Vox (Opinion)
By Ezra Klein
February 9, 2016
On
Monday, Donald Trump held a rally in Manchester, New Hampshire, where
he merrily repeated a woman in the crowd who called Ted Cruz a pussy.
Twenty-four hours later
Donald Trump won the New Hampshire primary in a landslide.
I'm
not here to clutch my pearls over Trump's vulgarity; what was telling,
rather, was the immaturity of the moment, the glee Trump took in his
"she-said-it-I-didn't"
game. The media, which has grown used to covering Trump as a sideshow,
delighted in the moment along with him — it was funny, and it meant
clicks, takes, traffic. But it was more than that. It was the
frontrunner for the Republican nomination for president
showing off the demagogue's instinct for amplifying the angriest voice
in the mob.
It
is undeniably enjoyable watching Trump. He's red-faced, discursive,
funny, angry, strange, unpredictable, and real. He speaks without filter
and tweets with reckless
abandon. The Donald Trump phenomenon is a riotous union of candidate
ego and voter id. America's most skilled political entertainer is
putting on the greatest show we've ever seen.
It's so fun to watch that it's easy to lose sight of how terrifying it really is.
Trump
is the most dangerous major candidate for president in memory. He pairs
terrible ideas with an alarming temperament; he's a racist, a sexist,
and a demagogue, but
he's also a narcissist, a bully, and a dilettante. He lies so
constantly and so fluently that it's hard to know if he even realizes
he's lying. He delights in schoolyard taunts and luxuriates in backlash.
Trump
is in serious contention to win the Republican presidential nomination.
His triumph in a general election is unlikely but it is far from
impossible. He's not a joke
and he's not a clown. He's a man who could soon be making decisions of
war and peace, who would decide which regulations are enforced and which
are lifted, who would be responsible for nominating Supreme Court
Justices and representing America in the community
of nations. This is not political entertainment. This is politics.
Trump's
path to power has been unnerving. His business is licensing out his own
name as a symbol of opulence. He has endured bankruptcies and scandal
by bragging his way
out of them. He rose to prominence in the Republican Party as a leader
of the birther movement. He climbed to the top of the polls in this
election by calling Mexicans rapists and killers. He defended a poor
debate performance by accusing Megyn Kelly of being
on her period. He responded to rival Ted Cruz's surge by calling for a
travel ban on Muslims. When two of his supporters attacked a homeless
man and said they did it because "Donald Trump was right, all these
illegals need to be deported," he brushed off complaints
that he's inspiring violence by saying his supporters are "very
passionate."
Behind
Trump's success is an unerring instinct for harnessing anger,
resentment, and fear. His view of the economy is entirely zero-sum — for
Americans to win, others
must lose. "We're going to make America great again," he said in his
New Hampshire victory speech, "but we're going to do it the old
fashioned way. We're going to beat China, Japan, beat Mexico at trade.
We're going to beat all of these countries that are
taking so much of our money away from us on a daily basis. It's not
going to happen anymore."
Trump
answers America's rage with more rage. As the journalist Molly Ball
observed, "All the other candidates say 'Americans are angry, and I
understand.' Trump says,
'I’M angry.'" Trump doesn't offer solutions so much as he offers
villains. His message isn't so much that he'll help you as he'll hurt
them.
Trump's
other gift — the one that gets less attention, but is perhaps more
important — is his complete lack of shame. It's easy to underestimate
how important shame is
in American politics. But shame is our most powerful restraint on
politicians who would find success through demagoguery. Most people feel
shame when they're exposed as liars, when they're seen as uninformed,
when their behavior is thought cruel, when respected
figures in their party condemn their actions, when experts dismiss
their proposals, when they are mocked and booed and protested.
Trump
doesn't. He has the reality television star's ability to operate
entirely without shame, and that permits him to operate entirely without
restraint. It is the single
scariest facet of his personality. It is the one that allows him to go
where others won't, to say what others can't, to do what others
wouldn't.
Trump
lives by the reality-television trope that he's not here to make
friends. But the reason reality-television villains always say they're
not there to make friends
is because it sets them apart, makes them unpredictable and fun to
watch. "I'm not here to make friends" is another way of saying "I'm not
bound by the social conventions of normal people." The rest of us are
here to make friends, and it makes us boring, gentle,
kind.
This,
more than his ideology, is why Trump genuinely scares me. There are
places where I think Trump's instincts are an improvement on the
Republican field. He seems more
dovish than neoconservatives like Marco Rubio, and less dismissive of
the social safety net than libertarians like Rand Paul. But those
candidates are checked by institutions and incentives that hold no sway
over Trump; his temperament is so immature, his
narcissism so clear, his political base so unique, his reactions so
strange, that I honestly have no idea what he would do — or what he
wouldn't do.
When
MSNBC's Joe Scarborough asked Trump about his affection for Vladimir
Putin, who "kills journalists, political opponents and invades
countries," Trump replied, "He's
running his country, and at least he's a leader, unlike what we have in
this country." Later, he clarified that he doesn't actually condone
killing journalists, but, he warned the crowd, "I do hate them."
It's
a lie that if you put a frog into a pot of water and slowly turn up the
heat the frog will simply boil, but it's a fact that if you put the
American political system
in a room with Trump for long enough we slowly lose track of how
noxious he is, or we at least run out of ways to keep repeating it.
But tonight is a night to repeat it. There is something scary in Donald Trump. We should fear his rise.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
No comments:
Post a Comment