Explaining Trump’s GOP, sort of
If somehow we regain our equilibrium, whenever that may be, people will be asking, and historians will be exploring the question, “What was up with those folks?”
What indeed!
An Iowan named Patricia, eager to cast a vote for Donald Trump in that state’s recent presidential caucus, told a New York Times reporter, “I know he is picked by God for this hour. I know there are things he has done in the past, but we all have pasts.”
In referencing the past, it’s not clear what Patricia has in mind. It might be the long ago past. Or maybe the more recent past. Whatever. She is a forgiving soul. Or a forgetting one.
Ronald Reagan was called the “Teflon” president because nothing odious stuck to him.
Donald Trump is super Teflon. No, super, super Teflon. Four criminal indictments. Ninety-one criminal charges. Yet, here is, on his way to another Republican presidential nomination.
Reagan would be astounded. Dwight Eisenhower would be amazed. Old Abe would be gobsmacked, twice, three times maybe.
Republicans must be out of their minds. So runs the commentary favored by Democrats, by liberals, by a considerable number of moderates (there are some of those still around), by a swath of independent voters, even by some Republicans.
Alas, the Republican base sees something in Trump others don’t.
Bret Stephens, a conservative columnist who writes for the liberal Times, penned a piece last week headlined, “The Case for Trump – By Someone Who Wants Him to Lose.”
According to Stephens, Trump has three things going for him. One of the things Trump gets “right,” says Stephens, is the meaning and implications of what is going on at the Southern border.
Cheap labor and a humanitarian impulse do not justify “a giant arrival gate for anyone and everyone who wants to take advantage of American abundance and generosity,” Stephens writes.
As a result, he says, Trump’s “we must have a wall” resonates.
Second, Trump picked up early on a mood of unaccustomed national pessimism, as reflected in the historically low percentages of adult Americans in the labor force and the continuing rise of “deaths of despair” among the white working class, according to the columnist
The final thing Trump has going for him, Stephens says, is the behavior of “elite media” (no longer neutral political coverage, he argues), and government agencies (the CDC and FBI, for example) which have exceeded their mandates.
“Trump got this,” Stephens says.
Former New Hampshire senator Judd Gregg, lamenting the drowning of his party in the Trumpian whirlpool, has claimed, “I don’t think Trump is a Republican. He’s a demagogue.”
Ah, but a demagogue who connects.
Republican pollster Kirsten Soltis Anderson spoke last week with podcaster Ezra Klein about the hold Trump has on the GOP faithful.
“What is that … appeal?” Klein asked, not evidently entirely persuaded by Anderson’s earlier opine that Trump offers, perversely enough, “stability,” especially in regard to crime, prices, and the border.
Klein commented that whatever Trump has “was a slippery thing to try to put your hands around.”
“Liberals and conservatives … could have understood why the other party liked the people they did.” Figures like Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Bob Dole, and John McCain were recognizable types.
“Trump breaks that,” Klein said. … “He’s made politics less translatable.”
Anderson answered: “Donald Trump had told Republican voters, you’re not a bad guy. [The world] tells you that you’re racist … that you don’t like poor people … that you’re backwards. I’m here to tell you that they’re wrong and that you are good people…. I’m going to fight for you.”
“… There is this belief that [Trump] likes me. He likes people like me. He tells me it’s OK to be somebody like me. And that,” Anderson said, “is an incredibly powerful motivator.”
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.