‘I’ll Take Health Care for $500 Billion, Alex’

By Kevin D. Williamson

Sunday, February 21, 2016

There is a Ghostbusters reboot in the works, making all of us children of the Eighties feel terribly, terribly old. But there is one line from the original that I suspect will not make an appearance in the new version: When Bill Murray’s Peter Venkman flirts with Sigourney Weaver’s Dana Barrett, she dismisses him as being “more like a game-show host” than a scientist. Oof.

That line is terribly out of date. With the people of these United States apparently determined to give serious consideration to electing a game-show host as president, the joke is on us.

Donald J. Trump, Manhattan real-estate heir, tabloid celebrity, and host of The Apprentice, continues his durable run for the presidency, confounding those who had written his candidacy off as a stunt. Trump has a great deal of money — though not so much that he’s above taking donations for his campaign and then lying about self-funding — but what he truly has oodles of is the real currency of American culture: celebrity. The combination of real wealth with real fame is a powerful intoxicant — the genuine opiate of the masses. (Including those masses hooked on genuine opiates.) Like most recreational substances, it goes from intoxicating to simply toxic when the concentration is sufficient: Witness the apparent mental impairment of Trump hangers-on such as Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter if you are in any doubt.

Among those cable-news and talk-radio figures who enjoyed surfing the wave of the Trump phenomenon during its early stages, a few have been embarrassed into having second thoughts. Some of them have pronounced themselves surprised at the intensity of the vitriol directed their way — ranging from gross anti-Semitism to ordinary KKK-style racism to anonymous shouts of “Faggot!” from the cowardly corners of the Internet — but they have overlooked the wisdom of the ancients: You lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas, in this case fleas with a fondness for medieval-themed role-playing games and Twitter avatar alter-egos named SaxonKnight666NoWhiteGenocide.

The criticism one hears directed at Trump’s rivals is despair-inducing. Marco Rubio, one Trump enthusiast insists, doesn’t “look presidential.” “Presidential,” along with “gravitas,” is one of the eternal banalities of our politics, one of those words that most frequently come out of mouths attached to brains without very much in them. Senator Rubio is youthful, it is true. You know who looked “presidential”? Leslie Nielsen. That was the great joke. But this isn’t a joke. This is the Islamic State and the national debt and the border crisis and a good deal more.

What of Ted Cruz? He has a pointy nose, and a pointy chin, and a widow’s peak that reminds people of Grandpa Munster or ancient breakfast-cereal mascots. (How do you know you’re a Republican-primary voter? The last person of color you had over to your home for a meal was Count Chocula.) He has a TV preacher’s oratorical affect and a Nixonian scowl. Chris Christie? Fat guy. Rand Paul? Unruly hair. Etc.

That one hears so much about the candidates’ superficial qualities and so little about, say, Ted Cruz’s approach to constitutional jurisprudence is not entirely surprising. It’s the same reason that Bill Clinton’s sodomizing a White House intern became a national scandal while Hillary Clinton’s cattle-futures shenanigans did not: Everybody understands sex, very few people understand options trading.

History is not without a sense of irony. Last time around, the electorate had a great guffaw when David Letterman scoffed at Mitt Romney: “Isn’t it time for a president who looks like a 1970s game show host?” Four years later, we’ve moved on to an actual game-show host.

That isn’t progress.

But it is illuminating. One lesson, already discussed in these pages, is that the broad Republican electorate is not actually very conservative. For all of the pleasure that these so-called conservatives derive from denouncing socialism on the Euro-weenie model, they turn out to have much more in common with Marine Le Pen than they do with Ronald Reagan, of free-enterprise and amnesty infamy: They like their welfare state just fine, thank you, but they’ll wet themselves in terror if they see a Marlboro billboard in Spanish.

What’s more illuminating, though, is how many of the so-called conservatives in the entertainment wing of the movement — the contrepreneurs — turned out to be mob-rule enthusiasts simply looking for a sufficiently large and stupid mob. Donald Trump is Bill Clinton without the experience in office, and indeed is a considerable financial patron of the Clinton enterprise. He has been on the wrong side of practically every important issue — life, the Second Amendment, national security — and managed to go nearly 70 years, most of which was spent in public life, without uttering a notable sentence about what has become his signature issue: immigration, about which his policies range from the nonsensical to the never-gonna-happen.

For the contrepreneurs and their followers, it’s an exercise in wishful thinking: If not for the illegals, employment and wages would go up, taxes would go down, spending would go down, budgets would be balanced, schools wouldn’t be terrible, etc. Chickens not laying? Cow gone dry? Somewhere, somehow, somebody called Perez is to blame. How do you know? Because some third-rate doggie-vitamin salesman on the radio says so.

When the God of the Old Testament was especially annoyed with His people, he threatened to take away their statesmen: “I will give children to be their princes, and babes shall rule over them.” We Americans don’t have princes, and we don’t need anybody to rule over us. But we do need capable public administrators, including capable presidents.

Children and babes? Isaiah, that lucky so-and-so, had never heard of a game-show host.