By Victor Davis Hanson
Tuesday, May 03, 2016
Columnists assured us that Donald Trump’s campaign would
implode after he cheaply besmirched war hero John McCain. They assured us again
after he crudely dismissed Fox News’s star anchor and heartthrob, Megyn Kelly.
And again after his schoolboy rumor-mongering about Senator Ted Cruz’s wife.
And on and on.
Yet such nonstop insults and gaffes have had little
effect on the Trump candidacy. Actually, they have had no effect at all. Zero.
Zilch.
Political operatives insisted that Trump would fade,
given that he had no real organization on the ground. My God, they said, he has
no handlers, and not a position paper in sight. Where is his internal polling?
Where are the senior Wise Men to advise him on the demographics of state
primaries? Yet Trump garnered more free publicity, interviews, and attention
from the liberal media than did any well-handled candidate, Democrat or
Republican.
The commentators on the weekend talk shows employed
adverbs like “finally” and “at last” to characterize each of the latest
outrages likely to end Trump’s campaign. Trump broke his promise about
releasing his income-tax returns (was he hiding a whittled-down 13 percent tax
rate in Bernie Sanders fashion?). He fibs nonstop about opposing the Iraq war
from the beginning. And he continuously exaggerates his net worth, as if the
public were a lender that he was conning.
Each of those fudgings earned pronouncements from the
experts about a “turning point” in his fate. How many times has someone on a
Sunday-morning show pronounced, in somber tones, “Trump has gone too far this
time” — without defining “too far”?
These periodic Trump obituaries were often instead
followed by upticks in Trump’s popularity. A Trump orgasm is to have someone in
a suit and makeup, or with a title before his name, pontificate that Trump
should be and is through — a Trump pleasure surpassed only by a shouting young
anti-Trump disrupter shown on the news with a placard, “Make America Mexico
Again.”
Seasoned pollsters intoned that if only the rest of the
Republican field would winnow itself out, thus allowing a direct head-to-head
vote between Trump and one solid conservative, Trump would certainly lose. Yet
the more candidates dropped out of the Republican primaries, the stronger Trump
seemed to become.
Pollsters also insisted that Trump alone of the major
Republican candidates — unlike Ted Cruz, John Kasich, or Marco Rubio — could
not beat Hillary Clinton in the general election. But the more frequently Trump
was written off as unviable, the more his polls climbed to near Clinton’s. Was
he a Goldwater primary tsunami that would wash out in the general election, or
a rare Reagan tidal wave that would bury his skeptics, both now and in
November?
Clearly, elite journalists, political advisers, media
anchors, and pollsters, for all their analyses, have no idea where, why, and
how Trump garners support. He follows no campaign rules. He has no consistent
political ideology. He ignores decorum. Scandals do not tar him. The media
treat him like a cobra rising from a basket — terrified that if at any moment
they stop their music, the smiling serpent might strike and bite them in the
nose.
Tomorrow Trump could declare there to be 57 states, or
address vets as Corpse-men or tell his legions to bring a gun to a knife fight
— and none of his supporters would find him clueless, half-educated, or incendiary.
If Trump brought one of his wheeler-dealer Manhattan real-estate cronies to a
rally and the man’s court-ordered ankle bracelet went off, no one would bat an
eye.
In other words, Trump is a postmodern creation, for whom
traditional and time-tested rules do not apply. He is neither brilliant nor
unhinged, neither ecumenical nor just a polarizer, not a wrecker and not a
savior of the Republican party, but something else altogether. He does not defy
conventional wisdom. There simply is no convention and no wisdom applicable to
Donald J. Trump. For years postmodernists have lectured us that there is no
truth, no absolutes, no timeless protocols worthy of reverence; Trump is their
Nemesis, who reifies their theories that truth is simply a narrative whose veracity
is established by the degree of power and persuasion behind it.
A reality-TV star, Trump appeals to those who despise
reality-TV celebs like the Kardashians. A billionaire, he is the hero of those
who hate billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, or Warren Buffett. A
vain narcissist, he earns the loyalty of those who are repelled by the vain
narcissism of Barack Obama. A man who dyes and does his hair, tans his skin,
and stretches his face, he appeals to those who have neither the money nor the
desire to do the same.
A self-described Republican, he attacks Republicans more
than Democrats. An elite insider, he blasts elite insiders. He is both to the
right and to the left of Cruz, Kasich, and Rubio. Trump rails against dirty
campaign fundraising — and he assures us that no one knows such corruption
better than he himself, since as a donor he used to spread cash around
precisely to influence. Why else should anyone give?
If the rules of politics do not apply to Trump, how then
can Trump break them? For Donald Trump, there is only one third rail:
conventionality. If he, as advised, were to stop calling his rivals liars and
crooks; if he, as urged, were to read sober and judicious speeches off
teleprompters; if he, as counseled, were to talk in politically correct
platitudes, Trump would turn doctrinaire and conformist — and be undone by
reviving the very orthodox rules he once strangled, but that otherwise strangle
outsider-insiders like himself. If Trump were to listen to a politico and lose
30 pounds, shorten his tie, cut off his comb-over, and wear earth-tone clothes,
he would be finished.
His supporters want a reckoning with a system that has
not so much failed as infuriated them. What drives their loyalty to Trump — if
not the person, at least the idea of Trump — is a sort of nihilism. As a close
friend put it to me this week, “I don’t care whether Trump wins or not, I just
want him to f— things up as long as he can.”
In his supporters’ eyes, had Trump run in 2008 he might
have lost, but he would at least have aired one Obama hit-ad a minute, with
Rev. Wright screaming obscenities as a trailer crossed the screen beneath,
collating the various quotations of praise from Obama for his personal pastor.
If Trump had run in 2012, they believe, he would have cut off Candy Crowley —
the moderator who hijacked the second presidential debate to save Barack Obama
— in a cruder way than he screamed at Rosie O’Donnell.
Trump is the antithesis of his smears of his rivals. He
is many things, but at least not “low energy.” He may be fat and pink and
orange, but he is not “little.” He lies and fabricates, but he is not a sober
and judicious constitutionalist: So “Lyin’ Donald Trump” wouldn’t work as a
sound bite. Nor would “crooked Donald” — given that he would admit he trims a
lot in business, whereas Hillary would deny to her last breath that the
Clintons made $100 million by leveraging their name and offices in quid-pro-quo
shakedowns.
To get a clearer idea of the feelings of Trump
supporters, read the comments section following any mainstream news story that
deals with race, class, and gender in politically correct fashion. A
stream-of-consciousness litany of his supporters’ peeves, for good or ill,
would run like this: The wrong people are in the news. Instead of generals, and
small-business owners, and muscular workers, we instead see smarmy smart-asses,
the pajama boys and mattress girls of the world of TV, who roll their eyes,
wink about a joke only the anointed get, and smirk that what they say could have
three different meanings — the Jon Stewarts, David Lettermans, and Stephen
Colberts of Smug, Inc.
On race, Trump supporters are tired of hearing that black
lives matter, while no one mentions that all lives matter. They are sick of
seeing protestors wave the flag of the country they do not wish illegal aliens
to be sent back to and trash the country they under no circumstances want them
to leave. They don’t like getting a letter from an IRS that employs Lois Lerner
— a letter that would be ignored with impunity by those who are here illegally,
or who run the Clinton Foundation. They are tired of wealthy minorities
claiming they are perpetual victims of ill-treatment at the hands of people who
are less well off than they. They don’t like hearing from elites that huge
trade deficits have little to do with loss of jobs or that cheating by our
trade partners is just a passing glitch in free trade. They cannot stand
lectures from those who make more money in an hour than they do in a year about
their own bad habits or slothfulness. They don’t know what the on-screen
savants mean by a leg-tingle or a perfectly pressed pant leg or a first-class
temperament or a president as god — and they don’t care to find out. They do
not hate political correctness so much as one-sided political correctness,
which gives a pass to some to say things that would get others fired or ruined.
They don’t want to be lectured that their own plight is part of a larger,
healthy creative destruction or a leaner, meaner competitiveness or an overdue
restructuring — by those who are never destroyed, rendered noncompetitive, or
restructured. And they don’t like to be talked down to by the experts who ran
up $10 trillion in debt, ruined the health-care system, dismantled the
military, and screwed up the Secret Service, the IRS, NASA, and the VA. Trump
is their megaphone, not their solution. The Trump supporters have seen plenty
of politicians with important agendas, but few with the zeal to push them
through; at this late date, they would apparently prefer zeal without agendas
to agendas without zeal.
Trump has no loyalty to the Republican establishment or
to the conservative movement. The apparent greatest attraction for his
supporters is that he drives crazy those who worship Hillary Clinton and Barack
Obama. And if the Republican establishment implodes with the Obamism it did not
stop, well, so goes collateral damage — and in the process, woe to us all.
Trump is for a brief season our long-haired Samson, and
the two pillars of the temple he is yanking down are the Republicans to his
right and the Democrats to his left — and it will all land on top of us, the
Philistines beneath.
“And he bent with
all his might so that the house fell on the lords and all the people who were
in it. So the dead whom he killed at his death were more than those whom he
killed in his life.” Judges 16.30.
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