If you buy into the theory that happiness equals reality minus expectations, then the Republican Party establishment is currently very, very unhappy. It wasn’t meant to be like this. The last presidential election was meant to be a wake-up call that systematically offending vast swathes of the American electorate was no way to win the White House.
The apparent revelation in 2012 that there weren’t enough angry white males to form a majority meant that this time the party would need to build a broader coalition by reaching out to women and minorities. This would be a primary season that would dignify the office of the presidency, as serious candidates like Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio and John Kasich showed that the Republicans could evolve on issues like immigration, healthcare, and marriage equality.
Oh, how very wrong we were. Watching the Republican primary process play out nightly on cable news is like rubber-necking a grisly car crash on the motorway. Your better nature wants you to shield your eyes and look away, but deep in your reptilian brain you’re hypnotised by the sheer horror of it. Of course at the centre of the mayhem is Trump. Rather than stumbling as prophesised all summer, his Teflon-coated and apparently gaffe-proof campaign has taken him to the top of the polls. There’s no real disagreement that he’s arrogant, smug, casually racist, and pretty much policy-free. The staggering thing is that close to a third of Republicans seem willing to overlook these flaws in their yearning to have an anti-politician as their standard bearer.
While the Trump phenomenon is undoubtedly fascinating, it’s just as interesting to watch the other Republican candidates struggle to deal with the reality distortion field that he’s created. Like a political black hole, Trump is now dictating the trajectory of Republican candidates who naively thought they lived in a galaxy far far away from the Donald. As the ‘Summer of Trump’ turns to autumn, experienced politicians who have won elections and run good campaigns in the past are evaporating in the polls and struggling to master the new rules of the game.
The key to understanding how the other candidates are reacting to Trump is to recognise that he is first and foremost a bully. Like all bullies he has a predator’s instinct for opponents’ weaknesses. Texas governor Rick Perry’s hopes of reinventing himself as a serious policy figure were shredded by Trump’s one-liner about his new ‘smart guy glasses’, and Perry is already out of the race.
Despite her recent rise in the polls, Trump’s ‘look at that face’ comment concerning (the admittedly stern) Carly Fiorina will probably stick to her far longer than it will to him. As far as I know, Trump hasn’t accused any of his opponents of being a bed wetter yet, but I imagine it’s only a matter of time.
In policy terms, these schoolyard tactics translate into telling ISIS that he is going to ‘kick their ass and take their oil’, which is just the State Department equivalent of giving them a wedgie and stealing their lunch money. When it comes to Putin’s Russia, Trump seems to think a testosterone-fuelled bromance with a fellow egomaniac will quickly sort out minor issues like Ukraine. Serious foreign policy figures are aghast, but many in the rank and file of the party hear echoes of Ronald Reagan’s tough guy persona in Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’ slogan. On immigration, Trump’s idea of constructing a towering wall to keep the Mexican wildlings out has no credibility outside of ‘Game of Thrones’, but for ‘information light’ voters it can come across as a bold and practical solution from someone who made their money building stuff.
When he’s had to play defence, Trump’s egotistical bluster has deflected issues that would have torpedoed other candidates. The media’s ‘gotcha’ questions get disarmingly straight answers, and he doesn’t resort to the self-righteous victimhood and faux anger that characterises normal politics. ‘Weren’t you once a Democrat?’ Yes. ‘Didn’t you give Hilary money?’ Yes. ‘Did you call women fat pigs’? Yes, but only Rosie O’Donnell. He even appears to have passed the religious right’s litmus test, even although he struggles to quote a single piece of scripture. Maybe his lack of biblical learning is explained by the fact that he believes the story of the messiah is playing out nightly on CNN.
My broad-based education at Renfrew High School in the early 1980s taught me that there are three ways to deal with a bully, and Trump’s opponents are experimenting with all of them. The first is the cloak of invisibility. Keep a low profile, cross the street when you see them coming, and hope you escape their attention. But this approach only works if Trump implodes before your own campaign disappears in a puff of irrelevance.
As Trump continues to suck the media oxygen out of everyone else’s campaigns, many of the ‘hide under the table’ candidates are like fish stranded on a riverbank gasping for attention. The best example is Rick Santorum. The former senator actually won the Iowa caucuses in 2012, but is currently a rounding error in the polls. How Santorum must yearn for those glory days when he could say outlandish things like equating homosexuality to bestiality to guarantee a full day of media attention.
Because of the media’s fascination with Trump, many in the Republican field are struggling to make it onto the local never mind national news. In desperation, candidates like Mike Huckabee are ramping up the rhetoric, with his accusation that Obama’s Iran nuclear deal is tantamount to ‘walking the Israeli people to the ovens’. When the Israeli government reprimands you for hyperbole concerning the holocaust, it may indicate you’ve gone a little over the top. But the sad thing is that this scaremongering gave Huckabee a boost in the polls and emboldened him to start talking about sending in the National Guard to close down abortion clinics. Some serious candidates are still gamely resisting the ‘go crazy or go home strategy’. Poor Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey, is persevering with his straight talking, ‘man of the people’ act, apparently unaware that he is exactly four years too late with that strategy.
The second approach to dealing with a bully is to join their gang. This is the Senator Ted Cruz tactic of obsequiously cuddling up to Trump in the transparent hope that if Trump stumbles, Cruz will inherit a large chunk of the Donald’s supporters. Of course Cruz has also taken time out from his pandering to burnish his own crazy credentials by spouting conspiracy-laden drivel about Obama preparing to declare martial law and ‘invade’ Texas.
The third, and clearly the most dangerous choice when dealing with Trump, is to take the hero route and stand up to the bully. Unfortunately, the Republican primary is not a boys’ own story where a pop on the nose gets everyone’s respect and the bully mends his ways. In fact it’s far closer to the world of early 1980s Renfrew High School, where standing up to the biggest bullies was often a fast track to disfigurement and perpetual fear.
When Senator Lindsay Graham called Trump a jackass early in the summer, he was quickly demonised as a Golum-like figure grovelling in front of Trump for media endorsements and money. Unfortunately for Graham, this thumbnail portrait aligned pretty well with how many people already saw the senator from South Carolina. As the titular establishment candidate, Jeb Bush has done more than most to confront Trump on issues like immigration, but the polls show that Trump’s relentless needling of Bush as a low-energy wimp who’s scared of his Mexican wife has also hit home. Senator Marco Rubio from Florida has recently emerged from his political witness protection programme to start attacking Trump’s lack of substance, and he’s also invited retaliation by calling him ‘touchy and insecure’. That retaliation has been swift and vicious, with Trump dismissing Rubio as ‘a sweaty kid’, but it’s too early to tell whether the hard kernel of truth in that characterisation will fatally undermine Rubio’s bid for the presidency.
Although they are clearly not bullies, the momentum of Senator Bernie Sanders in the Democratic race and the election of Jeremy Corbyn to the Labour leadership in the UK, reinforce the theme that voters are sick and tired of airbrushed politicians. Instead there’s an appetite for real, unscripted candidates who don’t care about focus groups or talking points and who don’t rely on million dollar cheques from corporate sugar daddies. Political populism has a long history in America, but the difference in 2015 is that Trump’s hucksterism and relentless personal branding are getting amplified by the twin engines of 24-hour cable news and social media. Win the media cycle and who cares about policies. Just point the finger at the Mexicans, the Iranians, the Chinese, and holler that they’ve taken advantage of our ‘idiot leaders’. Ratchet up the rhetoric even further by linking Mexican immigration to a series of horrific murders and sex crimes, and you have a potent populist message that the other candidates aren’t matching. Then if anyone dares to stand up to you, go for the jugular.
The sad truth is that Trump’s bully boy tactics may take him reasonably far in the fragmented Republican primary field, and it looks like he will be in the race through at least Iowa and New Hampshire. Despite that, the crumb of comfort is that the national polls still suggest he has no hope of winning the presidency. While he may have close to 30% support among Republicans, another 35% of Republicans say they will never vote for him, even if he is the nominee. It’s also worthwhile remembering that it is still early days for this campaign. At this point in 2011, pre-glasses Rick Perry was still leading in the polls and as I write this there are signs that Trump may be losing his outsider mantle to Carly Fiorina, whose flinty performances in the recent debates have garnered a lot of praise.
Since he entered the campaign, the best description I’ve heard of the Trump phenomenon is that he’s the entire Republican Party after five drinks; a nativist, prejudiced, blow hard Alf Garnett figure who says what everyone else is thinking. But if the Republican Party doesn’t want to wake up in 13 months with yet another electoral hangover, then it’s time for them to sober up. Instead of the renaissance promised after the debacle of 2012, the Republicans now have a primary process that is well and truly off the rails and includes three leading candidates who have never held a single elected office between them. In the standard psychological model of grief, denial and anger are followed by bargaining.
As Iowa and New Hampshire begin to loom on the horizon, maybe it’s time for the real Republican candidates to start talking to each other and figure out how they are going to co-operate to take down this bully for the good of the party and the good of the country.
By Alan McIntyre | October 2015