Donald Trump And Celebrity Populism

By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK

It is among the most quoted biblical passages, a favorite of Christians and non-Christians alike: “How is it that thou canst see the speck of dust which is in thy brother’s eye, and are not aware of the beam which is in thy own?”
Jesus’ words hit all the right notes. The Lord warns of ignoring your own faults while you defame others, of hypocrisy, of what the old Baltimore Catechism used to call the sins of calumny and detraction. The passage came to mind when I read E.J. Dionne’s attack on Donald Trump and his supporters.
There are reasons to be unhappy with Trump’s candidacy, but no one deserves a cheap shot. That is what Dionne hit him with in the May 20 issue of Commonweal. (Dionne’s columns are syndicated by The Washington Post.) He attacked Trump for things he has overlooked for years now in his favorite liberal Democratic politicians. Trump is the speck, Barack Obama and the Clintons are the beam. William F. Buckley was fond of using the term “selective indignation” when describing liberals. It fits Dionne.
The headline for Dionne’s column is “The Irony of Celebrity Populism: How Trump Exposes the Weaknesses of Our Political Culture.” He accuses Trump of bringing about “the demolition of the line between celebrity and political achievement,” of “converting fame directly into electoral currency, moving from celebrity to front-runner status without going through the messy time-consuming work” of holding political office.
Dionne contends that “Ronald Reagan, given his Hollywood standing, may be the closest historical analogue to Trump. But Trump did not spend eight years as governor of a large state. There is a perverse purity to Trump’s great leap.”
Dionne bemoans the manner in which Trump has recruited “celebrity allies he accumulated in the course of his career as a fame-monger to validate his quest. Facing a decisive challenge in the Indiana primary, Trump hauled out an endorsement from Bobby Knight, a state icon from his successful if controversial run as Indiana University’s basketball coach.” He charges that Trump “has been able to convert fame and outrage into votes without even a moment of apprenticeship in public service.”
Egads. Whatever one thinks of Trump as a man and as a potential president, it is silly to contend that he is not far more accomplished than Barack Obama and Bill Clinton were when they assumed the presidency. It is not even close.
Obama’s career as a community organizer, state senator, and his brief stint as a member of the United States Senate resulted in nothing of significance. Check the record. There is no major legislation that his supporters can point to. He was chosen by Democratic Party voters in his first run for the presidency for the same reason he was given the Nobel Peace Prize during the first days of his term in office: on the basis of what his supporters saw as “promise” and his image as a “transformational” figure.
The same can be said about Bill Clinton. He was a lackluster governor of a small Southern state, with no major accomplishments to call his own. He won the Democratic Party nomination because he was young and telegenic and possessed the ability to convey a folksy charm in his speeches.
Hillary is no different. She had nothing consequential on her résumé when she ran for the Senate seat in New York, other than being the wife of a former president. And she accomplished little in New York before she was appointed secretary of state by Barack Obama.
When Hillary’s supporters are asked in television interviews to list some of her accomplishments as secretary of state, it is startling. They offer nothing other than clichés about here “extensive travel” to foreign capitals and the “energy” she has shown in pursing world peace. That and the fact that she will be the first woman president and will break “the glass ceiling” that has held women back in the United States.
You can sympathize with Hillary’s apologists. From Benghazi, to the “Arab spring,” to Libya, to the Russian “reset,” it is a record of failure. There is no there there. It is what you get when you pursue foreign policy guided by the left-wing framework that depicts our enemies as misunderstood idealists and the United States as a force for evil in the world.
In contrast, Trump’s experience with world financiers, lawyers, labor leaders, architects, construction engineers, government leaders, urban planners, and commercial vendors of every type is vast and of great consequence. None of that, in and of itself makes Trump a good man, or a fit candidate for the presidency. But it makes him an experienced man, a knowledgeable man, a smart, competent, and accomplished man, the things that E.J. Dionne is focusing on in his column.
One of the favorite barbs the left is hurling against Trump these days is that he would be wealthier now, if he had taken the million dollars his father gave him to start his career and invested in an S&P 500 stock index fund. I have no way of knowing whether that is true. Neither do the critics who hit him with the accusation, of course. They are journalistic hit-men.
But even if it is true, the point is that Trump did not sit back and live out his life as a trust fund baby. He built companies and created tens of thousands of well-paying jobs, both in his own companies and the companies that provided him with goods and services. It is laughable to compare his accomplishments to Obama’s or the Clintons’. The Clintons have made their $221 million by providing access to the taxpayers’ money for the wealthy donors who pay them to make speeches. That’s it. They posture as movers and shakers when they are nothing but takers.
When Dionne writes more favorably of the achievements of Obama and the Clintons than he does Trump’s success in the private sector, he reveals the statist bias that lies at the heart of the liberal establishment. Big government and those who promote it are always looked on favorably in their world. The liberals are entitled to that opinion, of course. But there is no reason for the rest of us to not take notice of how it colors their view of events and public figures.
One last thing: How can Dionne keep a straight face when he expresses disdain for Trump soliciting an endorsement from Bobby Knight to advance his campaign? Look at the long line of Hollywood types that fall all over themselves to give endorsements and organize fund-raisers for Obama and the Clintons. Are we supposed to see Knight’s endorsement as undignified, but hold Susan Sarandon, Barbra Streisand, Harvey Weinstein, and George Clooney as exemplars of public-spiritedness?
I can’t help but wonder how H.L. Mencken would react to Dionne’s column. My hunch is that he would tear it apart. Then again, maybe he already did that. It is as if the early 20th-century curmudgeon was blessed with foresight:
“The main thing that every political campaign in the United States demonstrates is that politicians of all parties, despite their superficial enmities, are really members of one great brotherhood. Their principal, indeed their sole, objective is to collar public office, with all the privileges and profits that go therewith. They achieve this collaring by buying votes with other people’s money.”
Also: “If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner.”