The Real Donald Trump

There's been a lot going on the past few days. The terrorist attack in San Bernardino and the international climate change agreement reached in Paris are big news, and legitimately so. But I think it's time to directly address the phenomenon that is the candidacy of Donald Trump. I have commented on him before in these pages, but not with the directness and bluntness I feel is now necessarily called for.

Trump is a classic demagogue. His popularity is the encapsulation of every angry, mean-spirited, bigoted, xenophobic, violent, ill-informed, racist element in the Republican Party. The principal driving force of his support is fear, and he plays on it as adroitly as Segovia ever strummed the classical guitar. Trump's slogan may be "Make America Great Again" but his message is never about building up America or encouraging the greatness of its people. His stump speech instead begins with about half an hour of bombastic blather about how great Trump is, followed by another half hour of naming scapegoats and tearing them down. This began on day one of his campaign, when he announced that immigrants from Mexico were "rapists, murderers and thieves." He has spoken approvingly of the Japanese internment of World War II and "Operation Wetback," which rounded up Mexican-Americans, many of them natural born citizens, and expelled them. He has also demeaned women, Vietnam veterans, blacks and Muslims.  His misogynistic insults against Megyn Kelly and Carly Fiorina were followed by assertions that a black protester manhandled at one of his rallies "should have been roughed up." John McCain, who was tortured for his country for years as a POW in North Vietnam was a "loser" for letting himself be captured.

Trump has concocted a story that American Muslims celebrated the fall of the Twin Towers on 9/11. He says people who are entering the U.S. should be asked their religion and barred entrance if they are Muslim, and that Muslim citizens should be "registered" and have to wear identifying labels like the Jews of Nazi Europe. For months he kept the "birther" controversy boiling about President Obama's citizenship. Whether Mexican, woman, black or Muslim, the recurring theme is that people who are different are scary and must be delegitimized and eliminated. Trump's references to his opponents in the race are similarly pitched to the basest level of personal invective. They are "stupid," "losers," "psychos," "weak," "ugly," and "dumb," to name a few of the dizzying succession of schoolyard taunts he hurls at those with the temerity to run against him.

Based on the large number of contradictory statements he has made over the past many years in the public eye, it is impossible to tell whether he actually believes any of these things. I tend to think he probably does not. Rather, I think he knows exactly what he's doing: appealing to the fear, bigotry and desire for an authoritarian leader he knows is rampant in the Republican base with the design of riding that to the nomination and perhaps the White House. The Republican establishment is in a panic about Trump's popularity and his chances of garnering the nomination, but they have only themselves to blame. For years they have fed these fears in the base through their statements and their media outlets. They have succeeded in whipping their adherents into a frenzy of fear and hate. They have finally run up against a sharp and unscrupulous publicity hound who understands what has been created and knows how to take advantage of it. Instead of appealing to these dark intimations obliquely like 'respectable' Republicans do, Trump goes ahead and directly plays to them right out loud, and the haters love him for his 'honesty.' Not only the GOP establishment, but the whole nation now reaps the whirlwind.