by Sid Holt
He strokes his famous flying fuzz-mane. It looks gorgeous, like it’s been recently fed. The crowd goes wild. Whoooo! Trump!
It’s pure camp, a variety show. He singles out a Trump impersonator in the crowd, tells him he hopes the guy is making a lot of money. “Melania, would you marry that guy?” he says. The future first lady is a Slovenian model who, apart from Trump, was most famous for a TV ad in which she engaged in a Frankenstein-style body transfer with the Aflac duck, voiced by Gilbert Gottfried.
She had one line in that ad. Tonight, it’s two lines:
“Ve love you, New Hampshire,” she says, in a thick vampire accent. “Ve, together, ve vill make America great again!”
As reactionary patriotic theater goes, this scene is bizarre—Melania Knauss didn’t even arrive in America until 1996, when she was all of twenty-six—but the crowd goes nuts anyway. Everything Trump does works these days. He steps to the mic.
“She’s beautiful, but she’s more beautiful even on the inside,” he says, raising a finger to the heavens. “And, boy, is she smart!”
Before the speech, the PA announcer had told us not to “touch or harm” any protesters, but to instead just surround them and chant, “Trump! Trump! Trump!” until security can arrive (and presumably do the touching and/or harming).
I’d seen this ritual several times, and the crowd always loves it. At one event, a dead ringer for John Oliver ripped off his shirt in the middle of a Trump speech to reveal body paint that read “Eminent Domain This!” on his thorax. The man shouted, “Trump is a racist!” and was immediately set upon by Trump supporters, who yelled “Trump! Trump! Trump!” at him until security arrived and dragged him out the door to cheers. The whole Trump run is like a Jerry Springer episode, where even the losers seem in on the gags.
In Manchester, a protester barely even manages to say a word before disappearing under a blanket of angry boos: “Trump! Trump! Trump!” It’s a scene straight out of Freaks. In a Trump presidency, there will be free tar and feathers provided at the executive’s every public address.
It’s a few minutes after that when a woman in the crowd shouts that Ted Cruz is a pussy. She will later tell a journalist she supports Trump because his balls are the size of “watermelons” while his opponents’ balls are more like “grapes” or “raisins.”
Trump’s balls are unaware of this, but he instinctively likes her comment and decides to go into headline-making mode. “I never expect to hear that from you again!” he says, grinning. “She said he’s a pussy. That’s terrible.” Then, theatrically, he turns his back to the crowd. As the 500 or so reporters in attendance scramble to instantly make this the most important piece of news in the world—in less than a year Trump has succeeded in turning the USA into a massive high school—the candidate beams.
What’s he got to be insecure about? The American electoral system is opening before him like a flower.
In person, you can’t miss it: The same way Sarah Palin can see Russia from her house, Donald on the stump can see his future. The pundits don’t want to admit it, but it’s sitting there in plain view, twelve moves ahead, like a chess game already won:
President Donald Trump.
A thousand ridiculous accidents needed to happen in the unlikeliest of sequences for it to be possible, but absent a dramatic turn of events—an early primary catastrophe, Mike Bloomberg ego-crashing the race, etc.—this boorish, monosyllabic TV tyrant with the attention span of an Xbox-playing eleven-year-old really is set to lay waste to the most impenetrable oligarchy the Western world ever devised.
It turns out we let our electoral process devolve into something so fake and dysfunctional that any half-bright con man with the stones to try it could walk right through the front door and tear it to shreds on the first go.
And Trump is no half-bright con man, either. He’s way better than average.
It’s been well-documented that Trump surged last summer when he openly embraced the ugly race politics that, according to the Beltway custom of fifty-plus years, is supposed to stay at the dog-whistle level. No doubt, that’s been a huge factor in his rise. But racism isn’t the only ugly thing he’s dragged out into the open.
Trump is no intellectual. He’s not bringing Middlemarch to the toilet. If he had to jail with Stephen Hawking for a year, he wouldn’t learn a thing about physics. Hawking would come out on day 365 talking about models and football.
But, in an insane twist of fate, this bloated billionaire scion has hobbies that have given him insight into the presidential electoral process. He likes women, which got him into beauty pageants. And he likes being famous, which got him into reality TV. He knows show business.
That put him in position to understand that the presidential election campaign is really just a badly acted, billion-dollar TV show whose production costs ludicrously include the political disenfranchisement of its audience. Trump is making a mockery of the show, and the Wolf Blitzers and Anderson Coopers of the world seem appalled. How dare he demean the presidency with his antics?
But they’ve all got it backward. The presidency is serious. The presidential electoral process, however, is a sick joke, in which everyone loses except the people behind the rope line. And every time some pundit or party spokesman tries to deny it, Trump picks up another vote.
• • •
The ninth Republican debate, in Greenville, South Carolina, is classic Trump. He turns these things into WWE contests, and since he has actual WWE experience after starring in Wrestlemania in 2007, he knows how to play these moments like a master.
Interestingly, a lot of Trump’s political act seems lifted from bully-wrestlers. A clear influence is “Ravishing” Rick Rude, an eighties champ whose shtick was to insult the audience. He would tell ticket holders they were “fat, ugly sweat hogs,” before taking off his robe to show them “what a real sexy man looks like.”
In Greenville, Donald “The Front-Runner” Trump started off the debate by jumping on his favorite wrestling foil, Prince Dinkley McBirthright, a.k.a. Jeb Bush. Trump seems to genuinely despise Bush. He never missed a chance to rip him for being a “low-energy,” “stiff,” and “dumb as a rock” weenie who lets his Mexican wife push him around. But if you watch Trump long enough, it starts to seem gratuitous.
Trump’s basic argument is the same one every successful authoritarian movement in recent Western history has made: that the regular guy has been screwed by a conspiracy of incestuous elites. The Bushes are half that conspiratorial picture, fronts for a Republican Party establishment and whose sum total of accomplishments, dating back nearly thirty years, are two failed presidencies, the sweeping loss of manufacturing jobs, and a pair of pitiable Middle Eastern military adventures—the second one achieving nothing but dead American kids and Junior’s reelection.
Trump picked on Jeb because Jeb is a symbol. The Bushes are a dissolute monarchy, down to offering their last genetic screw-up to the throne.
Jeb took the high road for most of the past calendar year, but Trump used his gentlemanly dignity against him. What Trump understands better than his opponents is that NASCAR America, WWE America, always loves seeing the preening self-proclaimed good guy get whacked with a chair. In Greenville, Trump went after Jeb this time on the issue of his brother’s invasion of Iraq.
“The war in Iraq was a big f … fat mistake, all right?” he snorted. He nearly said, “A big fucking mistake.” He added that the George W. Bush administration lied before the war about Iraq having WMDs and that we spent $2 trillion basically for nothing.
Days earlier, Trump had gleefully tweeted that Bush needed his “mommy” after Jeb appeared with Lady Barbara on a morning show.
Jeb now went straight into character as the Man Whose Good Name Had Been Insulted. He defended his family and took exception to Trump having the “gall” to go after his mother.
“I won the lottery when I was born sixty-three years ago and looked up and I saw my mom,” Jeb said proudly and lifted his chin. Ame
rica loves Moms. How could he not win this exchange? But he was walking into a lawn mower.
“My mom is the strongest woman I know,” Jeb continued.
“She should be running,” Trump snapped.
The crowd booed, but even that was phony. It later came out that more than 900 of the 1,600 seats were given to local and national GOP officials. (Trump mentioned during the debate that he had only his wife and son there in comparison, but few picked up on what he was saying.) Pundits, meanwhile, lined up to congratulate Jeb for “assailing” Trump—“Bush is finally going for it,” the New York Times wrote—but the exchange really highlighted many of the keys to Trump’s success.
Trump had said things that were true and that no other Republican would dare to say. And yet the press congratulated the candidate stuffed with more than $100 million in donor cash who really did take five whole days last year to figure out his position on his own brother’s invasion of Iraq.
At a time when there couldn’t be more at stake, with the Middle East in shambles, a major refugee crisis, and as many as three Supreme Court seats up for grabs (the death of satanic quail hunter Antonin Scalia underscored this), the Republican Party picked a strange year to turn the presidential race into a potluck affair. The candidates sent forth to take on Trump have been so incompetent they can’t even lose properly.
One GOP strategist put it this way: “Maybe 34 [percent] is Trump’s ceiling. But 34 in a five-person race wins.”
The numbers simply don’t work, unless the field unexpectedly narrows before March. Trump has a chokehold on somewhere between 25 and 40 percent of the Republican vote, scoring in one poll across every category: young and old, educated and less so, hardcore conservatives and registered Democrats, with men and with women, Megyn Kelly’s “wherever” notwithstanding. Trump the Builder of Anti-Rapist Walls even earns an estimated 25 percent of the GOP Latino vote.
Moreover, there’s evidence that human polling undercounts Trump’s votes, as people support him in larger numbers when they don’t have to admit their leanings to a live human being. Like autoerotic asphyxiation, supporting Donald Trump is an activity many people prefer to enjoy in a private setting, like in a shower or a voting booth.
The path to unseating Trump is consolidation of opposition, forcing him into a two- or three-person race. Things seemed headed that way after Iowa, when Ted Cruz won and Marco Rubio came in third.
Rubio’s Iowa celebration was a classic. The toothy Floridian leaped onstage and delivered a rollickingly pretentious speech appropriate not for a candidate who just eked out wins in five Iowa counties, but for a man just crowned king of Jupiter.
“For months, they told us because we offered too much optimism in a time of anger, we had no chance,” he thundered. Commentators later noted Rubio’s language was remarkably similar to Barack Obama’s florid “they said our sights were set too high” 2008 Iowa victory speech.
The national punditry predictably overreacted to Rubio’s showing, having been desperate to rally behind a traditional, party-approved GOP candidate.
Why do the media hate Trump? Progressive reporters will say it’s because of things like his being crazy and the next Hitler while the Fox types insist it’s because he’s “not conservative.” But reporters mostly loathe Trump because he regularly craps on other reporters.
He called Fox’s Kelly a period-crazed bias monster for asking simple questions about Trump’s past comments about women and launched a weirdly lengthy crusade against little-known New Hampshire Union-Leader publisher Joseph McQuaid for comparing Trump to Back to the Future villain Biff Tannen. He even mocked the neurological condition of Times reporter Serge Kovaleski for failing to ratify Trump’s hilariously fictional recollection of “thousands” of Muslims celebrating after 9/11, doing an ad hoc writhing disabled-person impersonation at a South Carolina rally that left puppies and cancer kids as the only groups untargeted by his campaign. (He later denied the clearly undeniable characterization.)
But Trump’s thin-skinned dealings with reporters didn’t fully explain the media’s efforts to prop up his opponents. We’ve long been engaged in our own version of the high school put-down game, battering nerds and outsiders like Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich while elevating “electable,” party-approved candidates like John McCain and John Kerry.
Thus it was no surprise that after Iowa, columnists tried to sell the country on the loathsome “Marcomentum” narrative, a paean to the good old days when reporters got to tell the public who was hot and who wasn’t—the days of the “Straight Talk Express,” “Joementum,” etc.
“Marco Rubio Was the Real Winner in Iowa,” blared CNN. “Marco Rubio’s Iowa Mojo,” chimed in Politico. “Forget Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio Is the Real Winner of the Iowa Caucuses,” agreed Vanity Fair.
Rubio, we were told, had zoomed to the front of the “establishment lane” in timely enough fashion to stop Trump. Of course, in the real world, nobody cares about what happens in the “establishment lane” except other journalists. But even the other candidates seemed to believe the narrative. Ohio governor John Kasich staggered out of Iowa in eighth place and was finishing up his ninetieth lonely appearance in New Hampshire when Boston-based reporters caught up to him.
“If we get smoked up there, I’m going back to Ohio,” he lamented. Kasich in person puts on a brave face, but he also frequently rolls his eyes in an expression of ostentatious misanthropy that says, “I can’t believe I’m losing to these idiots.”
But then Rubio went onstage at St. Anselm College in the eighth GOP debate and blew himself up. Within just a few minutes of a vicious exchange with haranguing now-former candidate Chris Christie, he twice delivered the exact same canned twenty-five-second spiel about how Barack Obama “knows exactly what he’s doing.”
Rubio’s face-plant brilliantly reprised Sir Ian Holm’s performance in Alien, as a malfunctioning, disembodied robot head stammering, “I admire its purity,” while covered in milky android goo. It was everything we hate about scripted mannequin candidates captured in a brief crack in the political façade.
Rubio plummeted in the polls, and Kasich, already mentally checked out, was the surprise second-place finisher in New Hampshire, with 15.8 percent of the vote.
“Something big happened tonight,” Kasich said vaguely, not seeming sure what that thing was exactly. Even worse from a Republican point of view, Dinkley McBush somehow finished fourth, above Rubio and in a virtual tie with Iowa winner Ted Cruz.
Now none of the three “establishment lane” candidates could drop out. And the next major contest, South Carolina, was deemed by horse-race experts to have too tiny an “establishment lane” vote to decide which two out of that group should off themselves in time for the third to mount a viable “Stop Trump” campaign.
All of which virtually guarantees Trump will probably enjoy at least a five-horse race through Super Tuesday. So he might have this thing sewn up before the others even figure out in what order they should quit. It’s hard to recall a dumber situation in American presidential politics.
“If you’re Trump, you’re sending flowers to all of them for staying in,” the GOP strategist tells me. “The more the merrier. And they’re running out of time to figure it out.”
The day after Rubio’s implosion, Trump is upstate in New Hampshire, addressing what for him is a modest crowd of about 1,500 to 2,000 in the gym at Plymouth State University. The crowd here is more full-blown New England townie than you’ll find at his Manchester events: lots of work boots, Pats merch and f-bombs.
Trump’s speeches are never scripted, never exactly the same twice. Instead he just riffs and feels his way through crowds. He’s no orator—as anyone who’s read his books knows, he’s not really into words, especially long ones—but he has an undeniable talent for commanding a room.
Today, knowing the debate news is in the air, he makes sure to plunge a finger into Rubio’s wound, mocking candidates who need scripts.
“Honestly, I do
n’t have any teleprompters, I don’t have a speech I’m reading to you,” Trump says. Then he switches into a nasal, weenie-politician voice, and imitates someone reading tiny text from a crib sheet: “Ladies and gentlemen, it’s so nice to be here in New Hampshire, please vote for me or I’ll never speak to you again …”
The crowd laughs. Trump also makes sure to point a finger at the omnipresent Giant Media Throng.
“See all those cameras back there?” he says. “They’ve never driven so far to a location.”
The crowd turns to gape and sneer at the hated press contingent, which seems glad to be behind a rope. Earlier, Trump had bragged about how these same reporters had begrudgingly admitted that he’d won the St. Anselm debate. “They hate it, but they gave me very high grades.”
It’s simple transitive-property rhetoric, and it works. The press went gaga for Rubio after Iowa because—why? Because he’s an unthreatening, blow-dried, cliché-spouting, dial-surveying phony of the type campaign journalists always approve of.
And when Rubio gets exposed in the debate as a talking haircut, a political Speak n’ Spell, suddenly the throng of journalists who spent the past two weeks trying to sell America on “Marcomentum” and the all-important “establishment lane” looks very guilty indeed. Voters were supposed to take this seriously?
Trump knows the public sees through all of this, grasps the press’s role in it and rightly hates us all. When so many Trump supporters point to his stomping of the carpetbagging snobs in the national media as the main reason they’re going to vote for him, it should tell us in the press something profound about how much people think we suck.
Jay Matthews, a Plymouth native with a long beard and a Trump sign, cites Trump’s press beat-downs as the first reason he’s voting Donald.
“He’s gonna be his own man,” he says. “He’s proving that now with how he’s getting all the media. He’s paying nothing and getting all the coverage. He’s not paying one dime.”
Reporters have focused quite a lot on the crazy/race-baiting/nativist themes in Trump’s campaign, but these comprise a very small part of his usual presentation. His speeches increasingly are strikingly populist in their content.
