic if the election turns out the other way and the Black man in the
White House is replaced by a woman!
But there’s more to Trump than just making himself the
face of white reaction. If Bernie Sanders, when he ran against Hillary Clinton, presented himself as the
indulgent dad defending the kids against their censorious, schoolmarmish Mama
Hillary and offering them all the goodies, like free college and access to
health care, she’d told them the family couldn’t afford, Donald Trump is a very
different kind of father figure. He’s the stern, take-no-nonsense dad who will
wallop the kids if they get out of line, but will be equally as ferocious when
the family is under threat from outside.
Other writers
have compared Trump to such Right-wing media figures as Rush Limbaugh and Bill
O’Reilly, but American Prospect
contributing editor Harold Meyerson (http://prospect.org/article/trump%E2%80%99s-appeal-forgotten-man)
noted that one thing they have in common is they present themselves as
all-knowing father figures whose superior wisdom is questioned only at the
family’s peril. “There is in Trump, Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, and their kind a
need both to assert their own authority and to assume a certain passivity in
their audience,” Meyerson wrote.
“This assumption
certainly bolsters their own sense of indispensability, and reinforces their
image (and self-image) as the leader of a distinct tribe, or the
unchallengeable head of a docile family. … [T]heir respective cult leader
assumes the role of the head of a traditional ‘father knows best and takes no
shit’ family. They may even acknowledge the father in question may not always
know best — there’s ample evidence that Trump supporters understand he’s at
minimum a serial exaggerator — but his assumption of the role of tough,
judgmental father is what really appeals to them.”
In a New York
Times essay (http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/04/opinion/campaign-stops/the-eternal-return-of-unenlightened-despotism.html?rref=collection%2Fcolumn%2FThomas%20B.%20Edsall&action=click&contentCollection=Opinion&module=Collection®ion=Marginalia&src=me&version=column&pgtype=article),
political scientist Thomas Byrne Edsall took this even further. Like Meyerson,
Edsall cited survey research by political scientist Matthew MacWilliams, author
of a forthcoming book called Why Irrational Politics Appeals, who has called Trump’s winning the Republican
nomination “the rise of American authoritarianism —
America’s Authoritarian Spring.”
Edsall also
cited research by Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) CEO Robert P. Jones
that indicates that by a 2-to-1 margin, Americans favor authoritarian styles of
child-rearing that emphasize obedience and discipline rather than independent
thought. According to Jones’ survey, “A majority of Americans prefer children
to have respect for elders (74 percent) rather than independence (26 percent);
to demonstrate good manners (70 percent) rather than curiosity (30 percent);
and to be well-behaved (61 percent) rather than creative (38 percent).” This
may explain the popularity of charter schools and other so-called “education
reform” measures sponsored by giant corporations which regard schools as
training grounds for future corporate drones, not independent thinkers.
Also, according
to PRRI, “A majority of Americans favor either highly authoritarian (31
percent) or authoritarian (26 percent) traits. In contrast, roughly one-quarter
express preferences for either highly autonomous (10 percent) or autonomous (13
percent) traits. One in five Americans (20 percent) has mixed preferences.”
What’s more, the PRRI survey shows, “Americans who have a highly authoritarian
orientation are more than twice as likely as those who have a highly autonomous
orientation to say the country needs a leader who is willing to break the rules
to set things right (58 percent vs. 22 percent).”
This would seem
to be a dynamic tailor-made for Trump, who in his big speech at the Republican
Convention seemed less interested in being a democratically elected,
constitutionally constrained President than a Führer. His now-famous statement that America is in crisis
and “I alone can fix it” sounded much more like something one would expect to
hear from a Hitler or Mussolini — or, on the other side of the Left/Right
divide, from a Lenin, Stalin or Mao — than someone running to be the chief of
state of a republic. Indeed, Trump’s much-discussed admiration for Russian
President Vladimir Putin seems quite likely, at least to me, to stem from the
way Putin has turned Russia from an incompetently governed republic to a
competently governed dictatorship. I suspect in his heart of hearts Trump wants
not only to be U.S. President but to duplicate Putin’s triumph over democracy,
economic oligarchy and the separation of powers here.
Trump’s open appeal
to authoritarian voters looking for a leader who will restore “law and order”
and bring peace — his peace — to a
highly uncertain and dangerous world is one previous Republican Presidential
nominees have ridden to success. In 1968, Richard Nixon and Senator Strom
Thurmond (R-SC) worked out the so-called “Southern Strategy” that flipped the
Republicans’ and Democrats’ historic positions on civil rights. The party of
slavery, segregation and the Ku Klux Klan had pushed through the Civil Rights
Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, so Nixon’s and Thurmond’s
response was to see that the racist white male constituency was up for grabs
and remodel the “Party of Lincoln” as the party of white reaction and backlash.
Faced with a
country that seemed to be coming apart at the seams, courtesy of racial
uprisings and a long, costly and unwinnable war in Viet Nam, Nixon presented
himself as the candidate of “Law and Order” and the “Silent Majority.” Between
them, he and George Wallace (the Right-wing independent whose candidacy the
“Southern Strategy” was designed largely as a response to) got 57 percent of
the vote to Democrat Hubert Humphrey’s 43 percent, a signal of how decisively
American politics had turned Right just four years after Lyndon Johnson’s landslide
victory over Barry Goldwater in 1964 — and in 1970 student protesters at Kent
State and Jackson State University were viciously and cold-bloodedly shot down
by National Guardsmen and police in a vivid demonstration of what “Law and
Order” actually meant on the ground.
The 1960’s were
also the decade in which Ronald Reagan came of political age and won the
governorship of California largely on a promise to restore “law and order” to
college campuses beset by student protests. When Reagan became President in
1981 he dealt with the striking air traffic controllers much the way he’d
handled the student protests at Berkeley and elsewhere in the state as
governor: by treating them as unruly children who needed to be disciplined and
slapped into line by a strong, unforgiving father figure.
As Edsall noted
in another recent New York Times article
(http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/11/opinion/campaign-stops/is-trump-wrecking-both-parties.html?_r=0),
Trump is finishing the process Nixon and Reagan started, tearing the white
working class that used to be the bulwark of the Democratic coalition in New
Deal days and anchoring it firmly to the Republican Party by issues of race and
culture. He argues that the Democrats now have a less stable coalition than the
Republicans, an uneasy combination of people of color who want more government
involvement with the economy and upper- and upper-middle-class people who want
government essentially to leave them alone so they can make more money.
The latest polls show Trump behind Hillary Clinton both
overall and in the so-called “battleground states” which, in the bonkers
process by which Americans elect their President, have a disproportionate
impact on the final result. But, as journalist Jon Wiener recently wrote (https://www.thenation.com/article/are-hillary-clintons-strong-poll-numbers-misleading/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=New%20Campaign&utm_term=daily),
Clinton’s poll leads could be misleading because they fail to factor in the
strength of Trump’s appeal and the uniqueness of his campaign.
“Trump is so
different from every other candidate in the recent past that pundits fear he
could break out of the historic patterns of voting,” Wiener wrote. “That’s
pretty much what happened in the primaries, when so many experts said with
great conviction that Trump couldn’t win. Their reasoning was strong: He had no
ground game, no field operation working to get his supporters to the polls on
election day; he had no TV ads, which candidates all consider essential; he
wasn’t raising money, or spending it. He had no real campaign organization and
no experience in politics. In the past, candidates like that never won. But, of
course, the Republican primaries were different this time.”
By his
no-holds-barred approach to campaigning, and in particular by being his own
“attack dog,” spewing insults at the other candidates himself instead of
relying on his surrogates to do that, Donald Trump has likely changed the face
of U.S. political campaigning forever. His open appeals to the racist and
sexist prejudices of his core supporters have finished the process Barry
Goldwater, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan began: they’ve made prejudice seem
not only acceptable but something to be proud of. Trump the candidate may lose,
but Trump the political phenomenon will be alive and well after this election,
ranting about how the results were “rigged,” calling for Hillary Clinton’s
immediate impeachment and generally turning U.S. politics into a cesspool of
insult and denigration.
