Bloomberg View (Opinion)
By Frank Wilkinson
November 30, 2015
Donald
Trump is unique. But he's not without antecedents, and it's not hard to
locate his performance in some well-worn grooves of American politics.
Substitute
the word "segregation" for "immigration" in Trump's rhetoric, for
instance, and it recalls the bitter bite of Alabama's George Wallace,
whose presidential campaigns
in the 1960s leveraged white backlash more viciously than even Trump
dares.
Yet
Trump's no Wallace. His extravagant business success, and public
indulgence of luxury and "class," is a long way from Wallace's
hardscrabble solidarity with the (white)
working man. Often as not, Trump explains in so many words that he'll
succeed at a given task because his riches prove he's already a
spectacular success. "I'm rich," he reminds his audiences, as an
all-purpose validation of incorruptibility or competence,
and a sly suggestion that he knows how to hit the big boys where it
hurts because he's one of them.
Ross
Perot, the billionaire who ran for president in 1992 and 1996, used
personal wealth and business bona fides in a similar manner. And Perot's
conspiratorial mindset
and impulsiveness surely have their complements in Trumpland. Perot
received 19 percent of the popular vote (though no electoral votes) in
1992, the best showing for an independent since Teddy Roosevelt in 1912.
Trump would be lucky to do as well running as
an independent in 2016.
Still,
Trump is the larger, more protean figure. Perot was physically small,
intellectually compact, politically narrow. Trump sprawls. With his
flapping suit jackets,
flyaway hair and long and winding rhetorical roads, Trump spills over
everything.
The
truth is sometimes inundated. Whether or not it began as a muddled
memory or a deliberate effort to mislead, Trump's repeated claim that he
witnessed "thousands" of
Muslims in New Jersey celebrating the fall of the twin towers -- an
event that simply did not occur -- has become a lie through repetition.
But it's a lie of specific proportion and design, McCarthyite in both
respects.
Senator
Joseph McCarthy provides the most form-fitting mold for Trump. Like
McCarthy, Trump possesses the bravado to issue a lie so unconventional
in size and scope that
it flummoxes the mainstream news media, which is accustomed to more
digestible portions. And he has the will to stick by it, believing he
can reach a draw with the truth if he can't beat it outright.
In
an interview Sunday, NBC's Chuck Todd made the point that Trump's New
Jersey allegation is utterly baseless. Trump swept the journalist aside
like a helpless fact.
DONALD
TRUMP: --you know, just go a step further. All over the world at the
time it was reported that Muslims were celebrating the downing. All
over the world, forget
about New Jersey for a second. All over the world, it was reported
that Muslims were celebrating the fall of the World Trade Center.
Two
days ago, three days ago, there was a soccer game and there was a
minute of silence in honor of the people that were slain, horribly,
viciously slain in Paris, France.
And a huge amount of people, a tremendous number of people started
screaming out Muslim phrases. . . .
CHUCK TODD: But you're repeating, Mr. Trump.
DONALD TRUMP: So, there is a problem here, Chuck, of hatred that is unbelievable.
CHUCK TODD: But Mr. Trump, this didn't happen in New Jersey. There were plenty of reports. And you're feeding that stereotype.
DONALD TRUMP: Chuck, it did happen in New Jersey. I have hundreds of people that agree with me.
"Forget
about New Jersey for a second," Trump said, before taking us on a tour
of distractions and irrelevancies. And when he finally returned to the
Garden State, his
proof of the event, in a nation of 320 million people and wall-to-wall
media, was "hundreds of people that agree with me."
In
a 1959 biography that Walter Lippmann called "the definitive job,"
Richard Rovere plumbed McCarthy's style. Regarding McCarthy's marathon
speech in the Senate on February
20, 1950, in which accusations about communist this and that poured
forth without supporting evidence or coherence, Rovere wrote:
McCarthy's
presentation had been so disorderly, so jumbled and cluttered and
loose-ended, that it was beyond the power of most reporters to organize
the mess into a story
that would convey to the reader anything beyond the suspicion that the
reporter was drunk.
The
improvisational beginnings of Trump's attacks on immigrants -- had he
really intended to call Mexicans "rapists" at his announcement speech or
was he just riffing?
-- recall the ad-hoc origins of McCarthy's witch hunt. McCarthy kept
modifying the number of communists in the State Department -- 205 at his
speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, became 57 by the time he hit Reno,
Nevada -- without ever explaining why the number
wouldn't sit still. "He had not even taken the simple precaution of
keeping the materials for his speech in Wheeling so that he would know
for a certainty what he had said there," Rovere wrote.
Like
McCarthy's expose of a grand communist conspiracy, undermining the
nation from within, Trump cites an inside job as the source of
Republican troubles. At the Values
Voter Summit in Washington in September, he shared his dismay at
Republican surrender to the enemy in Washington:
And
I don’t understand. They get elected. They’re full of vim and vigor.
They’re going to change things. They’re going to get rid of “Obamacare.”
They’re going to do all
of these things. They come down to these magnificent vaulted ceilings
that you see all over Washington. And what happens? They become
different people.
McCarthy
offered to purify the republic ideologically. Trump proposes to do so
ethnically, removing millions of undocumented immigrants, and magically,
"making America
great again" by dipping into Trump's vast store of personal greatness
and reconstituting a pristine, golden past.
His
campaign is a jumble of nonsense and grudges. But it's a distinctly
American brand of nonsense and grudges, and its roots run deep enough to
make Trump a formidable
presence for a time. As historian Marvin Meyers wrote of another brash,
bullying champion of white middle America: "Political opponents mocked
the contents, but ruefully acknowledged the impressive popular effect."
That guy, Andrew Jackson, is on the $20 bill.
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