By Victor Davis Hanson
Tuesday, March 15, 2016
Donald J. Trump thus far has not shown that he has the
level-headedness to be president. He has no political ideology and could just
as well govern to the left of Hillary Clinton as to the right of her. Yet his
sloppy way of speaking has earned him equally sloppy, over-the-top analogies —
to Mussolini, Hitler, George Wallace, and a host of other populist and racist
demagogues.
But is he uniquely dangerous, ignorant, or cruel in terms
of either distant or recent American presidential history?
I don’t think so.
There are many ways to assess Trump. The debates and
rallies give us glimpses of his ill-preparedness (at least in comparison to his
rivals). So far his vision has not transcended banalities and generalities. He
seems to have no team of respected advisers, at least not yet. Indeed, at this
point, advising Trump apparently would be a career-killer in the Boston–New
York–Washington corridor. No one quite knows who talks to him on foreign
policy. He is an empty slate onto which millions write their hopes and dreams,
as “Make America great again” channels the empty “Hope and Change.”
Those are grounds enough for rejecting him. But what we
don’t need is high talk about Trump as something uniquely sinister, a villain
without precedent in American electoral history or indeed public life. That is
simply demonstrably false. Trump thrives despite, not because of, his crudity,
and largely because of anger at Barack Obama’s divisive and polarizing
governance and sermonizing — and the Republican party’s habitual consideration
of trade issues, debt, immigration, and education largely from the vantage
point of either abstraction or privilege.
Take Trump’s worst, most repugnant rhetoric, and there
will always pop up a parallel worse — and often from the lips of the heroes of
those who are blasting Trump as singularly foul. He crudely brags of his past
infidelities and sexual conquests — reminding us that he has an affinity with
JFK and Bill Clinton (is it worse to boast or to lie about such sins?). Whether
he would attempt to match either man’s sexual gymnastics while in the Oval
Office is, I think, doubtful. I don’t believe the Trump jet so far has followed
Bill Clinton south to Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual fantasy island. Is Clinton
ostracized by the liberal media or pundit class because of his fawning over and
cavorting with a convicted sex offender? Should Harvard have rejected Epstein’s
cash?
Unfortunately, Trump was not the first politician to brag about the size of his genitalia.
President Lyndon Johnson reportedly offered such jock talk often — as well as
reportedly exposing himself to aides. Did LBJ’s sick obsessions turn liberals
off the Great Society? In her civil suit, Paula Jones settled with Bill Clinton
after alleging that he had likewise pulled out his penis. Is such exhibitionism
cruder than vaguely alluding to penis size? A crude Trump certainly has not
entered cruder Anthony Weiner territory.
In reprehensible fashion, a Trump aide recently
manhandled a female reporter. Does that act reflect a Trump culture of sexism?
Perhaps. But the locus classicus of such thuggery still remains Bill Clinton
(currently on the campaign trail talking of various injustices), who on at
least two occasions likely assaulted
women through physical violence. Will someone uncover an early Trump essay with
lines like the following: “A man goes home and masturbates his typical fantasy.
A woman on her knees, a woman tied up, a woman abused.” “A woman enjoys
intercourse with her man — as she fantasizes being raped by 3 men simultaneously”
— replete with exegeses like the following: “Many women seem to be walking a
tightrope,” as their “qualities of love, openness, and gentleness were too
deeply enmeshed with qualities of dependency, subservience, and masochism.” If
such a Trump text is uncovered, will he then be in league with the author of
those lines, the young Bernie Sanders?
Trump crudely suggested that a Hispanic judge might be
prejudiced against him in an upcoming civil trial. Did he take his cue from
current Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor? She is on the record as saying
that race makes some judges “better” than others (“I would hope that a wise
Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not
reach a better conclusion than a white male”). Again, the point is not just
that Trump reflects a debased culture, but that the outrage is selective —
e.g., is a justiceship on the Supreme Court an unimportant office?
Trump is all over the place on abortion, flip-flopping
almost daily and without much clue about the mission of Planned Parenthood. But
he has not seen abortion on demand as a good thing because it falls
inordinately on the poor and minorities — in the fashion of Supreme Court
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who matter-of-factly said to a friendly reporter,
“Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe
was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth
in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.” If we thought
Ginsburg’s callous remark was a slip of the tongue, she clarified it a few
years later with a postscript: “It makes no sense as a national policy to
promote birth only among poor people.” Did prominent philosophers, ethicists,
and humanitarians sign a petition demanding that she step down, given her
judicial ill temperament and what can only be described as displays, on not one
but two occasions, of crackpot notions of racist eugenics?
I agree that it is disturbing that Trump does not grasp
the nature of the nuclear triad, but so far he has not, as has Vice President
Biden, claimed that a President FDR went on television in 1929 or, as has
President Obama, that the Falklands are better known as the Maldives. His Trump
vodka and steaks and eponymous schlock are a window into his narcissistic soul
and his lack of concern with integrity; but I’ll say more about the size of his
ego when he says he can cool the planet and lower the seas, and that he is the
one we’ve all been waiting for — accompanied by Latin mottos and faux-Greek
columns. Trump has no team to speak of. Is that because the ego-driven Trump
fancies himself a genius in the manner of “I think I’m a better speechwriter
than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than
my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m gonna think I’m a
better political director than my political director.”
Trump supposedly is inciting violence by creating a
climate of violence at his rallies. But did he say, or was it Ronald Reagan who
said, at a time of widespread unrest, “If it’s to be a bloodbath, let it be
now. Appeasement is not the answer”? Reagan called not for a punch or two but
for something rather more existential.
Trump reprehensibly has urged his supporters to
physically tangle with opponents. But, after Chicago, did he emulate a
presidential urge “to argue with them and get in their face!”? When Trump does
his next Philadelphia rally, will he, in Obama fashion, egg on his Trumpsters
with this: “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun. Because from
what I understand, folks in Philly like a good brawl. I’ve seen Eagles fans.”
Or maybe Trump could adapt another line from Obama and
use it with his working-class white supporters, cautioning them that, instead
of sitting out the election, they should say, “We’re gonna punish our enemies
and we’re gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are
important to us.” Or maybe Trump could try still another adaptation of a line
from President Obama for those stubborn senators who favor open borders: “Those
aren’t the kinds of folks who represent our core American values.”
Of course, we must watch Trump’s associates. If he is
indeed a devout churchgoer, will we learn of a Trump pastor analogous to the
anti-Semitic, racist, and anti-American Reverend Jeremiah Wright? And will
Trump get caught claiming that he is a loyal attendee of a church in the mold
of Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ (“Yep. Every week. Eleven o’clock
service. Ever been there? Good service.”) or that he could “no more disown” his
racist pastor than his own (allegedly racist) grandmother? Is the title of The Art of the Deal borrowed from a
sermon by a white nationalist?
We could play this tu quoque all day long, but the fact
that we can play it at all suggests
that Trump is hardly, by current standards, beyond the pale, much less that he
is aberrant in U.S. presidential-campaign history. He is or is not as uncouth
as Barack Obama, who has mocked the disabled, the wealthy, typical white
people, the religious, and the purported clingers, and has compared opponents
to Iranian theocrats and said that George W. Bush was “unpatriotic” — all as
relish to wrecking America’s health-care system, doubling the national debt,
setting race relations back six decades, politicizing federal bureaucracies,
ignoring federal law, and leaving the Middle East in shambles and our enemies
on the ascendant.
For those who point to Hillary Clinton as a more sober
and judicious alternative, they might ask themselves whether the Trump
financial shenanigans are on par with the quid pro quo Clinton Foundation
scams, or whether the Trump companies are a bigger mess than Hillary’s resets.
True, a historical precedent could be
set in the current campaign, but that would be if Hillary Clinton was the first
presidential candidate indicted before the election, given that all her serial
explanations about illegally using a private server to send and receive various
classified information have only led to updated and further misleading
backtracking, and will continue to do so until she is either charged or, for
political reasons, exonerated.
Trump certainly sounds both reckless and naïve. He
repeats ad nauseam the same trite phrases, seemingly as confused as if he were
claiming to have knocked away an amphibious rabbit from his canoe. He does not
quite know whether Putin is a murderous thug or, as recent biographies have
argued, a rather traditional Russian autocratic nationalist. He seems clueless
about Israel, and he talks nonsense about stealing oil from Iraq.
My problem with all the rhetorical blather about him is
whether such half-baked ideas are worse than concretely snubbing Netanyahu
(e.g., “chickenshit”), or blaming, in a recent Atlantic interview, variously David Cameron, Nicolas Sarkozy, and
the Europeans in general for the Libyan disaster — which, if I recall, was
supposed to be “We came, we saw, Qaddafi died”; or perhaps it was “What
difference does it make?”; or was the instigator a rogue video maker who was
summarily jailed for causing our consulate to be torched?
I had thought Obama was foolish for talking of ISIS as
jayvees; now I learn from the Atlantic
interview that it was the Pentagon that misled him with “flash in the plan”
metaphors. Obama, remember, did not render null and void his own red lines. You
see, it was the U.N. and Congress, not he, that set those lines in the first
place — sort of like the hapless Chuck Hagel supposedly cooking up the Bergdahl
swap.
So let us all take a deep breath, calm down, allow the
primary season to run its course, tally up the votes, and collate the Trump
gaffes and inanities. Let us stop the condescending sermons about the Trump
“mob” and cease pondering whether to walk or to support the eventual nominee —
bearing in mind that a Democratic victory would, inter alia, change the Supreme
Court for a generation. Let us go to the convention, seek an alternative to
Trump, play out the delegate count, and then judge whether the nominee has said
or done something that would appear far different from — and far worse than —
the fare of our usual rogues’ gallery of presidents, advisers, judges, and
senators.
I would not vote for Donald Trump in the primary, given
that I have no idea what he would do as president and thus most certainly hope
he does not get the nomination. But he seems about on par with the current
president, in terms of reckless speeches, inexperience, crudity, and
cluelessness. Yet I don’t recall hearing that many in the Democratic party ever
felt that Obama’s provocative and ignorant campaign utterances, along with his
past associations with the likes of Tony Rezko, Revernd Wright, Bill Ayers, and
Father Pfleger, had driven them to vote for a far more sober and judicious John
McCain or Mitt Romney.
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