New Yorker (Opinion)
By David Remnick
March 14, 2016
Nearly
three decades ago, Howard Kaminsky, of Random House, called on the
real-estate developer and self-marketing master Donald Trump at his
office on Fifth Avenue. Kaminsky
brought along a cover design for “Trump: The Art of the Deal,” its
author’s literary début. Trump seemed reasonably happy. Just one thing,
he said. “Please make my name much bigger.”
It
was all so funny once. For a long time, Trump, with his
twenty-four-karat skyscrapers, his interesting hair, and his
extra-classy airline, was a leading feature of
the New York egoscape. The editors of the satirical monthly Spy covered
him with the same obsessive attention that Field & Stream pays to
the rainbow trout. Trump never failed to provide; he was everywhere,
commandeering a corner at a professional wrestling
match, buying the Miss Universe franchise and vowing smaller bathing
suits and higher heels. You could watch him humiliate supplicants on
“The Apprentice” and hear him on “The Howard Stern Show” gallantly
describing the mystery of Melania’s bowel movements
(“I’ve never seen anything—it’s amazing”) and announcing that, “without
even hesitation,” he would have had sex with Princess Diana. As early
as 1988, Trump hinted at a run for the White House, though this was
understood to be part of his carny shtick, another
form of self-branding in the celebrity-mad culture.
And
now here we are. Trump is no longer hustling golf courses, fake
“universities,” or reality TV. He means to command the United States
armed forces and control its nuclear
codes. He intends to propose legislation, conduct America’s global
affairs, preside over its national-intelligence apparatus, and make the
innumerable moral and political decisions required of a President. This
is not a Seth Rogen movie; this is as real as
mud. Having all but swept the early Republican primaries and caucuses,
Trump—who re-tweets conspiracy theories and invites the affections of
white-supremacist groups, and has established himself as the adept
inheritor of a long tradition of nativism, discrimination,
and authoritarianism—is getting ever closer to becoming the nominee of
what Republicans like to call “the party of Abraham Lincoln.” No
American demagogue––not Huey Long, not Joseph McCarthy, not George
Wallace––has ever achieved such proximity to national
power.
Meanwhile,
the elders of the G.O.P., like House Speaker Paul Ryan, have declared
their disgust, unless, like Governor Chris Christie, of New Jersey, they
have sold their
souls for a place at Trump’s feeding trough. As yet, no detestable
remark, no flagrant display of ignorance, no scummy business deal has
dissuaded his followers. Nor will Trump be defeated by the putatively
scathing critiques of the commentariat (including
this one). Quote his most hateful eruptions––about Mexicans, about
Muslims, about women, about African-Americans––and the next day will
still bring an arena filled with voters who find him incorruptible
precisely because he is rich, and who vibrate to his
blunt assessments of the American condition. Last month, John Oliver, a
master of the extended comic decimation, opened video fire on Trump
after many months of resisting the subject. So hilarious! So
devastating! And then Trump cleaned up on Super Tuesday.
Don’t they watch HBO in the S.E.C. states?
Pull
the camera back, and Trump can be viewed as part of a deadly serious
wave of authoritarians and xenophobes who have come to power in Russia,
Poland, and Hungary,
and who lead such movements as the National Front, in France, and the
Independence Party, in the United Kingdom. Vladimir Putin and Trump have
expressed mutual admiration. It’s not hard to see why. Putin has
obliterated the early shoots of Russian democracy
as evidence of weakness and obeisance to the West; his eighty-per-cent
popularity rating is built on arousing nationalism and a hatred of
minorities (ethnic and sexual), the suppression of dissent, and a
bare-chested macho image. Trump says approvingly, “At
least he’s a leader, unlike what we have in this country.”
Yet
how has Donald Trump, the coddled scion of a New York real-estate
baron, emerged as a populist hero? How does the beneficiary of a draft
deferment due to bone spurs
on his feet get away with questioning the military record of John
McCain, who endured five years as a prisoner of war? Trump believes that
his appeal is based largely on what he calls his heroic lack of
“political correctness” but which is more accurately
described as a breezy penchant for race-baiting, war crimes, and
content-free policy pronouncements. At rallies, Trump gets some of his
loudest cheers when he calls for the expanded use of torture (methods “a
hell of a lot worse” than waterboarding), for the
construction of a walled-off southern border (it will be “a beautiful
wall”), and for the immediate replacement of Obamacare with . . .
“something terrific.”
The
question remains why the Trump phenomenon has proved so buoyant and
impregnable. Some have earnestly ascribed it to broad social and
economic forces, particularly
the “new normal” of stagnating wages, underemployment, and corporate
“offshoring” and “inversion.” Yet those factors were at least as
pronounced in the last election cycle––and Republicans chose as their
nominee the father of comprehensive health care in Massachusetts.
The
socioeconomic forces are real, but Trump is also the beneficiary of a
long process of Republican intellectual decadence. Paul Ryan denounces
Trump but not the Tea
Party rhetoric that propelled his own political ascent. John McCain
holds Trump in contempt, but selected as his running mate Sarah Palin,
the Know-Nothing of Wasilla, one of Trump’s most vivid forerunners and
supporters. Mitt Romney last week righteously
slammed Trump as a “phony” and a misogynist, and yet in 2012 he
embraced Trump’s endorsement and praised his “extraordinary”
understanding of economics.
The
G.O.P. establishment may be in a state of meltdown, but this process of
exploiting the darkest American undercurrents began with Richard
Nixon’s Southern Strategy
and, more lately, has included the birther movement and the Obama
Derangement Syndrome. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, who compete hard for the
most extreme positions in conservatism, decry the viciousness and the
vacuousness of Trump, but they started out by deferring
to him––and now they ape his vulgarity in a last-ditch effort to keep
pace. Insults. Bigotry. Nationally televised assurances of adequate
genital dimensions. This is the political moment in which we live. The
Republican Party, having spent years courting the
basest impulses in American political culture, now sees the writing on
the wall. It reads “Donald Trump,” in very big letters.
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