By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
Back in 2011, the last time Donald Trump was talking about himself as a candidate for the presidency, I took the position in this space in The Wanderer that we “should not fall” for his sales pitch. I argued that Trump was all bluster and slogans, with no serious, thought-out policy recommendations; that he never moved beyond self-congratulatory rhetoric about how “smart, really smart” and “tough” he is.
Things have not changed since 2011. Trump is still all sizzle and no steak, with a campaign filled with promises to not let our enemies “walk all over us” and to “make America great again,” with no specifics about how he will do these things. Does that mean I still recommend that people not pay attention to Trump? No. Something has changed.
Such as? Look: Trump is not going to win the Republican nomination. By the time you read these words, his habit of putting his foot in his mouth may have effectively removed him from the race. He looks less presidential every day. But what we have ask ourselves is not whether Trump can become president, but why so many people are backing him, including many, I suspect, who agree with what he has to say but tell the pollsters that they would not vote for him.
Trump’s moment at center stage — however brief it turns out to be — is creating the pressure needed to move the eventual Republican nominee to run a campaign that addresses the issues that catapulted Trump to the top of the polls in mid-July. It would be a good thing to keep Trump on the stage for a while. Maybe for quite a while.
What issues? Michael A. Cohen, writing in the Boston Globe on July 18, says it is “bashing immigrants” in a manner that appeals to Republican “base voters” who are “overwhelmingly white and old” and who “don’t look kindly on politicians who want to improve the party’s appeal among Hispanics, and can clearly be reached by a racist demagogue with lots of money and bad hair.”
Cohen doesn’t get it; unless he is engaging in a cheap shot calculated to serve his agenda. No doubt there are some racists and xenophobes among the people backing Trump, but they do not explain his high poll numbers. The people supporting Trump don’t “hate” immigrants. Most of them would favor an orderly process of immigration designed to meet our employment needs, without making American citizens feel like strangers in their own country.
What they oppose are the waves of illegal immigrants pouring across our borders as if those borders do not apply to them, while our government acts as if it is more concerned about their rights than those of the people already living here. The American people want a government that represents them. It is not an unreasonable demand. They see Trump as a man who wants the same thing.
For over two decades now the voters have watched our elected leaders, both Democrat and Republican, act as if there is nothing our government can do to protect us from millions of people crossing our borders illegally. The polls tell us that the American people refuse to accept that as the new normal. They are convinced that the problem is that the government does not want to protect the borders. Trump has packaged himself as a man who will change that situation; that he will shrug off the charges of racism and xenophobia that will be thrown at him when he goes about addressing the problem.
There’s more: The professional politicians tell us we are defenseless against the loss of American jobs to Mexico and China, that the price of participating in the global economy is the hollowing out of our industrial base; that we are no longer a society where a hard-working young man or woman with a high school diploma can find a job to support their families in the manner of the blue-collar families of the past, that those jobs are “lost forever”; that we should “get over it”; that our government can’t help us in this matter.
Trump offers an alternative to that despair. He promises to use tax and trade policies to create an economy that benefits American workers, not just the East and West Coast elites. The people drawn to Trump do not want a defeatist government that promises to do little more find a way to make America’s economic decline as painless as possible. Can Trump deliver on this promise? Who knows? But the voters want someone who will try.
Trump’s backers see him as a leader who would use the power of the central government to back police forces trying to control urban rioters, rather than support local politicians who order them to stand back and be pelted by rocks and bottles while they watch entire neighborhoods being set aflame. Trump is appealing to voters who think it common sense that our government should see its primary responsibility to be ending riots, not protecting the rights of the rioters. They are convinced that Trump will not reflexively side with the rioters, a tendency that is evident in the current administration. Sorry; it is true. There is a track record.
The voters are also confident that a Trump administration would not go through contortions to never use the terms “Islamic terrorist” or “jihadi terrorist” to describe Muslim men who shoot soldiers and Marines on American military installations. The great majority of the American people scratch their heads when they see Obama spokesmen concocting terms like “workplace violence” to describe these attacks. They see Trump as a leader who would not deploy a team of policy wonks to play these word games.
Trump remains a long shot. My guess is that he will not make it far into the primary season. Indeed, I doubt that he really wants the job of living in the White House and reporting to work every morning in the Oval Office. It is not hard to imagine him someday soon withdrawing from the race, proclaiming proudly that that he is “rich, really rich,” and “doesn’t need nitpicking criticism” from people who couldn’t afford the rent for a studio apartment in Trump Tower.
But for now, Trump is teaching professional politicians an important lesson. He is illustrating that Republican candidates need not go on an instant apology tour every time they say something that the mainstream press and the interviewers on the Sunday morning talk shows find inappropriate. Trump is showing us that what Richard Nixon used to call the Silent Majority may still be a sleeping giant, waiting to be mobilized. That mobilization is the only thing that can stop what seems to be the inexorable national decline that is taking place.
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