In the halcyon days of last autumn, I thought that the Trump campaign was just wasting everyone’s time before an inevitable Icarian plummet to Earth. I was completely wrong. I prefer to think of it as optimism, not naivité, but frankly I can’t mount much of a defense against my ignorance. I underestimated any number of things. I’ll concede that.
Having repented of my wrongness and asked the Lord for forgiveness, I am now free to render judgement on everybody else for missing a number of things I myself missed mere months ago. Thanks, Jesus!
So why is Trump so popular? “Because people are stupid and racist!” Okay, probably, sure. I mean they’re definitely stupid overall, and it’s not like racism is non-existent. But really? That’s a satisfying analysis? That’s all there is to it? Stupidity is pretty much by tautology the cause of everything people do that’s wrong, so I don’t think that adds much to the conversation. More proximately, and less facile-ly, people support Trump for reasons with a little more nuance than stupidity and racism.
Ideology: As far as modern American politics go, Trump isn’t really identifiable as a liberal or conservative. Frankly, I don’t think he has much in the way of policies he wants implemented. Aside from immigration restrictions, what does he want done? Trade restrictions with China and Mexico? That’s about all I can think of. He’ll probably cut taxes too, but I’m pretty sure every politicians says that out of rote. What Trump is is a nationalist. Nationalism is not necessarily an ideology that sits on one side of the political spectrum. It’s a pretty universally embraced ideology in Europe, which we Americans all consider left-wing. It’s epitomized in his slogan: “Make America great again”. It’s vapid, sure, but it appeals to nationalist sentiments. Trump’s major issue is immigration, an issue hardly at the top of the public list of concerns. But it is a top issue from a nationalistic perspective.
Germane to that is terrorism, which is public issue number one. And it is by all accounts a statistically worthless concern. 90% of the roughly 3200 deaths from terrorism in the US in the last 20 years were from the 9/11 attacks. And while those attacks obviously had major economic implications as well, fatality-wise, we lose more or less the same number of people every year from fires. Yet fires are not even on the list of concerns. We care so little about fires that I’m pretty sure every American household has at least one smoke detector with the batteries pulled out of it. “It was beeping for no reason so I just yanked the batteries out and I haven’t gotten around to trying to fix it.” So while the fear may be irrational, it is still at the top of the list, and Trump is tapping into that better than the other candidates have been able to. Bush’s “fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here” policy was never going to work, but it staved off our insecurity for a good decade. But that’s not holding up well in the psyche of our nation, so now a lot of people are concerned about the whole coming-over-here thing. And that’s in line with the nationalistic ideology. And I can dismiss it as a statistically unsound concern, but from a philosophical standpoint, there is a valid argument to be made: to what extent can we restrict the freedoms of people to immigrate out of the concern that some of them will harm people living here? Trump and people sympathetic to him ideologically take the view that heavy restrictions are necessary to protect lives. You can absolutely disagree with that, but that’s the argument that ultimately needs addressed if you’re going to take disagreement with him on that position.
Trump is not running as a conservative Republican. He’s essentially an independent candidate on the Republican ticket. And it’s an interesting juxtaposition to Sanders, who’s actually an independent candidate on the Democratic ticket who’s doing pretty well. Sanders likely won’t clench the nomination, but for an independent, he is getting a lot of coverage and support. This independence is a massive asset. In 2010, independent affiliation beat out the Dem’s to become the largest political affiliation in the country, and it’s still been gaining traction, hovering around the 40% mark. Americans are getting sicker of the two parties, thank God. But there’s no great way to channel that frustration. The system has been set up to prevent people from exercising any independent option. Independents like Ross Perot and Ralph Nader showed that people would be interested, at least to some extent in voting for other options, and the Democrats and Republicans have been working in a bipartisan effort to stifle that kind of dissent. Independent candidates and 3rd parties are shut out of the platforms to speak to the public. Ballot access laws, controlled by the major parties, makes it next to impossible for any sustained effort for independent politics to happen (google Libertarian Party ballot access and you’ll have plenty to look at). The media is facilitating all of this as the gatekeepers of information. If they didn’t have their team to root for and the enemy team to root against, they’d have to rethink their entire outlook on life, which would be uncomfortable. Having independents in a debate could force people to ask questions on the actual issues themselves, not just with party/factional allegiance. Trump, and to a lesser extent Sanders, are the work-around. Not bona fide independents, but conspicuously different enough from the status quo candidates.
Being a celebrity confers massive advantages in media coverage. I’m not saying it’s a conspiracy, that the media is intentionally giving Trump more time because of some kind of machinations hashed out in closed meetings. Voice actor Billy West says that “there’s only one show business, and we’re all in it”, the “we” referring to anyone in the industry. Trump is benefiting front his more than anyone else. He’s interesting to the people in the media. He’s not being picked out in some sort of nefarious plot to distract us from “what’s really going on” TM; he’s just the guy people in that business can’t take their eyes off. It may be mostly negative attention, but it’s attention nonetheless. And in a popularity contest like democracy, attention is an ingredient for success. Political coverage is in all practicality the same as reality TV. A reality TV star with gravitas is well suited to benefit from the political media game.
The Republican field conferred Trump some advantage as well. Debates were absolutely packed to the brim early on with a lot of clutter. Again, I considered Trump to be a part of this clutter. I stand by that, but he rose above it. I underestimated his staying power, of course, but he was among the three candidates with absolutely no political experience–the others being Fiorina and Carson. All of these candidates seemed to interest voters to a fair degree, which doesn’t seem uncommon for early stages in the race. More politically established candidates had to vie for air time along with these three, along candidates with an outside chance. The GOP failed to rally behind a single popular establishment candidate, and no establishment candidate was able to secure a dominant popularity, so Trump managed to fight off the attrition long enough to secure his place as a viable alternative to the establishment.
The other side to Trump’s success is his lack of failure–isn’t logic fun, kids? Nobody has been able to stump the Trump.
In the GOP, the Party absolutely did not (nor does it yet) have its shit together. The fact that there were multiple debates with 10+ candidates is insane. The initial heir-apparent to the throne picked by the Party (as evidenced by endorsements and fundraising) was Jeb Bush. Bush is bland and inoffensive through-and-through. He’s politically stable, experienced, and has good name recognition. Except for the fact that he would be the 3rd president Bush in the last quarter century, and for some reason the Party didn’t understand that America really wasn’t interested in another one. The last one left with a legacy of war and recession making a lasting impression, and people–reasonably–want someone new. He was the absolute worst guy to pick for the American public because of his name. Had the Party told Bush to bow out and thrown endorsements behind Walker or Rubio from the get-go, this may have been a very different scenario. Having two other non-politicians didn’t help matters, although those kinds of people are a lot harder for the Party to deal with. But the egotism of Fiorina and Carson are complicit in the ascendancy of Trump as well; had they exited early, again, way more time for the actual politicians to talk. Cruz and Paul, representing staunch conservative and libertarian perspectives respectively, have/had their place in the field to discuss things ideologically. Trump’s is there for that too, as the nationalist, he’s just a lot less coherent. Kasich, who is not a fan-favorite of the Party itself nor its donors–he was snubbed by the Kochs in a fundraiser they did in his home state, recently, for example–has been staying in for personal leverage. All he had to do was not act like an idiot and he was assured national publicity, which he’s been getting. Kasich is fine with Trump winning if it means he’ll get consideration for something down the line. With all that, the more “moderate” establishment candidate (now Rubio) is hurting. The Party isn’t going to fall behind Trump, Cruz, or Kasich. And none of them will be eager to drop out just out of sheer ego. My guess is the Party will cut deals to throw all the non-Trump delegates behind Rubio, but that remains to be seen.
The media, even in its efforts to attack Trump, have been fueling his popularity. In the debates, he very consistently got considerably more time to speak and more mentions. That attention translates to popularity. They may genuinely be deluded enough to think that negative attention means negative popularity, but that’s not necessarily how it works. The sage advice of the internet has been lost on the fourth estate: don’t feed the trolls. It is a staggering display of incompetence that continuously flabbergasts me. They made the gradeschool mistake of calling Trump and asshole over and over, instead of a dumbass. There is a universe of difference between those two things, and the media doesn’t know it. Frankly, nobody gives a shit if Trump is an asshole, except for people who already aren’t voting for him. What they might care about is if he’s a moron. And the media never took him to task for it. The closest they got was having Megyn Kelly not apologize for existing. Nobody took him to task for a lack of policy beyond building a wall and vague platitudes. “How are you going to negotiate with X?” would have been a great question to ask a thousand different times, and I never heard it come up. That being said, the media should be taking all the candidates to task, but nonetheless they spent a massive amount of effort sitting and talking about Trump, and while they were doing that, they never bothered to call him out on not having much in the way of coherent or feasible policy.
Along the same lines is everyone else who is calling Trump an asshole, or, stupider yet, his followers assholes. Trump appeals not just to nationalists, but for people who feel marginalized and want somebody, anybody else who they feel will protect them. Protect them from what? From everyone who calls his supporters racists, bigots, fascists, regressive, etc. Shockingly, people tend not to like vitriol and invective. And it gets hurled with abandon. Politics has always been filled with mud-slinging, but when society slings mud at other segments within itself, that’s a recipe for disaster. Trump’s assholishness is not a pure liability: it’s one of his major assets, at least to a sizable demographic. Trump is the bluntly honest guy that appeals to a lot of us. My friend made the insight that that honesty makes people feel empowered. It’s a sense of control over something in a realm as chaotic as politics. And to a fair degree, a trustworthy politician is a very rare thing indeed. It’s far less the crassness that appeals to people than the confidence. Trump doesn’t take shit from people. He doesn’t put up with the kind of shit a lot of people have been dealing with. There are a number of people who are sick of being insulted, and watching insults roll off him like water off a duck is giving a lot of people something to latch onto. Does Trump have openly racist and fascist supporters? Sure. Those guys don’t actually care if you call them racist or fascist. But a huge number of people genuinely don’t consider themselves racist, etc., and nobody is respecting their perspective. People who don’t irrationally hate all Muslims are still concerned about Islamic terrorism. And while I’ll be the first to argue that it’s a statistically silly fear, it’s not a fear that comes from nowhere. The Islamic terrorism is scary, and there’s a logic to it. Religious extremists want to kill people like us because they’re insane. They’ve done it before and will try it again. And that’s completely true. The overall perspective may be skewed, but that concern is absolutely a valid construct, and when people can’t even voice that concern without being shut down and called a terrible, horrible human being, they’re not going to change their opinion, they’re just going to go to some who will listen. It’s the reason the far-right is on the ascent in Europe right now. Trump is our version of that phenomenon, and our actions will determine whether he’s a harbinger of things to come or the zenith/nadir of it all. Likewise, people who have to compete with immigrant laborers, and live in communities where public schools are slammed with rapid influxes of immigrants that they aren’t equipped to deal with, and any of the various other issues that arise in high-immigration areas, people who don’t irrationally hate immigrants have valid complaints–which again, may not be totally right overall–that deserve to be addressed with more nuance than accusations of racism, particularly by people who have never been adversely affected by those kinds of scenarios.
Trump has managed to secure himself as the guy people know is against the status quo. That can take a couple different incarnations, but his success is due in large part because his supporters do not feel that there is a better choice for them to pick. The status quo sucks. People have found somebody who isn’t more of the same crap. He may be different crap, but people are trying to make a change. That he’s the best shot they think we have for change: that’s on our system, which is ultimately on us. “Every nation gets the government it deserves.” –Joseph de Maistre