Hurricane Trump

New York Times (Op-Ed)

By Thomas Edsall

September 23, 2015

Hurricane Trump

“A political storm is not coming. It is already here,” Glen Bolger, a Republican pollster, wrote last week on the website of his firm, Public Opinion Strategies.

The anger voters feel at corporations and the political class has reached heights not seen since the Great Depression.

However long Donald Trump lasts, the forces that prompted his ascent may be more politically consequential than a mere outburst of discontent from Americans in the early stage of a presidential election would suggest. Trump’s improbable success so far may have the potential to shift politics and the policy agenda.

In Trump, Republican primary voters have picked an unexpected standard-bearer for a protest against money in politics. Counterintuitively, the billionaire provocateur boasts of using campaign contributions to buy politicians: “When you give, they do whatever the hell you want them to do.”

In the first Republican debate, on Aug. 6, Trump elaborated:

I was a businessman. I give to everybody. When they call, I give. And you know what? When I need something from them, two years later, three years later, I call them, and they are there for me.

Trump has contributed $1.5 million to candidates and parties over the past two decades — $584,850 to Democrats and $961,140 to Republicans. He also brags about his influence-buying prowess, with lobbyists in Washington, New York, New Jersey and Illinois:

Hey, I have lobbyists. I have to tell you. I have lobbyists that can produce anything for me. They’re great.

Others have noticed the crazy situation in which Trump’s pronouncements about his participation in a corrupt system are taken by his fans as evidence of his incorruptibility.

Trump’s signal appeal, according to Bolger, stems from voters’ belief that “the deck is stacked against them by politics and politicians, big business and bankers, the media, and other American and world institutions.”

Bolger tells Republican officeholders – the core of his clientele – to:

Go to the lower-middle-income parts of your district and meet with base voters there. If those voters turn against you as well as against Washington, it increases the likelihood that a primary challenger could get legs.

“There is a belief,” Bolger adds, “that Washington, D.C., is not working because the politicians have been sidetracked by power, money and Potomac Fever.”

Trump, for the moment, appears to be exempt from these critiques, insulated — in the eyes of his supporters – by his own vast wealth from special interest pressures.

At a news conference on July 26, Trump declared that his ability to pay for his own campaign frees him from fealty to donors:

Bush is controlled by those people. Walker is controlled by those people. Hillary Clinton is controlled by those people. Trump has none of those people. I’m not controlled. I do what’s right for the people.

Trump embodies precisely what his supporters say they hate – the exploitation of money and lobbyists to get his way. Nonetheless, he seems to have turned this to advantage by openly acknowledging how he has worked the system. His promise is to control the system on behalf of those who vote for him, rather than being controlled by it.

“It’s a collective middle finger to the establishment,” a Trump supporter told the Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf. “Trump has never lied to me whereas all of the other Republican politicians (like McConnell & Boehner) have,” wrote another reader, who added, “Nobody fights for my side. Trump fights. Trump wins. I want an Alpha Male who is going to take it to the enemy.” A third Trump loyalist wrote: “This is a guy who isn’t afraid to abuse the abuser. He has and will continue to humiliate the establishment politicians who try to stand up to him by exposing them for who they are. “

Along parallel lines, Leigh Ann Crouse of Dubuque, Ia., told The Associated Press: “He has a backbone and he cannot be bought.”

In an August Harvard Business Review article titled “Why People Are Drawn to Narcissists Like Donald Trump,” Michael Maccoby, a corporate consultant, wrote:

No one pushes Trump around, and no insult goes unanswered. He fights back. He is not cautious or fearful of offending a critic or any of America’s adversaries. In this, Trump has a personality type that’s common to the charismatic leaders who emerge in times of turmoil and uncertainty, when people are ready to follow a strong leader who promises to lead them to greatness.

Maccoby calls such leaders people “productive narcissists” and describes them as “not vulnerable to intimidation.” They are characterized by “a large amount of aggressive energy and a bias for action.” In an earlier Harvard Business Review article, he noted that

Narcissists are almost unimaginably thin-skinned. They cannot tolerate dissent. In fact, they can be extremely abrasive with employees who doubt them or with subordinates who are tough enough to fight back. One serious consequence of this oversensitivity to criticism is that narcissistic leaders often do not listen when they feel threatened or attacked.

Of course, Trump is not the only candidate catapulted or crushed by voters’ rage. Their resentment of the political status quo targets both Democrats and Republicans. Stan Greenberg, a Democratic pollster, said in a phone interview that voters “see both parties as equally corrupt.” He described current attitudes as “a huge change. This is not a ‘goo-goo’ good government issue” driven by upscale reformers. “It’s a real issue.”

Steve Israel, a Democratic congressman who represents parts of Queens and Long Island, is chairman of policy and communications for the Democratic Steering and Policy Committee. He has been using the party’s pollsters, focus group specialists and consultants to conduct an extensive study of voters.

Israel told me that most voters see their own position as fragile, vulnerable to collapse in hard times. People who in the past blamed structural forces for their difficulties, including globalization and trade, now “blame politicians.”

Voters, Israel says, are making “an obscene gesture to Washington. D.C.”

Ed Goeas, a Republican pollster, echoed Democratic talking points in his emailed analysis of the contemporary electorate.

Members of the middle class are living paycheck to paycheck, they are anxious about terrorism coming to their own backyard, and they believe that the rule of ‘if you work hard and play by the rules, you can get ahead’ is in danger of disappearing from the American ethos. Most important, the middle class believes that the rich play by a different set of rules and just get richer, but they also believe that the poor get all the programs and benefits, and all they get is the bill.

Drew Westen, a professor of psychology at Emory, contends that common ground can be found among Democrats, Republicans and independents in a contempory variant of populism.

Westen provided The Times with a graphic illustrating how voters of both parties and independents responded positively or negatively, using hand-held metered dials, as a one-minute and 15 second statement was read aloud:

The American dream used to mean something – that you could count on good American wages and benefits for a hard day’s work. But that’s changing as big corporation have been shipping our jobs overseas and lobbyists have been rewriting all the rules. In just the last eight years, the average white family has lost about one-eighth of its wealth and seen its income drop for the first time in 80 years. If you were African-American or Latino just starting to catch up through hard work and determination, you’ve lost more than half of everything you put away. Ordinary people, whether white, black or brown, shouldn’t be paying for a crash they didn’t cause. We can’t afford to be a nation of haves and have-nots, where young people can’t find their first job and middle-aged construction workers may have seen their last. We can’t afford to be a nation where white kids are living in their parents’ basements, where too many young men color are living on the streets. It’s time to return to America where everyone willing to work and play by the rules can count on a fair shot. Opportunity should knock on every door no matter how humble the home, or who lives in it. That’s what I promised my children, that’s the American dream.

The accompanying chart illustrates how focus group participants, listening to these words, expressed steadily increasing support, whether they were Republicans, Democrats, or independents.

The downward trajectories of Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush, the two mainstream establishment candidates, provide the strongest evidence yet of voter skepticism of customary political promises.

Clinton and Bush have offered the public just what they thought they were supposed to. In a July 13 speech in New York, Clinton told voters that “wages need to rise to keep up with costs, paychecks need to grow. Families who work hard and do their part deserve to get ahead and stay ahead.” Bush, in turn, declared on Sept. 9 in North Carolina that the “new normal is a comfortable ride for the affluent people that live off their portfolios,” pledging that his “plan will help those who live on their paychecks, who haven’t seen a raise in a while.”

Instead of rising in the polls, Clinton and Bush are faltering. On the day Clinton gave her most explicitly populist speech, July 23, she stood at 62.8 percent in the polls for the Democratic nomination. Today, she stands at 44.7 percent, an 18.1 point drop among voters in her own party. Bush, who as recently as July 15 led the Republican field standing at 17 percent, has fallen to a weak third place, now standing at 7.8 percent, according to RealClearPolitics.

Some analysts argue that the unexpected developments over the past nine months will fade in importance as mainstream candidates develop effective campaign strategies to restore their legitimacy.

David Winston, a Republican pollster, observed in an email that the Trump spectacle is likely to dim once other candidates focused attention on economic issues and “address those concerns in a way that people think could actually work.”

Conventional candidates are likely, however, to face difficulty in making credible claims that they will improve the lot of the middle class. As Neil Irwin of The Times reported on Sept. 16:

The 2014 real median income number is 6.5 percent below its 2007, pre-crisis level. It is 7.2 percent below the number in 1999. A middle-income American family, in other words, makes substantially less money in inflation-adjusted terms than it did 15 years ago.

Bush and Clinton have something more in common: a long history of collecting millions of dollars from powerful interests, both individual and corporate, and deep roots in political dynasties. Their fund-raising success threatens to be a significant liability in the current climate.

The Republican primary process, of all places, has become a test of the balance of power between elites and the affluent on the one hand, and middle- and working-class voters on the other.

For those who would like to see the middle and working classes politically empowered, Donald Trump, the overbearing, narcissistic, xenophobic casino and real estate magnate, would seem to be a weak reed to grasp. It would be the irony of ironies if this particular billionaire gave voice to the millions of voters who find themselves well outside the circle of power.

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