How America
Made Donald Trump Unstoppable
He's no ordinary con man. He's way above average
and the American political system is his easiest
mark ever
By Matt Taibbi
February 25, 2016 "Information
Clearing House"
- "Rolling
Stone
" - The first thing you notice at Donald
Trump's rallies is the confidence. Amateur
psychologists have wishfully diagnosed him from afar
as insecure, but in person the notion seems absurd.
Donald Trump, insecure? We should all have such
problems.
At the Verizon Giganto-Center in Manchester the
night before the New Hampshire primary, Trump bounds
onstage to raucous applause and the booming riffs of
the Lennon-McCartney anthem "Revolution." The song
is, hilariously, a cautionary tale about the perils
of false prophets peddling mindless revolts, but
Trump floats in on its grooves like it means the
opposite. When you win as much as he does, who the
hell cares what anything means?
He steps to the lectern and does his Mussolini
routine, which he's perfected over the past months.
It's a nodding wave, a grin, a half-sneer, and a
little U.S. Open-style applause back in the
direction of the audience, his face the whole time a
mask of pure self-satisfaction.
"This is unbelievable, unbelievable!" he says,
staring out at a crowd of about 4,000 whooping New
Englanders with snow hats, fleece and beer guts.
There's a snowstorm outside and cars are flying off
the road, but it's a packed house.
He flashes a thumbs-up. "So everybody's talking
about the cover of Time magazine last week. They
have a picture of me from behind, I was extremely
careful with my hair ... "
He strokes his famous flying fuzz-mane. It looks
gorgeous, like it's been recently fed. The crowd
goes wild. Whoooo! Trump!
It's pure camp, a variety show. He singles out a
Trump impersonator in the crowd, tells him he hopes
the guy is making a lot of money. "Melania, would
you marry that guy?" he says. The future first lady
is a Slovenian model who, apart from Trump, was most
famous for a TV ad in which she engaged in a
Frankenstein-style body transfer with the Aflac
duck, voiced by Gilbert Gottfried.
She had one line in that ad. Tonight, it's two
lines:
"Ve love you, New Hampshire," she says, in a thick
vampire accent. "Ve, together, ve vill make America
great again!"
As reactionary patriotic theater goes, this scene is
bizarre Melania Knauss didn't even arrive in
America until 1996, when she was all of 26 but the
crowd goes nuts anyway. Everything Trump does works
these days. He steps to the mic.
"She's beautiful, but she's more beautiful even on
the inside," he says, raising a finger to the
heavens. "And, boy, is she smart!"
Before the speech, the PA announcer had told us not
to "touch or harm" any protesters, but to instead
just surround them and chant, "Trump! Trump! Trump!"
until security can arrive (and presumably do the
touching and/or harming).
I'd seen this ritual several times, and the crowd
always loves it. At one event, a dead ringer for
John Oliver ripped off his shirt in the middle of a
Trump speech to reveal body paint that read "Eminent
Domain This!" on his thorax. The man shouted, "Trump
is a racist!" and was immediately set upon by Trump
supporters, who yelled "Trump! Trump! Trump!" at him
until security arrived and dragged him out the door
to cheers. The whole Trump run is like a Jerry
Springer episode, where even the losers seem in on
the gags.
In Manchester, a protester barely even manages to
say a word before disappearing under a blanket of
angry boos: "Trump! Trump! Trump!" It's a scene
straight out of Freaks. In a Trump presidency, there
will be free tar and feathers provided at the
executive's every public address.
It's a few minutes after that when a woman in the
crowd shouts that Ted Cruz is a pussy. She will
later tell a journalist she supports Trump because
his balls are the size of "watermelons," while his
opponents' balls are more like "grapes" or
"raisins."
Trump's balls are unaware of this, but he
instinctively likes her comment and decides to go
into headline-making mode. "I never expect to hear
that from you again!" he says, grinning. "She said
he's a pussy. That's terrible." Then, theatrically,
he turns his back to the crowd. As the 500 or so
reporters in attendance scramble to instantly make
this the most important piece of news in the world
in less than a year Trump has succeeded in turning
the USA into a massive high school the candidate
beams.
What's he got to be insecure about? The American
electoral system is opening before him like a
flower.
In person, you can't miss it: The same way Sarah
Palin can see Russia from her house, Donald on the
stump can see his future. The pundits don't want to
admit it, but it's sitting there in plain view, 12
moves ahead, like a chess game already won:
President Donald Trump.
A thousand ridiculous accidents needed to happen in
the unlikeliest of sequences for it to be possible,
but absent a dramatic turn of events an early
primary catastrophe, Mike Bloomberg ego-crashing the
race, etc. this boorish, monosyllabic TV tyrant
with the attention span of an Xbox-playing
11-year-old really is set to lay waste to the most
impenetrable oligarchy the Western world ever
devised.
It turns out we let our electoral process devolve
into something so fake and dysfunctional that any
half-bright con man with the stones to try it could
walk right through the front door and tear it to
shreds on the first go.
And Trump is no half-bright con man, either. He's
way better than average.
It's been well-documented that Trump surged last
summer when he openly embraced the ugly race
politics that, according to the Beltway custom of
50-plus years, is supposed to stay at the
dog-whistle level. No doubt, that's been a huge
factor in his rise. But racism isn't the only ugly
thing he's dragged out into the open.
Trump is no intellectual. He's not bringing
Middlemarch to the toilet. If he had to jail with
Stephen Hawking for a year, he wouldn't learn a
thing about physics. Hawking would come out on Day
365 talking about models and football.
But, in an insane twist of fate, this bloated
billionaire scion has hobbies that have given him
insight into the presidential electoral process. He
likes women, which got him into beauty pageants. And
he likes being famous, which got him into reality
TV. He knows show business.
That put him in position to understand that the
presidential election campaign is really just a
badly acted, billion-dollar TV show whose production
costs ludicrously include the political
disenfranchisement of its audience. Trump is making
a mockery of the show, and the Wolf Blitzers and
Anderson Coopers of the world seem appalled. How
dare he demean the presidency with his antics?
But they've all got it backward. The presidency is
serious. The presidential electoral process,
however, is a sick joke, in which everyone loses
except the people behind the rope line. And every
time some pundit or party spokesman tries to deny
it, Trump picks up another vote.
The ninth Republican debate, in Greenville, South
Carolina, is classic Trump. He turns these things
into WWE contests, and since he has actual WWE
experience after starring in Wrestlemania in 2007,
he knows how to play these moments like a master.
Interestingly, a lot of Trump's political act seems
lifted from bully-wrestlers. A clear influence is
"Ravishing" Rick Rude, an Eighties champ whose
shtick was to insult the audience. He would tell
ticket holders they were "fat, ugly sweat hogs,"
before taking off his robe to show them "what a real
sexy man looks like."
In
Greenville, Donald "The Front-Runner" Trump started
off the debate by jumping on his favorite wrestling
foil, Prince Dinkley McBirthright, a.k.a. Jeb Bush.
Trump seems to genuinely despise Bush. He never
missed a chance to rip him for being a "low-energy,"
"stiff" and "dumb as a rock" weenie who lets his
Mexican wife push him around. But if you watch Trump
long enough, it starts to seem gratuitous.
Trump's
basic argument is the same one every successful
authoritarian movement in recent Western history has
made: that the regular guy has been screwed by a
conspiracy of incestuous elites. The Bushes are half
that conspiratorial picture, fronts for a Republican
Party establishment and whose sum total of
accomplishments, dating back nearly 30 years, are
two failed presidencies, the sweeping loss of
manufacturing jobs, and a pair of pitiable Middle
Eastern military adventures the second one
achieving nothing but dead American kids and
Junior's re-election.
Trump
picked on Jeb because Jeb is a symbol. The Bushes
are a dissolute monarchy, down to offering their
last genetic screw-up to the throne.
Jeb
took the high road for most of the past calendar
year, but Trump used his gentlemanly dignity
against him. What Trump understands better than
his opponents is that NASCAR America, WWE
America, always loves seeing the preening
self-proclaimed good guy get whacked with a
chair. In Greenville, Trump went after Jeb this
time on the issue of his brother's invasion of
Iraq.
"The war
in Iraq was a big f ... fat mistake, all right?"
he snorted. He nearly said, "A big fucking
mistake." He added that the George W. Bush
administration lied before the war about Iraq
having WMDs and that we spent $2 trillion
basically for nothing.
Days
earlier, Trump had gleefully tweeted that Bush
needed his "mommy" after Jeb appeared with Lady
Barbara on a morning show.
Jeb now
went straight into character as the Man Whose
Good Name Had Been Insulted. He defended his
family and took exception to Trump having the
"gall" to go after his mother.
"I won
the lottery when I was born 63 years ago and
looked up and I saw my mom," Jeb said proudly
and lifted his chin. America loves Moms. How
could he not win this exchange? But he was
walking into a lawn mower.
"My mom
is the strongest woman I know," Jeb continued.
"She
should be running," Trump snapped.
The
crowd booed, but even that was phony. It
later came out that more than 900 of the
1,600 seats were given to local and national
GOP officials. (Trump mentioned during the
debate that he had only his wife and son
there in comparison, but few picked up on
what he was saying.) Pundits, meanwhile,
lined up to congratulate Jeb for "assailing"
Trump "Bush is finally going for it,"
The New York Times wrote but the
exchange really highlighted many of the keys
to Trump's success.
Trump
had said things that were true and that no
other Republican would dare to say. And yet
the press congratulated the candidate
stuffed with more than $100 million in donor
cash who really did take five whole days
last year to figure out his position on his
own brother's invasion of Iraq.
At
a time when there couldn't be more at stake,
with the Middle East in shambles, a major
refugee crisis, and as many as three Supreme
Court seats up for grabs (the death of
satanic quail-hunter Antonin Scalia
underscored this), the Republican Party
picked a strange year to turn the
presidential race into a potluck affair. The
candidates sent forth to take on Trump have
been so incompetent they can't even lose
properly.
One
GOP strategist put it this way: "Maybe 34
[percent] is Trump's ceiling. But 34 in a
five-person race wins."
The
numbers simply don't work, unless the field
unexpectedly narrows before March. Trump has
a chokehold on somewhere between 25 and 40
percent of the Republican vote, scoring in
one poll across every category: young and
old, educated and less so, hardcore
conservatives and registered Democrats, with
men and with women, Megyn Kelly's "wherever"
notwithstanding. Trump the Builder of
Anti-Rapist Walls even earns an estimated 25
percent of the GOP Latino vote.
Moreover, there's evidence that human
polling undercounts Trump's votes, as people
support him in larger numbers when they
don't have to admit their leanings to a live
human being. Like autoerotic asphyxiation,
supporting Donald Trump is an activity many
people prefer to enjoy in a private setting,
like in a shower or a voting booth.
The
path to unseating Trump is consolidation of
opposition, forcing him into a two- or
three-person race. Things seemed headed that
way after Iowa, when Ted Cruz won and Marco
Rubio came in third.
Rubio's Iowa celebration was a classic. The
toothy Floridian leaped onstage and
delivered a rollickingly pretentious speech
appropriate not for a candidate who just
eked out wins in five Iowa counties, but for
a man just crowned king of Jupiter.
"For months, they told us because we offered
too much optimism in a time of anger, we had
no chance," he thundered. Commentators later
noted Rubio's language was remarkably
similar to Barack Obama's florid "they said
our sights were set too high" 2008 Iowa
victory speech.
The
national punditry predictably overreacted to
Rubio's showing, having been desperate to
rally behind a traditional, party-approved
GOP candidate.
Why
do the media hate Trump? Progressive
reporters will say it's because of things
like his being crazy and the next Hitler,
while the Fox types insist it's because he's
"not conservative." But reporters mostly
loathe Trump because he regularly craps on
other reporters.
He
called Fox's Kelly a period-crazed bias
monster for asking simple questions about
Trump's past comments about women, and
launched a weirdly lengthy crusade against
little-known New Hampshire Union-Leader
publisher Joseph McQuaid for comparing Trump
to Back to the Future villain Biff
Tannen. He even mocked the neurological
condition of Times reporter Serge
Kovaleski for failing to ratify Trump's
hilariously fictional recollection of
"thousands" of Muslims celebrating after
9/11, doing an ad hoc writhing
disabled-person impersonation at a South
Carolina rally that left puppies and cancer
kids as the only groups untargeted by his
campaign. (He later denied the clearly
undeniable characterization.)
But
Trump's thin-skinned dealings with reporters
didn't fully explain the media's efforts to
prop up his opponents. We've long been
engaged in our own version of the high
school put-down game, battering nerds and
outsiders like Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich
while elevating "electable," party-approved
candidates like John McCain and John Kerry.
Thus it was no surprise that after Iowa,
columnists tried to sell the country on the
loathsome "Marcomentum" narrative, a paean
to the good old days when reporters got to
tell the public who was hot and who wasn't
the days of the "Straight Talk Express," "Joementum,"
etc.
"Marco Rubio Was the Real
Winner in Iowa," blared CNN. "Marco Rubio's
Iowa Mojo," chimed in Politico. "Forget Ted
Cruz, Marco Rubio Is the Real Winner of the
Iowa Caucuses," agreed
Vanity Fair.
Rubio, we were told, had zoomed to the front
of the "establishment lane" in timely enough
fashion to stop Trump. Of course, in the
real world, nobody cares about what happens
in the "establishment lane" except other
journalists. But even the other candidates
seemed to believe the narrative. Ohio Gov.
John Kasich staggered out of Iowa in eighth
place and was finishing up his 90th lonely
appearance in New Hampshire when
Boston-based reporters caught up to him.
"If
we get smoked up there, I'm going back to
Ohio," he lamented. Kasich in person puts on
a brave face, but he also frequently rolls
his eyes in an expression of ostentatious
misanthropy that says, "I can't believe I'm
losing to these idiots."
But
then Rubio went onstage at St. Anselm
College in the eighth GOP debate and blew
himself up. Within just a few minutes of a
vicious exchange with haranguing now-former
candidate Chris Christie, he twice delivered
the exact same canned 25-second spiel about
how Barack Obama "knows exactly what he's
doing."
Rubio's face-plant brilliantly reprised Sir
Ian Holm's performance in Alien, as
a malfunctioning, disembodied robot head
stammering, "I admire its purity," while
covered in milky android goo. It was
everything we hate about scripted mannequin
candidates captured in a brief crack in the
political faηade.
Rubio plummeted in the polls, and
Kasich, already mentally checked out,
was the surprise second-place finisher
in New Hampshire, with 15.8 percent of
the vote.
"Something big happened tonight," Kasich
said vaguely, not seeming sure what that
thing was exactly. Even worse from a
Republican point of view, Dinkley McBush
somehow finished fourth, above Rubio and
in a virtual tie with Iowa winner Ted
Cruz.
Now none of the three "establishment
lane" candidates could drop out. And the
next major contest, South Carolina, was
deemed by horse-race experts to have too
tiny an "establishment lane" vote to
decide which two out of that group
should off themselves in time for the
third to mount a viable "Stop Trump"
campaign.
All of which virtually guarantees Trump
will probably enjoy at least a
five-horse race through Super Tuesday.
So he might have this thing sewn up
before the others even figure out in
what order they should quit. It's hard
to recall a dumber situation in American
presidential politics.
"If you're Trump, you're sending flowers
to all of them for staying in," the GOP
strategist tells me. "The more the
merrier. And they're running out of time
to figure it out."
The
day after Rubio's implosion, Trump is
upstate in New Hampshire, addressing
what for him is a modest crowd of about
1,500 to 2,000 in the gym at Plymouth
State University. The crowd here is more
full-blown New England townie than
you'll find at his Manchester events:
lots of work boots, Pats merch and
f-bombs.
Trump's speeches are never scripted,
never exactly the same twice. Instead he
just riffs and feels his way through
crowds. He's no orator as anyone who's
read his books knows, he's not really
into words, especially long ones but
he has an undeniable talent for
commanding a room.
Today, knowing the debate news is in the
air, he makes sure to plunge a finger
into Rubio's wound, mocking candidates
who need scripts.
"Honestly, I don't have any
teleprompters, I don't have a speech I'm
reading to you," Trump says. Then he
switches into a nasal, weenie-politician
voice, and imitates someone reading tiny
text from a crib sheet: "Ladies and
gentlemen, it's so nice to be here in
New Hampshire, please vote for me or
I'll never speak to you again ... "
The crowd laughs. Trump also makes
sure to point a finger at the
omnipresent Giant Media Throng.
"See all those cameras back there?"
he says. "They've never driven so
far to a location."
The crowd turns to gape and sneer at
the hated press contingent, which
seems glad to be behind a rope.
Earlier, Trump had bragged about how
these same reporters had
begrudgingly admitted that he'd won
the St. Anselm debate. "They hate
it, but they gave me very high
grades."
It's simple transitive-property
rhetoric, and it works. The press
went gaga for Rubio after Iowa
because why? Because he's an
unthreatening, blow-dried,
clichι-spouting, dial-surveying
phony of the type campaign
journalists always approve of.
And when Rubio gets exposed in the
debate as a talking haircut, a
political Speak n' Spell, suddenly
the throng of journalists who spent
the past two weeks trying to sell
America on "Marcomentum" and the
all-important "establishment lane"
looks very guilty indeed. Voters
were supposed to take this
seriously?
Trump knows the public sees through
all of this, grasps the press's role
in it and rightly hates us all. When
so many Trump supporters point to
his stomping of the carpetbagging
snobs in the national media as the
main reason they're going to vote
for him, it should tell us in the
press something profound about how
much people think we suck.
Jay Matthews, a Plymouth native with
a long beard and a Trump sign, cites
Trump's press beat-downs as the
first reason he's voting Donald.
"He's gonna be his own man," he
says. "He's proving that now with
how he's getting all the media. He's
paying nothing and getting all the
coverage. He's not paying one dime."
Reporters have focused quite a lot
on the crazy/race-baiting/nativist
themes in Trump's campaign, but
these comprise a very small part of
his usual presentation. His speeches
increasingly are strikingly populist
in their content.
His pitch is: He's rich, he won't
owe anyone anything upon election,
and therefore he won't do what both
Democratic and Republican
politicians unfailingly do upon
taking office, i.e., approve
rotten/regressive policies that
screw ordinary people.
He talks, for instance, about the
anti-trust exemption enjoyed by
insurance companies, an atrocity
dating back more than half a
century, to the McCarran-Ferguson
Act of 1945. This law, sponsored by
one of the most notorious
legislators in our history (Nevada
Sen. Pat McCarran was thought to be
the inspiration for the corrupt Sen.
Pat Geary in The Godfather II),
allows insurance companies to share
information and collude to divvy up
markets.
Neither the Republicans nor the
Democrats made a serious effort
to overturn this indefensible
loophole during the debate over
the Affordable Care Act.
Trump pounds home this theme in
his speeches, explaining things
from his perspective as an
employer. "The insurance
companies," he says, "they'd
rather have monopolies in each
state than hundreds of companies
going all over the place bidding
... It's so hard for me to make
deals ... because I can't get
bids."
He goes on to explain that
prices would go down if the
state-by-state insurance
fiefdoms were eliminated, but
that's impossible because of the
influence of the industry. "I'm
the only one that's self-funding
... Everyone else is taking
money from, I call them the
bloodsuckers."
Trump isn't lying about any of
this. Nor is he lying when he
mentions that the big-pharma
companies have such a
stranglehold on both parties
that they've managed to get the
federal government to bar itself
from negotiating Medicare
prescription-drug prices in
bulk.
"I don't know what the reason is
I do know what the reason is,
but I don't know how they can
sell it," he says. "We're not
allowed to negotiate drug
prices. We pay $300 billion more
than if we negotiated the
price."
It's actually closer to $16
billion a year more, but the
rest of it is true enough. Trump
then goes on to personalize this
story. He claims (and with Trump
we always have to use
words like "claims") how it was
these very big-pharma donors,
"fat cats," sitting in the front
row of the debate the night
before. He steams ahead even
more with this tidbit: Woody
Johnson, one of the heirs of
drug giant Johnson & Johnson
(and the laughably incompetent
owner of the New York Jets), is
the finance chief for the
campaign of whipping boy Jeb
Bush.
"Now, let's say Jeb won. Which
is an impossibility, but let's
say ... "
The crowd explodes in laughter.
"Let's say Jeb won," Trump goes
on. "How is it possible for Jeb
to say, Woody, we're going to
go out and fight
competitively' ?"
This is, what not true? Of
course it's true.
What's Trump's solution?
Himself! He's gonna grab the
problem by the throat and fix it
by force!
Throughout his campaign, he's
been telling a story about a
$2.5 billion car factory that a
Detroit automaker wants to build
in Mexico, and how as president
he's going to stop it.
Humorously, he tried at one
point to say he already had
stopped it, via his persistent
criticism, citing an article on
an obscure website that claimed
the operation had moved to
Youngstown, Ohio.
That turned out to be untrue,
but, hey, what candidate for
president hasn't impulse-tweeted
the completely unprovable fact
or two? (Trump, incidentally,
will someday be in the Twitter
Hall of Fame. His fortune-cookie
mind restless,
confrontational, completely
lacking the shame/veracity
filter is perfectly engineered
for the medium.)
In any case, Trump says he'll
call Detroit carmakers into his
office and lay down an
ultimatum: Either move the jobs
back to America, or eat a 35
percent tax on every car
imported back into the U.S. over
the Mexican border.
"I'm a free-trader," he says,
"but you can only be a
free-trader when something's
fair."
It's stuff like this that has
conservative pundits from places
like the National Review
bent out of shape. Where, they
ask, is the M-F'ing love? What
about those conservative
principles we've spent decades
telling you flyover-country
hicks you're supposed to have?
"Trump has also promised to use
tariffs to punish companies,"
wrote David McIntosh in the
Review's much-publicized,
but not-effective-at-all
"Conservatives Against Trump"
22-pundit jihad. "These are not
the ideas of a small-government
conservative ... They are,
instead, the ramblings of a
liberal wanna-be strongman."
What these tweedy Buckleyites at
places like the Review
don't get is that most people
don't give a damn about
"conservative principles." Yes,
millions of people responded to
that rhetoric for years. But
that wasn't because of the
principle itself, but because it
was always coupled with the more
effective politics of
resentment: Big-government
liberals are to blame for your
problems.
Elections, like criminal trials,
are ultimately always about
assigning blame. For a
generation, conservative
intellectuals have successfully
pointed the finger at
big-government-loving,
whale-hugging liberals as the
culprits behind American
decline.
But the fact that lots of voters
hated the Clintons, Sean Penn,
the Dixie Chicks and whomever
else, did not, ever, mean that
they believed in the principle
of Detroit carmakers being able
to costlessly move American jobs
overseas by the thousands.
"We've got to do something to
bring jobs back," says one Trump
supporter in Plymouth, when
asked why tariffs are suddenly a
good idea.
Cheryl Donlon says she heard
the tariff message loud and
clear and she's fine with
it, despite the fact that it
clashes with traditional
conservatism.
"We need someone who is just
going to look at what's best
for us," she says.
I mention that Trump's plan
is virtually identical to
Dick Gephardt's idea from
way back in the 1988
Democratic presidential
race, to fight the Korean
Hyundai import wave with
retaliatory tariffs.
Donlon says she didn't like
that idea then.
Why not?
"I didn't like him," she
says.
Trump, though, she likes.
And so do a lot of people.
No one should be surprised
that he's tearing through
the Republican primaries,
because everything he's
saying about his GOP
opponents is true. They
really are all stooges on
the take, unable to stand up
to Trump because they're not
even people, but are, like
Jeb and Rubio, just robo-babbling
representatives of unseen
donors.
Back
in Manchester, an American
Legion hall half-full of
bored-looking Republicans
nurses beers and knocks
billiard balls around,
awaiting Iowa winner Ted
Cruz. The eely Texan is
presumably Trump's most
serious threat and would
later nudge past Trump in
one national poll (dismissed
by Trump as conducted by
people who "don't like me").
But New Hampshire is a
struggle for Cruz. The high
point in his entire New
England run has been his
penchant for reciting scenes
from The Princess Bride,
including the entire Billy
Crystal "your friend here is
only mostly dead" speech for
local station WMUR. The one
human thing about Cruz seems
to be that his movie
impersonations are
troublingly solid, a
consistent B-plus to
A-minus.
But stepping into the human
zone for even a few minutes
backfired. The actor Mandy
Patinkin, who played Inigo
Montoya in the film, reacted
with horror when he learned
Cruz was doing his
character's famous line "You
killed my father, prepare to
die." He accused Cruz of
deliberately leaving out the
key line in Montoya's
speech, after he finally
slays the man who killed his
father: "I've been in the
revenge business for so
long, now that it's over, I
don't know what to do with
the rest of my life."
Patinkin believed Cruz
didn't do that line because
Cruz is himself in the
revenge business, promising
to "carpet-bomb [ISIS] into
oblivion" and wondering if
"sand can glow."
Patinkin's criticism of
Cruz cut deeply,
especially after the
Iowa caucuses, when Cruz
was accused by Trump and
others of spreading a
false rumor that Ben
Carson was dropping out,
in order to steal
evangelical votes and
pad his lead.
The unwelcome attention
seemed to scare Cruz
back into scripted-bot
mode, where he's a
less-than-enthralling
presence. Cruz in person
is almost physically
repellent.
Psychology Today
even ran an article by a
neurology professor
named Dr. Richard
Cytowic about the
peculiarly off-putting
qualities of Cruz's
face.
He used a
German term,
backpfeifengesicht,
literally "a face in
need of a good punch,"
to describe Cruz. This
may be overstating
things a little. Cruz
certainly has an odd
face it looks like
someone sewed pieces of
a waterlogged Reagan
mask together at
gunpoint but it's his
tone more than anything
that gets you. He speaks
slowly and loudly and in
the most histrionic
language possible, as if
he's certain you're too
stupid to grasp that
he is for
freedom.
"The ...
Constitution ...," he
says, "serves ... as
... chains ... to ...
bind ... the ...
mischief ... of ...
government ... "
Four years ago, a
candidate like this
would have just
continued along this
path, serving up piles
of euphuistic Tea Party
rhetoric for audiences
that at the time were
still hot for the
tricorner-hat
explanation of how
Comrade Obama ruined the
American Eden.
But now, that's not
enough. In the age of
Trump, the Cruzes of the
world also have to be
rebels against the
"establishment." This
requirement makes for
some almost unbelievable
rhetorical contortions.
"Government," Cruz now
ventures, "should not be
about redistributing
wealth and benefiting
the corporations and the
special interests."
This absurd Swiss Army
clichι perfectly
encapsulates the
predicament of the
modern GOP. In one
second, Cruz is against
"redistributionism,"
which in the Obama years
was code for "government
spending on minorities."
In the next second, he's
against corporations and
special interests, the
villains du jour in the
age of Bernie Sanders
and Trump, respectively.
He's against everything
all at once. Welfare!
Corporations! Special
Interests! Government!
The Establishment! He's
that escort who'll be
into whatever you want,
for an hour.
Trump meanwhile wipes
out Cruz in his speeches
in a single, drop-the-mic
line.
"They give Ted $5
million," he says,
bringing to mind loans
Cruz took from a pair of
banks, Goldman Sachs and
Citibank.
The total was closer to
$1.2 million, but
Trump's point, that even
the supposed "outsider"
GOP candidate is just
another mindless payola
machine, is impossible
to counter.
The
unexpectedly
thrilling Democratic
Party race between
Hillary Clinton and
Bernie Sanders, too,
is breaking just
right for Trump.
It's exposing deep
fissures in the
Democratic strategy
that Trump is
already exploiting.
Every four years,
some Democrat who's
been a lifelong
friend of labor runs
for president. And
every four years,
that Democrat gets
thrown over by
national labor
bosses in favor of
some party lifer
with his signature
on a half-dozen
job-exporting
free-trade
agreements.
It's called
"transactional
politics," and the
operating idea is
that workers should
back the winner,
rather than the most
union-friendly
candidate.
This year, national
leaders of several
prominent unions
went with Hillary
Clinton who, among
other things,
supported her
husband's efforts to
pass NAFTA over
Bernie Sanders.
Pissed, the rank and
file in many locals
revolted. In New
Hampshire, for
instance, a Service
Employees
International Union
local backed Sanders
despite the national
union's endorsement
of Clinton, as did
an International
Brotherhood of
Electrical Workers
chapter.
Trump is already
positioning himself
to take advantage of
the political
opportunity afforded
him by
"transactional
politics." He
regularly hammers
the NAFTA deal in
his speeches,
applying to it his
favorite word,
"disaster." And he
just as regularly
drags Hillary
Clinton into his
hypothetical tales
of job-saving,
talking about how
she could never
convince Detroit
carmakers out of
moving a factory to
Mexico.
Unions have been
abused so much by
both parties in the
past decades that
even mentioning
themes union members
care about instantly
grabs the attention
of workers. That's
true even when it
comes from Donald
Trump, a man who
kicked off the
fourth GOP debate
saying "wages [are]
too high" and who
had the guts to tell
the Detroit News
that Michigan
autoworkers make too
much money.
You will find union
members scattered at
almost all of
Trump's speeches.
And there have been
rumors of unions
nationally
considering
endorsing Trump.
SEIU president Mary
Kay Henry even
admitted in January
that Trump appeals
to members because
of the "terrible
anxiety" they feel
about jobs.
"I know guys, union
guys, who talk about
Trump," says Rand
Wilson, an activist
from the Labor for
Bernie organization.
"I try to tell them
about Sanders, and
they don't know who
he is. Or they've
just heard he's a
socialist. Trump
they've heard of."
This is part of a
gigantic subplot to
the Trump story,
which is that many
of his critiques of
the process are the
same ones being made
by Bernie Sanders.
The two men, of
course, are polar
opposites in just
about every way
Sanders worries
about the poor,
while Trump would
eat a child in a
lifeboat but both
are laser-focused on
the corrupting role
of money in
politics.
Both propose
"revolutions" to
solve the problem,
the difference being
that Trump's is an
authoritarian
revolt, while
Sanders proposes a
democratic one. If
it comes down to a
Sanders-Trump
general election,
the matter will
probably be decided
by which candidate
the national press
turns on first: the
flatulent narcissist
with cattle-car
fantasies or the
Democrat who gently
admires Scandinavia.
Would you bet your
children on that
process playing out
sensibly?
In the meantime,
Trump is cannily
stalking the Sanders
vote. While the rest
of the GOP clowns
just roll their eyes
at Sanders, going
for cheap groans
with bits about
socialism, Trump
goes a different
route. He hammers
Hillary and
compliments Sanders.
"I agree with
[Sanders] on two
things," he says.
"On trade, he said
we're being ripped
off. He just doesn't
know how much."
He goes on. "And
he's right with
Hillary because,
look, she's
receiving a fortune
from a lot of
people."
At a Democratic town
hall in Derry, New
Hampshire, Hillary's
strangely pathetic
answer about why she
accepted $675,000
from Goldman to give
speeches "That's
what they offered"
seemed doomed to
become a touchstone
for the
general-election
contest. Trump would
go out on Day One of
that race and blow
$675,000 on a pair
of sable underwear,
or a solid-gold
happy-face necktie.
And he'd wear it 24
hours a day, just to
remind voters that
his opponent sold
out for the Trump
equivalent of lunch
money.
Trump will surely
argue that the
Clintons are the
other half of the
dissolute-conspiracy
story he's been
selling,
representing a
workers' party that
abandoned workers
and turned the
presidency into a
vast cash-for-access
enterprise, avoiding
scrutiny by making
Washington into
Hollywood East and
turning labor
leaders and
journalists alike
into starstruck
courtiers. As with
everything else,
Trump personalizes
this, making his
stories of buying
Hillary's presence
at his wedding a
part of his stump
speech. A race
against Hillary
Clinton in the
general, if it
happens, will be a
pitch right in
Trump's wheelhouse
and if Bill Clinton
is complaining about
the "vicious"
attacks by the
campaign of
pathological nice
guy Bernie Sanders,
it's hard to imagine
what will happen
once they get hit by
the Trumpdozer.
The
electoral
roadshow, that
giant ball of
corrupt
self-importance,
gets bigger and
more
grandiloquent
every four
years. This time
around, there
was so much
press at the
Manchester
Radisson, you
could have wiped
out the entire
cable-news
industry by
detonating a
single Ryder
truck full of
fertilizer.
Like the actual
circus, this is
a roving
business. Cash
flows to
campaigns from
people and
donors;
campaigns buy
ads; ads pay for
journalists;
journalists
assess
candidates.
Somewhat
unsurprisingly,
the ever-growing
press corps
tends in most
years to like
or at least deem
"most serious"
the candidates
who buy the most
ads. Nine out of
10 times in
America, the
candidate who
raises the most
money wins. And
those candidates
then owe the
most favors.
Meaning that for
the pleasure of
being able to
watch insincere
campaign
coverage and see
manipulative
political ads on
TV for free, we
end up having to
pay inflated
Medicare drug
prices, fund
bank bailouts
with our taxes,
let billionaires
pay 17 percent
tax rates, and
suffer a
thousand other
indignities.
Trump is right:
Because Jeb Bush
can't afford to
make his own
commercials, he
would go into
the White House
in the pocket of
a drug
manufacturer. It
really is that
stupid.
The triumvirate
of big media,
big donors and
big political
parties has
until now
successfully
excluded every
challenge to its
authority. But
like every
aristocracy, it
eventually got
lazy and
profligate, too
sure it was
loved by the
people. It's now
shocked that
voters in
depressed
ex-factory towns
won't keep
pulling the
lever for
"conservative
principles," or
that union
members bitten a
dozen times over
by a trade deal
won't just keep
voting
Democratic on
cue.
Trump isn't the
first rich guy
to run for
office. But he
is the first to
realize the
weakness in the
system, which is
that the
watchdogs in the
political media
can't resist a
car wreck. The
more he insults
the press, the
more they cover
him: He's
pulling 33 times
as much coverage
on the major
networks as his
next-closest GOP
competitor, and
twice as much as
Hillary.
Trump found the
flaw in the
American Death
Star. It doesn't
know how to turn
the cameras off,
even when it's
filming its own
demise.
The problem, of
course, is that
Trump is crazy.
He's like every
other corporate
tyrant in that
his solution to
most things
follows the
logic of Stalin:
no person, no
problem. You're
fired! Except as
president he'd
have other
people-removing
options, all of
which he likes:
torture, mass
deportations,
the banning of
23 percent of
the Earth's
population from
entering the
United States,
etc.
He seems to be
coming around to
the idea that
having an ego
smaller than
that of, say, an
Egyptian Pharaoh
would be a sign
of weakness. So
of late, his
already-insane
idea to build a
"beautiful" wall
across the
Mexican border
has evolved to
the point where
he also wants
the wall to be
named after him.
He told Maria
Bartiromo he
wanted to call
it the "Great
Wall of Trump."
In his mind, it
all makes sense.
Drugs come from
Mexico; the wall
will keep out
Mexicans;
therefore, no
more drugs.
"We're gonna
stop it," he
says. "You're
not going to
have the drugs
coming in
destroying your
children. Your
kids are going
to look all over
the place and
they're not
going to be able
to find them."
Obviously!
Because no one's
ever tried
wide-scale drug
prohibition
before.
And as bad as
our media is,
Trump is trying
to replace it
with a worse
model. He
excommunicates
every reporter
who so much as
raises an
eyebrow at his
insanity,
leaving him with
a
small-but-dependable
crowd of
groveling
supplicants who
in a Trump
presidency would
be the royal
media. He even
waves at them
during his
speeches.
"Mika and Joe
are here!" he
chirped at the
MSNBC morning
hosts at a New
Hampshire event.
The day after he
won the New
Hampshire
primary, he
called in to
their show to
thank them for
being
"supporters." To
her credit, Mika
Brzezinski tried
to object to the
characterization,
interrupting Joe
Scarborough, who
by then had
launched into a
minute-long
homily about how
happy he was to
be a bug on the
windshield of
the Trump
phenomenon.
You think the
media sucks now?
Just wait until
reporters have
to kiss a brass
Trump-sphinx
before they
enter the White
House press
room.
"He has all
these crazy
ideas, and
[reporters] are
so scared of
him, they don't
ask him any
details," says
Michael Pleyte,
an Iraq vet who
came all the way
from Michigan to
watch the New
Hampshire
primary in
person. "Forget
about A to Z,
they don't even
ask him to go A
to Trump."
King Trump.
Brace
yourselves,
America. It's
really
happening.
|
