Atlantic (Opinion)
By Conor Friedersdorf
July 13, 2015
There
is an Ivy League grad who has spent most of his life in Manhattan,
where he is chauffeured around in limousines. He frequently brags to
strangers about his massive
personal wealth. In public statements, he has advocated government
healthcare, a woman’s right to an abortion, an assault weapons ban, and
paying off the national debt by forcing rich people to forfeit 14.25
percent of their total wealth. When the man married
his third wife, he invited Bill and Hillary Clinton to the wedding, and
he has given many thousands to their political campaigns and their
foundation. He’s donated many thousands more that helped elect Democrats
to the Senate and the House. And George W. Bush
was “maybe the worst president in the history of this country,” the man
said in 2008. “He was so incompetent, so bad, so evil.”
On
paper, this is not someone you’d expect to excel in the 2016 Republican
Party primary. But Donald Trump is excelling. Thanks to his celebrity, a
few epic flip-flops,
and his willingness to pander to the most xenophobic element of the
GOP’s base, the real-estate developer and reality-TV star is polling
near the top of the field. While he is unlikely to win the nomination,
he may well appear at the presidential debates and
continue to tarnish the GOP brand in the eyes of Hispanic voters. “When
Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” Trump said
during his official announcement. “They’re sending people that have lots
of problems. And they’re bringing those problems
with us. They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re
rapists, and some, I assume, are good people.”
As
execrable as those highly misleading beliefs would be if earnestly
held, it is arguably worse for a man to disingenuously stoke xenophobia
to advance his political
prospects.
Thus
it is worth noting that, after Mitt Romney’s 2012 loss, Donald Trump
told the website Newsmax that Republicans would continue to lose
elections if they came across
as mean-spirited and unwelcoming to people of color. Democrats were
kind toward illegal immigrants, Trump said, whereas Romney “had a crazy
policy of self deportation which was maniacal. It sounded as bad as it
was, and he lost all of the Latino vote. He lost
the Asian vote. He lost everybody who is inspired to come into this
country.” He added that the GOP needs a comprehensive solution to “this
incredible problem that we have with respect to immigration, with
respect to people wanting to be wonderful, productive
citizens of this country.”
These
discordant statements praising and savaging immigrants are not entirely
unlike one another—they’re both framed as bold efforts to tell it like
it is. Donald Trump
is a master at that affectation. He seems as if he is fearlessly
stating his core convictions, consequences be damned, even when he is
being a shameless poseur.
Some conservatives understand this.
At
National Review, where Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann, and Herman Cain,
the populist poseurs of the last election cycle, were treated with as
much respect as contempt,
the rise of Donald Trump has been met with a mix of horror and open
disdain.“I truly, honestly, and with all my heart and mind think Donald
Trump’s most ardent supporters are making a yuuuuuuge mistake. I think
they are being conned and played,” Jonah Goldberg,
the author of Liberal Fascism, wrote. “I feel like a guy whose brother
is being taken advantage of by a grifter. I’m watching helplessly as the
con artist congratulates him for taking out a third mortgage.”
Other
National Review writers concurred. “Donald Trump has been a
conservative for about ten minutes,” Jim Geraghty wrote. Ramesh Ponnuru
noted Trump’s bygone support
for legal late-term abortion. Rich Lowry, who wrote an ill-considered
Politico column using Trump’s remarks as if they were a good peg to
persuade people to cut back on legal immigration, has criticized him for
failing to adequately learn about the subject
matter he is discussing, calling some of his remarks on immigration
“completely absurd.”
Says Mona Charen, not to be outdone:
It
seems that Trump is the answer only if the question is: Why can’t we
get more oafish egomaniacs into politics? Just when the Republican party
needs finesse and sensitivity
when discussing immigration; just when it needs to focus on issues that
unite all sectors of the electorate, including Hispanic and Asian
voters; it gets a blowhard with all the nuance of a grenade.
And
even that biting criticism cannot compete with the derisive takedowns
of Kevin Williamson, who has recently published the following remarks
about The Donald:
“Donald
Trump may be the man America needs. Having been through four
bankruptcies, the ridiculous buffoon with the worst taste since Caligula
is uniquely positioned to
lead the most indebted organization in the history of the human race.”
“...the
self-made man who started with nothing but a modest portfolio of 27,000
New York City properties acquired by his millionaire slumlord father,
barely out of his
latest bankruptcy and possibly headed for another one as the
casino/jiggle-joint bearing his name sinks into the filthy mire of the
one U.S. city that makes Las Vegas look respectable, a
reality-television grotesque with his plastic-surgery-disaster wife,
grunting like a baboon about our country’s ‘brand’...”
“His announcement speech was like Finnegans Wake as reimagined by an unlettered person with a short attention span.”
“The value of speaking one’s mind depends heavily on the mind in question, and Trump’s is second-rate.”
“Trump’s
performance-art character is butch in the sense that certain gay icons
are butch — bikers, cowboys, and the rest of the Village People — and
appealing to certain
men for similar reasons, one of which is overcompensation for threats
against their virility.”
“The
problem with messiah complexes is that there’s no way to know whether
you are going to rise on the third day unless somebody crucifies you.
Trump has announced, and
I say we get started on that.”
Amid
those zings, Williamson also astutely observed that Trump “brings out
two of the Right’s worst tendencies: the inability to distinguish
between entertainers and political
leaders, and the habit of treating politics as an exercise in emotional
vindication.”
That
brings us to the influential conservatives who are falling for Trump as
he aggrandizes himself at the expense of the Republican Party’s image
and electoral prospects.
Most important is Rush Limbaugh, the most popular conservative talk
radio host:
When
this program started, people did react to it in a way that indicated
they were being validated. The media when this program started
criticized it by saying I was
a Svengali and you're a bunch of mind-numbed robots, and you were brain
dead until I came along. I started telling you what to think and how
to think because you didn't have the ability. And it's totally wrong.
What really happened was you didn't have anybody
else.
There
wasn't anybody in national media saying things that you believe and in
ways that you would say them. And that's what I did. I came along and I
validated what people
already believed. There were no mind-numbed robots. He's saying Trump
is doing the same thing. Trump is articulating what a vast majority of
people think about what's going on here with amnesty and illegal
immigration that nobody else says. Either they
don't have the guts to say it or they don't believe it or what have
you.
His
question is, "How long is Trump going to hold out? How long is Trump
going to go?" He says, "It would be great if Trump had half the life
you had on radio." But
Trump is doing more than that. In addition to articulating those
things. Trump is actually taking the media on. He's going to every one
of these Drive-By Media places and he's throwing it right back in their
faces, all the conventional wisdom that they're
hitting him with and all the conventional wisdom that is wrong. He's
just nuking it right back at them.
Sarah
Palin, whose writing is similar to her extemporaneous speech, is
another notable Trump supporter—she posted the following message to her
Facebook page, reiterating
her belief that if someone is criticized in the media they must be
tops:
Mr.
Trump should know he's doing something right when the malcontents go
ballistic in the press! There is no denying Donald J. Trump's
accomplishments and drive to create
opportunity for every willing American to succeed. His own success is
testament to the job-creating achievements made possible when one
applies the courageous and tenacious pro-private sector precepts we need
to fire up the economy. Trump joins a competitive
field of GOP candidates that will duke it out in the arena of ideas and
track records, a field representing diverse achievements. This, in
contrast with the pro-big government party's practice of merely
anointing a chosen one, thus robbing voters of healthy
debate.
Key
to conservative's victory is to do our own vetting of each candidate,
focus on their ability to unleash America's entrepreneurial spirit and
dramatically shrink government
in order to prioritize our nation's security. That means we ignore the
media's participation in the liberals' Pantsuit Politics of Personal
Destruction. THEN, on an even playing field, in 2016 we charge forward
after the radical left hears America shout, "You're
fired!"
And the Breitbart websites are also notable for the favorable coverage they’ve given Trump:
Back
in 1988, reviewing Donald Trump’s first bestseller, The Art of the
Deal, Janet Scott Barlow wrote, “He is a staggeringly unique individual
who is also a regular guy,
a one-of-a-kind business colossus who proves his humanity by inviting
anyone––everyone––to be impressed by him. It is a dual message of
egomania and condescension that could be taken seriously only by
compulsive role players with time on their hands.”
Now
that Trump is polling at the top of the GOP field, all those
conservatives who have in the past treated Limbaugh, Palin,
Breitbart.com, and their ilk as credible voices
who look out for the best interests of the conservative base are partly
responsible for his rise.
They’ve helped to create a comical celebrity monster.
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