One fundamental thing to keep in mind in any discussion of Donald Trump
Is that his appeal is essentially emotional, not rational. Politics generally
engage people’s emotions to one degree or another, but to his die-hard
supporters, Trump’s appeal is almost entirely emotional. He purports to have
some policies—building a wall, deporting illegals, repealing Obamacare, or now,
letting it implode, reforming the tax code, restricting immigration by
Muslims—but he changes his positions so often, and so glibly, and at so little
cost to his base of support, it’s obvious the fanatical devotion he inspires
among so many middle- and working-class white people has very little to with
matters of policy. His supporters are devoted not to his policies but to him.
We have in the US what we have long seen in dictatorships right and left: a
personality cult.
Some
commentators are making much of the fact that voters in Alabama’s recent
special primary election ignored Trump’s intervention on behalf of the
incumbent, Luther Strange, appointed earlier this year to replace Jeff Sessions,
who had resigned his seat in the Senate to become Trump’s attorney general, and
voted instead for the archconservative firebrand Roy Moore. Breitbart cited
that result as evidence of the supposed fact that Trumpism is bigger than
Trump, that the fidelity of the people who elected Trump is more to the ideas
he stands for than to Trump himself. But the critical thing with Trump is
style, not substance—he has no substance—and stylistically Moore bears a closer
resemblance to him than Strange does. In a very real sense, Trump’s strategic
endorsement of the other guy notwithstanding, Moore’s victory was more an
affirmation than a rejection of Trump, and Trump himself is probably not
unhappy about it.
Trump’s
appeal to his supporters is less ideological than tribal. It’s more
personality- than policy-driven. It’s performance driven, but only in the
vaudevillian sense. It’s not rational, it’s emotional. Emotionally both Trump
and his devotees in Alabama and elsewhere are much more in tune with Moore, the
Bible-thumping culture warrior, than with Strange, the staunch but
common-garden-variety Southern conservative, and for the same reason—because
Moore will do more to stir things up and aggravate the liberals. He’ll mix it
up and get in fights. The people who voted for Moore voted for him despite
Trump’s policy of supporting the other guy, not despite Trump himself. To them,
Moore’s appeal and Trump’s are basically the same. It’s the gratifying prospect
of watching one of their own climb into the ring with the liberals and beat the
crap out of them. It’s like having a front-row seat at an endless tag team
match in professional wrestling, one of the multiple forms of scripted low-brow
entertainment Trump has actually participated in. The combat itself, as it
plays out on TV, may be at least superficially intellectual, but the appeal of
watching it, for viewers both left and right, is fundamentally visceral. For
liberals, it’s the fun of watching the preposterous vulgarian self-destruct,
assuming, as they tend to, that that’s what he’s doing. For his supporters, it’s
largely a desire for revenge—revenge on the liberals Trump’s legions blame for
just about everything that sticks to one degree or another in their collective
craw, including the triumph of the civil rights movement, defeat in Vietnam,
the denigration of rural white culture, gay marriage, wage stagnation,
affirmative action, political rectitude, nonsectarian holiday greetings and,
perhaps worst of all, the election of a black president, this last compelling
proof of the loss, or at least the imminent demise, of white primacy in
American society.
These issues can all be cast in
conceptual terms, but for Trump’s supporters they all ring emotional bells.
They all touch on tribal identity. If you’re of a theoretical bent, you can
weave theories around them, but the people aggrieved by them don’t have to
think about them to get upset by them anymore than you have to think about
neural transmission to feel pain when you grab a hot skillet bare-handed, or
than a dog has to reflect on territoriality to get belligerent when a stranger
comes to the door. These issues invoke emotional reflexes, and Donald Trump,
the great counterpuncher, with his racism, carnival-barking bravado and defiant
vulgarity, has just the personality to evoke and convey them. He’s the doctor
wielding the hammer that evokes the reflex, and the hammer the patient uses to
bludgeon those he blames his poor health on.
For a personality cult to take
hold, it helps to have a strong, charismatic personality, and whatever screaming
deficiencies he may have, Donald Trump has that. His charm is lost on lots of
people, but among the people it works on it obviously works very powerfully. Say
what you will about him, Donald Trump is not your typically preprogrammed
politician. No one, apparently including Trump himself, quite knows what to
expect next out of his mouth or his Twitter feed. He’s spontaneous, outrageous
and unpredictable, in stark and refreshing contrast to Hillary Clinton and just
about anyone else in our political history this side of Huey Long, with whom he
has a lot in common.
The
flip side of his verbal unpredictability is his attitudinal consistency, and
therein too lies much of his charm. Under duress from his more sober-minded
managers, he may make an occasional requisite denunciation of the very bigotry
he thrives on politically, but when he does, his delivery is so obviously
devoid of conviction, his words serve more to provide his bigoted followers
cover than to discourage them. Trump is a loose cannon. He contradicts himself
or his spokespeople with astounding frequency, switches policy positions—on
abortion, on invading Iraq, on withdrawing from Afghanistan, on trade with
China, on funding for his border wall—with almost wild abandon; but the underlying
mettle he’s made of has never changed and never will, and his followers know
that. In one sense his populism is as fraudulent as his claims about millions
of illegal voters, or his preposterous guarantee that Mexico would pay for his
border wall: he cares for the middle class only insofar as he can exploit it
for money, as in the form of tuition for classes at his bogus “university,” or
for votes. But in another sense it seems real. His supporters see in him a
kindred spirit, and they’re probably right. Financial assets, place of
residence and avoidance of military service aside, he’s one of them. He’s unapolegetically
low-brow. His psychological habitat seems to overlap midtown Manhattan and the
tabloid rack at the supermarket. It’s entirely fitting that an old friend and
major supporter of Trump’s publishes the National Inquirer. Among the subjects
Trump has seen fit to tweet about is Kristin Stewart’s love life. He’s actually
wrestled, or pretended to wrestle, in a professional wrestling match. He’s not
much of a reader. He didn’t merely produce and star in one of the crassest TV
shows ever made, he’s an avid consumer of TV. He tweets insults about people on
TV.
Trump
can shift positions from now til Sunday and break every preposterous promise he
made during the campaign or has made since—he may commit more troops to a war
in Afghanistan he’s described as a total disaster, fail to impose tariffs on
Chinese imports, fail to replace Obamacare with anything at all, much less
something “really great”; he may fail to deliver any significant rebuilding of the nation's infrastructure, much less a trillion dollars' worth; he may fail to revitalize the coal industry, or to
rid North Korea of nuclear weapons, or to build anything resembling a real border
wall, and he will certainly fail to get Mexico to pay for it. In word and deed
he may prove as changeable as a chameleon. But his personality and style will
never change, and his cult followers know that and love him for it. He’s
permanently, indelibly crass, intrinsically dishonest and unfailingly
entertaining, and as big a pile of broken promises as his first term may look
like by the time it ends, just having him to cheer for, and to jeer at the
liberals with, is so gratifying to his fans, by the time his surreal new
reality show completes its first run, his ratings may have already won him an
encore.
