Last October, a journalist, out for dinner with me
and another college friend, recalled his interview for a magazine roughly 30
years ago with Donald Trump. At the
time, the Manhattan real estate magnate was riding high, not just on his
various holdings but on his recent bestseller, The Art of the Deal.
The journalist asked the billionaire what was much
on the minds of his bosses: “Why do you think you have become so successful?”
“He said, ‘The Trump Brand,’” the journalist remembered.
“Over and over, the same thing: ‘The Trump Brand,’ ‘The Trump Brand.’ By the
end of the interview, I was sick and tired of hearing it!”
In a way, the mogul’s emphasis on “brand”
foreshadowed his stress throughout this election on his “winning.” There was a
remarkably empty, hollow core to his bragging then and now: he could not
articulate the benefits of his real estate to others any more than he could
outline a clear, feasible domestic or foreign policy to voters. Yet listeners
were supposed to be caught up in the excitement of merely the association with him.
What do supporters think they’re getting with “The
Trump Brand”? American craftiness and shrewdness, manifested in The Art of the Deal? A Samson who, however
flawed, will bring down with him the philistines at the heart of the corrupt
American political system? Someone who’ll bring back a country—their country—that hasn’t existed in 60
years, and never will again? Or an enlarged embodiment of their own shadowy zenophobia,
racism and sexism, for once given unapologetic, full-throated expression (“I am
your voice”) by a candidate of a major political party?
When it comes to politics, though, I’d say the Trump
brand involves 4 “D’s”—deadbeat, deceiver, divider, and demagogue—all adding up
to a fifth, positively toxic one: a danger to this republic. Maybe that’s why
even many longtime conservatives believe the
candidate displays “an infantile hunger for approval” (Pulitzer Prize-winning
columnist Charles Krauthammer) or is insane (the headline for a post-Democratic
Convention column by former Ronald Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan, when he began to bellow about criticism from parents of a Muslim-American soldier: “The Week They Decided Trump Was Crazy”).
From
Great Pretender to Great Divider
How many times as children were we taught the
following by our parents? Don’t belittle
somebody. Don’t be rude. Don’t be crude. Don’t brag. Don’t whine. Don’t cheat.
Don’t lie. Which of these has Trump not
done this election? How do we expect today’s children to react to the spectacle
of thousands acclaiming this 70-year-old rich brat?
The businessman-reality-star-GOP-candidate has
created nothing but division across the American landscape—within families,
within political parties, and within an electorate that, no matter its other
differences of opinion, previously practiced a kind of civil religion
concerning national ideals.
About a year ago, a friend of mine now living in
Florida told me, “Whatever you do, don’t vote for Jeb Bush.” With my experience
of the governor of my own state, I responded, “Whatever you do, don’t vote for Chris Christie.” Neither of us could foresee that two
politicians we heartily detested from personal experience would nevertheless be
preferable to a billionaire blowhard with an unerring instinct for exploiting
the worst instincts of the American people, let alone that said blowhard would
rampage through the primaries to seize the GOP nomination and now put the party
on the brink of a civil war.
It all comes courtesy of a candidate with
fundamental problems in recognizing truth. He lies when he’s in bed, then again
as soon as he steps out of it, round the clock.
The Press: How to Cover Trump's Big Lies
That mendacity has presented a historic challenge to
journalists’ goal of objectivity. His lies have been so numerous, so nakedly
HUGE, that there has been no way for the Fourth Estate to examine the factual
nature of his statements without openly calling into question his honesty. To
say that his statements are "inaccurate," even "false,"
doesn't begin to get at the brazenness with which he throws around half-truths
and then, when they no longer suit him, rewrites history as if it didn't exist,
Orwellian style, as when he claimed to have "ended" the birther lie about President Obama that he had done so much to spread.
A new generation of journalists, then, is
rediscovering the dilemma that faced their 1950s forebears with Senator Joseph
McCarthy: how to avoid giving oxygen to a bullying liar. Without enough GOP
surrogates to call out Trump, they have been forced to take on the job
themselves. (In what other election has The
New York Times ever referred in a headline to the prior seven days of a candidate
as his “Week of Whoppers”?)
Their contempt for Trump’s outrageous utterances has
been harder and harder to conceal. After all, if you are forced, one 24-hour
news cycle after another, to disprove a candidate’s claims—if that candidate
doesn’t even try to substantiate his
claims, or tweets ever so innocently that "many people are saying" that Ted Cruz's father was connected to the Kennedy assassination—how can you not run the risk
that readers or listeners will believe you see the politico as either a liar or
lunatic?
Don’t think that conservatives haven’t noticed and
resented this erosion of a once-bright journalistic line, or that they won’t
recall it with the dawn of a new administration this January.
The former reality-show star’s path to the GOP
nomination sped along because he sized up primary voters as shrewdly as he did
the audience for The Apprentice. In
this sense, his statements have been less splenetic than strategic: Any time a
reporter is obliged to point out a rank falsehood by Trump, he or she is called
biased—and all by the same man who considers it a dark, dark day when some
reporter, somewhere, isn’t covering him.
The
Preposterous Longevity of a Gaffe Machine
Even after a week in which he body-shamed a past
Miss Universe and responded to the news that he may have avoided as much as 18
years of taxes by claiming more than $900 million in losses, Trump stayed close enough
in the polls to Democratic nominee Hilary Clinton to be well within the margin
of error. Even after his audiotape with Billy Bush forced him to make what may
be the only attempt at a public apology that he’s ever given in his adult life,
social media posts continued to ring with unshaken faith in him.
Virtually nobody would have believed a year ago that
he would have gotten even this far. After
all, his disadvantages were legion:
*a landlord in a nation that excoriates his kind;
*a front-page philanderer campaigning in a heartland
where the name “Bill Clinton” is still mud;
*a born-on-third-base businessman with a spotty record
of losses and broken promises to go with his billions;
*a classic RINO (Republican in Name Only), who has
contributed mightily to Democratic coffers and doesn’t hide his lack of
interest in issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage;
*an eager user of draft deferments in the Vietnam
period who criticized a war hero unlucky enough to be captured; and
* an Easterner—a New
Yorker, no less—who swept states where another candidate from godless
Gotham, Rudy Giuliani, was swamped in 2008.
The success of this persona may be astonishing, but
the list of his offensive comments can only be called “preposterously lengthy.”
Other candidates saw the wind blown out of their campaigns by a single gaffe
(e.g., John Kerry’s, even before the 2008 Democratic primaries kicked off, with
his dumb joke that students who neglected their education could get “stuck in Iraq”).
Trump has managed to tick off a whole litany of
people: POWs, women, Hispanics, Asians, Muslims, blacks, Jews, and advocates
for the disabled. I never thought someone in the political arena would combine the
huckster instincts of P.T. Barnum with the all-encompassing offensiveness of
Spiro Agnew.
One after another, each succeeding Trump pronouncement
led the media to blink its eyes in astonishment, then opine—solemnly,
repeatedly, and with the next day’s pronouncement, wrongly—that he’d stooped to
a “new low.” The reality TV star who discussed with Billy Bush the fun of
“p----y” was perfectly in line with the vulgarian who said Megyn Kelly had "blood coming out of her whatever” and who claimed that Hillary Clinton had
been “schlonged” by Barack Obama back in 2008.
Each time, many of us expected the offensive remark
to become an acid test for the party’s rank and file. But many still haven’t unequivocally
rejected Trump. If not by now, a month before the election, when?
Peggy Noonan, Hugh Hewitt, Ross Douthat, and David
Brooks were just a few of the Establishment conservatives who admitted that
their own incorrect guesses about Trump in the primaries disqualify them from
making further predictions about his future. Let’s say this: Trump's improbable run is no longer an enigma, though it is heartbreakingly
sad to see this happen to the party of Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt.
For me, Trump "crossed a line" the day he
entered the race, with his remark about Mexico sending "people that have lots of problems," including drug carriers and "rapists." Virtually everything he has said since then has only
confirmed it. He has run on rancid resentment, not on a cause or a philosophy of
government (as, at least, Ronald Reagan did, however much one may disagree with
it). How appropriate that this week's firestorm has now led many Republicans to
revolt at last. For my part, I, as a New York-area resident, found Trump’s tabloid-ready
bloviations revolting decades ago.
Nor will he leave the race with a single grace note,
as John McCain did in '08 when he corrected a questioner who said Barack Obama
was a Muslim that his opponent wasn't, that he was a Christian and father and
that their disagreement was simply about issues. He has coarsened our politics
and lowered our standing in the eyes of the world, an impression that may
take decades to counter.
Some weeks ago, a friend told me that she liked this
blog because I did not write about politics all the time. It was an accurate
assessment, because I don’t like
writing about politics again and again and again.
The current election, however, requires a more intensive discussion than I
have given it to date, because it raises concerns that either have not surfaced
in decades or that never appeared before. Over the next few weeks—even if, by a
miracle, Trump withdraws from the race—I will devote much of this space to the
unique challenge he poses to American democracy. In keeping with the word my friend
used a year ago, I’ll examine his “brand” and the several aspects of it that
bear directly on his fitness for the nation’s highest office: deadbeat, deceiver,
divider, and demagogue.
(Photo taken by Gage
Skidmore of Donald Trump speaking with supporters at a campaign rally at the
Prescott Valley Event Center in Prescott Valley, Arizona, Oct. 4, 2016.)
