With Donald Trump, it's personal

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.