I’ve got those
DT Blues.
I have tried,
and I can’t shake them. Those DT Blues
have been getting me down. It’s
possible—not necessarily likely but definitely possible—that Donald Trump will
defy the laws of nature (those he doesn’t deny) and become our next President.
As Sherlock
Holmes once said, “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no
matter how improbable, must be the truth.”
It’s a great
line from the Great Detective, but improbabilities don’t happen all that often
in politics. Yes, there is the odd upset
in a primary, and once in a while you have a wave election where even old
favorites can get swept away. But
Presidential politics—especially in the primary era, does not lend itself to
the weird and outré. There just aren’t
that many longshot candidacies that end in success—there are the “quixotic” and
the pretenders, the contenders and the winners. Obama might have surprised
Hillary in 2008, but he was already considered a supernova by that time. Other candidates in recent years—Romney,
McCain, Bush the Younger, Dole, Bush Senior, Reagan, Ford and Nixon were all
established party names. The Democrats could get a little funkier—Carter and McGovern
in particular, but the edge for an Establishment-favored or even accepted
candidate, from name recognition, to money, to institutional help, was so
significant that the idea of a successful Trump candidacy seemed absurd.
Yet, here he
is. When historians do the post-mortem
of this election, and particularly, on the nominating process, they may very
well focus on the fragmented field, the surprising underperformance by those
candidates who should have been better, and most importantly, on the emergence
of a potent populism. But what
Republicans (actually, pretty much all of us) clearly did not see was that, in
a strange sort of way, the quadrennial complaints of the hard-right were
actually correct—the GOP never had nominated a “true” conservative, and, by
doing so, had never really energized the base.
This is where
Trump, and his brilliantly asynchronous campaign, achieved complete tactical
surprise. Conservatism is not
necessarily just some pristine set of principles laid out for all time like the
Ten Commandments. Rather, it is a pulse, a way of thinking about things, an
urgency for command, a desire for order, and a willingness to use power to
impose that order.
Trump’s
opponents, and the GOP at the institutional level, failed to recognize that. They simply assumed that the primary battle
would take place on familiar ground—a group of basically like-minded people fighting
over narrow slices of ground defined mostly by tone and not substance. So they all just read from the same hymnal, some
with a little more fire and brimstone than the others, all while trying to
appear “Presidential.” When Trump began to show some staying power, they (and
their allies in the media and intelligentsia) began banging a new drum. Trump was
not only coarse and un-Presidential; he wasn’t even a conservative.
But he was a
conservative. Not a check-the-box type, but, rather, at the gut level. That’s
why he has the nomination—he didn’t win it by default—he’s wanted,
passionately, by a determined group of primary voters who liked both what he
said, and the way he said it.
One of the great
paradoxes of Trump’s appeal is that a made-for-television personality could
actually appear to be authentic. He’s lived his life out in the open, courted
publicity, bragged about his sex life, threatened, cajoled, promoted,
bankrupted. What many of us (Left, Center and Right) didn’t expect was that his
apparently unscripted boorishness and his manifest dislike for certain ethnic
groups somehow added to his authenticity, and made him more appealing to some. All of us know “a guy” and maybe a few “guys”
who say things that make you wince. He’s
the shirtless one at the 4th of July picnic manning the grill,
flipping burgers and dogs and chicken, popping open cans of beer, and running
off a bit at the mouth. Some of us like
what he says, because, to tell the truth, we don’t particularly cotton to
“those people” all that much anyway, and we are tired of all this pussy-footing
around about hurting people’s feelings. The insulted ones should man up and not
be so sensitive—and maybe they should leave, and take their funny accents and
their different cultures elsewhere. That
Trump wears a fancy suit instead of tank-top, and still talks like that, just
shows how potent he is. Nobody tells
Trump what to say. Trump doesn’t take
guff. He will put down those tongs and the 25-ounce Bud and lay you out—or,
have one of his friends do it for him. So either join in the fun, have a beer
and a brat, or shut the heck up.
OK, the
billionaire gets the Archie Bunker crowd. For his supporters on the far right,
they hear a little goose-step in his swagger (and tweets) and they love it. For NRA members, Trump-world will be a land
where you get a high-five for packing heat, not some scolding. For displaced blue-collar workers tired of
seeing their jobs shipped somewhere, Trump’s going to tear up every trade deal,
every last piece of paper that sucks the life out of their communities, because
he’s a world-class negotiator.
But even that
doesn’t make you President. So, as with
any good salesman, wait…there’s more! If
you own a small business, you are tired of dumb regulations and filling out
forms, Trump will do something about that. Maybe you lost out on a promotion or
your daughter got turned down at the college of her choice, and you don’t think
it was done on merit—Trump will do something about that. Or your Social Security—Trump says he will
protect that. It could just be Hillary—Trump
will clean her clock in November and send her to jail, and boy, don’t those
Clintons (especially her) deserve their comeuppance?
From all that,
you start to see the outlines of a winning coalition—but not everyone who
should be is on board. I have read literally hundreds of editorials, op-eds,
and syndicated pieces by conservative authors.
Many are highly critical of Trump—George Will has actually left the GOP
over his nomination, and the distinguished scholar Charles Murray has said he
can’t support the candidacy. Senior members of the Bush Administration’s
national security team have even gone so far as to say they will vote for
Clinton. It’s not easy to buck party
loyalty (for confirmation, watch Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, and John McCain
try to retain their dignity while kneeling) but these people, and like-minded
others, as well as some very big money people, realize that a Trump Presidency
is a bridge too far for them. They will
sit it out, or spend their energies down-ballot.
Yet, all those
finely-honed and sincere pieces are just a whisper in a storm. Here’s another one from the Washington Post “I
hate Donald Trump, but he might get my vote.” It’s by a gentlemen named Jim Ruth. He identifies himself as part of the “New
Silent Majority” and says, “We are under
no illusions about Trump. We know that this Man Who Would Be King is a classic
bully and a world-class demagogue in his personal, professional and political
lives. He will continue to demonize his perceived enemies and take the low road
at every opportunity…. So why then would rational, affluent, informed citizens
consider voting for The Donald? Short of not voting at all — still an option
some of us are considering — he’s the only one who appears to want to preserve
the American way of life as we know it.”
And that is the
one note Trump’s been playing on his Gibson, better than anyone else: Command, order, and control—the true modern conservatism.
It’s left me
with those DT Blues.
July 5, 2016
Michael
Liss (Moderate Moderator)
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