He won’t pivot. So I have to. Having seen Donald Trump as a braggadocious but benign celebrity in New York for decades, I did not regard him as the apotheosis of evil. He seemed more like a toon, a cocky huckster swanning around Gotham with a statuesque woman on his arm and skyscrapers stamped with his brand. I certainly never would have predicted that the Trump name would be uttered in the same breath as Hitler, Mussolini and scary menace, even on such pop culture staples as The Bachelorette.
Trump jumped into the race with an eruption of bigotry, ranting about Mexican rapists and a Muslim ban. But privately, he assured people that these were merely opening bids in the negotiation; that he was really the same pragmatic New Yorker he had always been; that he would be a flexible, wheeling-and-dealing president, not a crazy nihilist like Ted Cruz or a mean racist like George Wallace. He yearned to be compared to Ronald Reagan, a former TV star who overcame a reputation for bellicosity and racial dog whistles to become the most beloved Republican president of modern times.
Trump was applying his business cunning, Twitter snarkiness and bendy relationship with the truth to his new role as a Republican politician. The opposition was unappetising: Cruz, a creepy, calculating ideologue; Marco Rubio, a hungry lightweight jettisoning his old positions and mentor; Chris Christie, a vindictive bully; Jeb Bush, a past-his-sell-by-date scion.
When Trump pulled back the curtain on how Washington Republicans had been stringing their voters along for years with bold promises, like repealing Obamacare, that they knew had no chance, it was a rare opportunity to see them called out. And when Trump was blunt about how cheaply you could buy and sell politicians in both parties, it made this town squirm.
His obnoxious use of ethnicity only exposed the fact that Republicans had been using bigotry against minorities and gays to whip up voters for decades. The GOP would love to drop Trump now because it prefers a candidate in the party’s more subtle racist traditions. (Or even a candidate savvy enough to heap disdain on the 47 per cent of government freeloaders at a ritzy fundraiser without having a bartender tape it and leak it.)
The neocons calling Trump a fascist would certainly prefer a more militaristic candidate. Trump realised the Iraq War was misbegotten long before much of the media cognoscenti in New York, and he was willing to hold George W. Bush accountable for being asleep at the switch before September 11 and using a bait-and-switch on Iraq. Even though he ranted about the press, he was also far more available to the media than the cloaked Hillary Clinton, who has yet to give a news conference this year. But he undermines his accessibility when he incites nastiness against reporters at his rallies and revokes The Washington Post’s credentials for a headline he doesn’t like.
Rhetoric and racism
Before his campaign became infused with racial grievance, victimhood and violence, Trump told me, “I have fun with life, and I understand life, and I want to make life better for people.” If he had those better angels, he didn’t listen to them. Seduced by the roar of the angry crowd, Trump kept dishing out racially offensive comments about “my African-American”, a black man he spotted at a California rally; the “Mexican” judge on the Trump University case; and the “Afghan” who committed the atrocities in Orlando.
Mitt Romney is right that Trump’s rhetoric causes “trickle-down racism” and misogyny. The Washington Post had a front-page story on Friday about the vulgarities freely directed at Clinton by men and women at Trump rallies.
Trump told me he could act like the toniest member of high society when he wanted, and he would as soon as he dispatched his Republican rivals. He said his narcissism would not hinder him as he morphed into a leader. But he can’t stop lashing out and doesn’t get why that turns people against him. Everything is filtered through his ego. He reacted to Orlando not as a tragedy so much as a chance to brag about “the congrats” he got for “being right on radical Islamic terrorism”.
The presumptive but now tenuous nominee seemed bereft at a Dallas rally last Thursday night when he could no longer brag about his polls, which are shattering records for negativity. Finally, on Friday, Trump couldn’t stop himself from tweeting out a poll, even though it was one that showed him behind Clinton.
Trump has made his campaign all about his ability to win. So if he stops winning, what’s his raison d’etre?
Trump’s pledges to release his tax returns and surround himself with an A-team fell through. A month after his hostile takeover of the Republican Party, he’s got a skeletal operation a few floors below his office suite in Trump Tower.
Trump shocked himself by shooting to the top of the Republican heap. It was like watching a bank robber sneak into a bank, only to find all the doors unlocked. But like Dan Quayle and Sarah Palin, Trump refused to study up on policy. So he has been unable to marry his often canny political instincts with some actual knowledge.
He has made some fair points. A lot of America’s allies do take advantage of them. US trade deals have left swathes of America devastated. And it was a positive move to propose a meeting with the NRA on gun control for people on the terrorist watch list. But his fair points are getting outnumbered by egregious statements and nutty insinuations, like suggesting that President Barack Obama is tolerant of Daesh (the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) attacks, an echo of the kooky birther campaign that he led, suggesting that Obama wasn’t qualified to be president.
Now Trump’s own behaviour is casting serious doubt on whether he’s qualified to be president.
— New York Times News Service
Maureen Dowd is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and New York Times columnist.
