Donald Trump’s victory in the Nevada Republican caucus wasn’t even a close one; he reportedly led in practically every demographic (and listed them in his victory speech). Evangelicals, young, old, Hispanics, the highly educated and “the poorly educated” they all loved him on Tuesday night. Hispanics? Yes, even Hispanics, even after that line about “drugs and rapists” .
And though establishment toffs like to issue signifying snorts about Trump voters being predominantly “poorly educated”, in the minutes after the caucus even CNN started to come around to the most elusive explanation: Trump’s popularity isn’t about his supporters’ education, their religion or the policies they’d like to see enacted. Trump is popular because of his supporters’ anger.
Anger isn’t something that Beltway pundits recognize, let alone understand because everyone employed in media or in politics in and around Washington DC is pretty well off. Even ink-stained wretches pull down five-figures — and, unlike everywhere else in America, since journalism is built on documenting nonsense, there’s some real job security in documenting Washington.
Television people fare even better, because TV money is stupid money. Think-tank malefactors reap great sums from the aggrieved heartland or from industries looking to build a canon of falsified data, and Congress and the attendant lobbying is a helluva racket. Anger is pretty easy to miss when it’s something pretty difficult to feel.
When you sit at the centre of the world and are unlikely to ever lack for the basic materials of self-sufficiency, the idea of blind, gnawing resentment — let alone of feeding that resentment even with irrational aims — is ineluctably beyond your ken.
It’s harder still to understand that there are millions of people in America whose ambitions for a life of steadily improving conditions cratered sometime around nine years ago and have never recovered. If you can hardly imagine that you could follow the Horatio Alger script to the letter and still find yourself sinking in quicksand, you’re never going to understand why someone would be so contemptuous of the pieties of a system that only pays attention to you when doing soft-focus interviews in search of a journalism award or a campaign ad. And anger isn’t something so easily ratiocinated. When your job is explaining world events, irrational phenomena lie fundamentally outside your brief. Explaining things with, “Well, people are angry!” is like surrender; it’s explaining badly-resolved story lines in a TV show with, “A wizard did it.”
Journalists learn to see the world in terms of the push/pull of conflicting ideologies and the necessary stratagems within a needlessly complicated governmental system; they’re necessarily going to seek their explanations for seeming irrationality in the more elegant realms of philosophy and economics and political science. Doing so fails them all the time. Look at the Tea Party, which the Beltway (at various points) tried desperately to explain as populist resentment of Business As Usual, or a new libertarian moment.
Unambiguous signs
Only recently has the media madding crowd come around to some kind of consensus about it just being racist as hell. That wasn’t a difficult conclusion to reach, and it didn’t need to take seven years; all they had to do was look at their damn signage — all those placards of Obama as “Curious George” the monkey and signs like “Obama’s plan = white slavery” were kind of unambiguous. Which brings us back to Trump’s victory speech in Nevada, which was his usual gallimaufry of disconnected thoughts. They aren’t traditional political speeches as must as they are The Donald emceeing his own Dean Martin roast for everyone and everything he hates, with interruptions for what he loves. He burns his enemies to a crisp, tells America it’s wonderful and drops in random praise.
“Florida, we love Florida.” Hey, Florida, baby, you’re beautiful. You’re wonderful. I tell ya, I love ya. You’re aces. Here’s $100 (Dh367) for the tables. I know you’re going to be lucky tonight because I can feel it. There’s a great temptation to fume at the emptiness and banality of Trump’s statements and at the absence of traditional policy plans; it’s almost irresistible to seek some grander explanation for his success than that people like him.
But you don’t need some grand overarching political science theory. There are millions of miserable people in America who know exactly who engineered the shattering of their worlds, and Trump isn’t one of those people — and, with the exception of Bernie Sanders, everyone else in the field is running on the basis of their experience being one of those people.
When you are abused and bullied enough, anyone willing to beat up or burn down whomever put you in that position is your friend. Even a bully can be a hero if he targets others bullies — and that is, more or less, what Trump has done since day one. Trump’s nativism is horrifying and nauseating, as is his delight in talking about beating up protesters and intimidating anyone who hassles him. People are right to fear the way he has turned movement conservatism’s loathing of protest, the media and non-white foreigners up to 11 and ripped the knob off.
But that disgusting behaviour gets paired with the sight of Trump humiliating establishment empty suits like Scott Walker, stuffed shirts like Jeb Bush, party pets like Marco Rubio and habitual liars like Ted Cruz. The fact that Trump himself is frequently lying doesn’t matter to those that see themselves as the establishment’s victims if he’s lying in service of exposing another government predator.
As tacky and thuggish as it might be, Trump plays the hero to people that the wise warriors of the system have abandoned. He’s the ultimate Gary Stu character: a billionaire beholden to no one and able to abuse every disingenuous and pettifogging remora latched headfirst on the nation and sucking upward. And as long as people can enjoy the elbow-throwing wish-fulfillment of watching him in action, most of the rest doesn’t matter to them — not the bombast, not the war-mongering, not the infeasibility of even his signature promises and certainly not the consequences if he keeps them. If the system is already so broken that it abandoned you, its preservation is not your concern. Hell, burning it down might be what you want most. Anger has a clarity all its own. It renders most detail extraneous, and it animates like nothing else. It is not to be underestimated, and, at this point, we will probably have to wait until November to find out if it truly has been.
