by Sid Holt
His pitch is: He’s rich, he won’t owe anyone anything upon election, and therefore he won’t do what both Democratic and Republican politicians unfailingly do upon taking office, i.e., approve rotten/regressive policies that screw ordinary people.
He talks, for instance, about the anti-trust exemption enjoyed by insurance companies, an atrocity dating back more than half a century, to the McCarran-Ferguson Act of 1945. This law, sponsored by one of the most notorious legislators in our history (Nevada Sen. Pat McCarran was thought to be the inspiration for the corrupt Sen. Pat Geary in The Godfather II), allows insurance companies to share information and collude to divvy up markets.
Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats made a serious effort to overturn this indefensible loophole during the debate over the Affordable Care Act.
Trump pounds home this theme in his speeches, explaining things from his perspective as an employer. “The insurance companies,” he says, “they’d rather have monopolies in each state than hundreds of companies going all over the place bidding … It’s so hard for me to make deals … because I can’t get bids.”
He goes on to explain that prices would go down if the state-by-state insurance fiefdoms were eliminated, but that’s impossible because of the influence of the industry. “I’m the only one that’s self-funding … Everyone else is taking money from, I call them the bloodsuckers.”
Trump isn’t lying about any of this. Nor is he lying when he mentions that the big-pharma companies have such a stranglehold on both parties that they’ve managed to get the federal government to bar itself from negotiating Medicare prescription-drug prices in bulk.
“I don’t know what the reason is—I do know what the reason is, but I don’t know how they can sell it,” he says. “We’re not allowed to negotiate drug prices. We pay $300 billion more than if we negotiated the price.”
It’s actually closer to $16 billion a year more, but the rest of it is true enough. Trump then goes on to personalize this story. He claims (and with Trump we always have to use words like “claims”) how it was these very big-pharma donors, “fat cats,” sitting in the front row of the debate the night before. He steams ahead even more with this tidbit: Woody Johnson, one of the heirs of drug giant Johnson & Johnson (and the laughably incompetent owner of the New York Jets), is the finance chief for the campaign of whipping boy Jeb Bush.
“Now, let’s say Jeb won. Which is an impossibility, but let’s say …”
The crowd explodes in laughter.
“Let’s say Jeb won,” Trump goes on. “How is it possible for Jeb to say, ‘Woody, we’re going to go out and fight competitively’ ?”
This is, what—not true? Of course it’s true.
What’s Trump’s solution? Himself! He’s gonna grab the problem by the throat and fix it by force!
Throughout his campaign, he’s been telling a story about a $2.5 billion car factory that a Detroit automaker wants to build in Mexico, and how as president he’s going to stop it. Humorously, he tried at one point to say he already had stopped it, via his persistent criticism, citing an article on an obscure website that claimed the operation had moved to Youngstown, Ohio.
That turned out to be untrue, but, hey, what candidate for president hasn’t impulse-tweeted the completely unprovable fact or two? (Trump, incidentally, will someday be in the Twitter Hall of Fame. His fortune-cookie mind—restless, confrontational, completely lacking the shame/veracity filter—is perfectly engineered for the medium.)
In any case, Trump says he’ll call Detroit carmakers into his office and lay down an ultimatum: Either move the jobs back to America, or eat a 35 percent tax on every car imported back into the U.S. over the Mexican border.
“I’m a free-trader,” he says, “but you can only be a free-trader when something’s fair.”
It’s stuff like this that has conservative pundits from places like the National Review bent out of shape. Where, they ask, is the M-F’ing love? What about those conservative principles we’ve spent decades telling you flyover-country hicks you’re supposed to have?
“Trump has also promised to use tariffs to punish companies,” wrote David McIntosh in the Review’s much-publicized, but not-effective-at-all “Conservatives Against Trump” 22-pundit jihad. “These are not the ideas of a small-government conservative … They are, instead, the ramblings of a liberal wanna-be strongman.”
What these tweedy Buckleyites at places like the Review don’t get is that most people don’t give a damn about “conservative principles.” Yes, millions of people responded to that rhetoric for years. But that wasn’t because of the principle itself, but because it was always coupled with the more effective politics of resentment: Big-government liberals are to blame for your problems.
Elections, like criminal trials, are ultimately always about assigning blame. For a generation, conservative intellectuals have successfully pointed the finger at big-government-loving, whale-hugging liberals as the culprits behind American decline.
But the fact that lots of voters hated the Clintons, Sean Penn, the Dixie Chicks and whomever else, did not, ever, mean that they believed in the principle of Detroit carmakers being able to costlessly move American jobs overseas by the thousands.
“We’ve got to do something to bring jobs back,” says one Trump supporter in Plymouth, when asked why tariffs are suddenly a good idea.
Cheryl Donlon says she heard the tariff message loud and clear and she’s fine with it, despite the fact that it clashes with traditional conservatism.
“We need someone who is just going to look at what’s best for us,” she says.
I mention that Trump’s plan is virtually identical to Dick Gephardt’s idea from way back in the 1988 Democratic presidential race, to fight the Korean Hyundai import wave with retaliatory tariffs.
Donlon says she didn’t like that idea then.
Why not?
“I didn’t like him,” she says.
Trump, though, she likes. And so do a lot of people. No one should be surprised that he’s tearing through the Republican primaries, because everything he’s saying about his GOP opponents is true. They really are all stooges on the take, unable to stand up to Trump because they’re not even people, but are, like Jeb and Rubio, just robo-babbling representatives of unseen donors.
Back in Manchester, an American Legion hall half-full of bored-looking Republicans nurses beers and knocks billiard balls around, awaiting Iowa winner Ted Cruz. The eely Texan is presumably Trump’s most serious threat and would later nudge past Trump in one national poll (dismissed by Trump as conducted by people who “don’t like me”).
But New Hampshire is a struggle for Cruz. The high point in his entire New England run has been his penchant for reciting scenes from The Princess Bride, including the entire Billy Crystal “your friend here is only mostly dead” speech for local station WMUR. The one human thing about Cruz seems to be that his movie impersonations are troublingly solid, a consistent B-plus to A-minus.
But stepping into the human zone for even a few minutes backfired. The actor Mandy Patinkin, who played Inigo Montoya in the film, reacted with horror when he learned Cruz was doing his character’s famous line “You killed my father, prepare to die.” He accused Cruz of deliberately leaving out the key line in Montoya’s speech, after he finally slays the man who killed his father: “I’ve been in the revenge business for so long, now that it’s over, I don’t know what to do with the rest of my life.”
Patinkin believed Cruz didn’t do that line because Cruz is himself in the revenge business, promising to “carpet-bomb [ISIS] into oblivion” and wondering if “sand can glow.”
Patinkin’s criticism of Cruz cut deeply, especially after the Iowa caucuses, when Cruz was accused by Trump and others of spreading a false rumor that Ben Carson was dropping out, in order to steal evangelical votes and pad his lead.
The unwelcome attention seemed to scare Cruz back into scripted-bot mode, where he’s a less-than-enthralling p
resence. Cruz in person is almost physically repellent. Psychology Today even ran an article by a neurology professor named Dr. Richard Cytowic about the peculiarly off-putting qualities of Cruz’s face.
He used a German term, backpfeifengesicht, literally “a face in need of a good punch,” to describe Cruz. This may be overstating things a little. Cruz certainly has an odd face—it looks like someone sewed pieces of a waterlogged Reagan mask together at gunpoint—but it’s his tone more than anything that gets you. He speaks slowly and loudly and in the most histrionic language possible, as if he’s certain you’re too stupid to grasp that he is for freedom.
“The … Constitution …,” he says, “serves … as … chains … to … bind … the … mischief … of … government …”
Four years ago, a candidate like this would have just continued along this path, serving up piles of euphuistic Tea Party rhetoric for audiences that at the time were still hot for the tricorner-hat explanation of how Comrade Obama ruined the American Eden.
But now, that’s not enough. In the age of Trump, the Cruzes of the world also have to be rebels against the “establishment.” This requirement makes for some almost unbelievable rhetorical contortions.
“Government,” Cruz now ventures, “should not be about redistributing wealth and benefiting the corporations and the special interests.”
This absurd Swiss Army cliché perfectly encapsulates the predicament of the modern GOP. In one second, Cruz is against “redistributionism,” which in the Obama years was code for “government spending on minorities.” In the next second, he’s against corporations and special interests, the villains du jour in the age of Bernie Sanders and Trump, respectively.
He’s against everything all at once. Welfare! Corporations! Special Interests! Government! The Establishment! He’s that escort who’ll be into whatever you want, for an hour.
Trump meanwhile wipes out Cruz in his speeches in a single, drop-the-mic line.
“They give Ted $5 million,” he says, bringing to mind loans Cruz took from a pair of banks, Goldman Sachs and Citibank.
The total was closer to $1.2 million, but Trump’s point, that even the supposed “outsider” GOP candidate is just another mindless payola machine, is impossible to counter.
The unexpectedly thrilling Democratic Party race between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, too, is breaking just right for Trump. It’s exposing deep fissures in the Democratic strategy that Trump is already exploiting.
Every four years, some Democrat who’s been a lifelong friend of labor runs for president. And every four years, that Democrat gets thrown over by national labor bosses in favor of some party lifer with his signature on a half-dozen job-exporting free-trade agreements.
It’s called “transactional politics,” and the operating idea is that workers should back the winner, rather than the most union-friendly candidate.
This year, national leaders of several prominent unions went with Hillary Clinton—who, among other things, supported her husband’s efforts to pass NAFTA—over Bernie Sanders. Pissed, the rank and file in many locals revolted. In New Hampshire, for instance, a Service Employees International Union local backed Sanders despite the national union’s endorsement of Clinton, as did an International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers chapter.
Trump is already positioning himself to take advantage of the political opportunity afforded him by “transactional politics.” He regularly hammers the NAFTA deal in his speeches, applying to it his favorite word, “disaster.” And he just as regularly drags Hillary Clinton into his hypothetical tales of job-saving, talking about how she could never convince Detroit carmakers out of moving a factory to Mexico.
Unions have been abused so much by both parties in the past decades that even mentioning themes union members care about instantly grabs the attention of workers. That’s true even when it comes from Donald Trump, a man who kicked off the fourth GOP debate saying “wages [are] too high” and who had the guts to tell the Detroit News that Michigan autoworkers make too much money.
You will find union members scattered at almost all of Trump’s speeches. And there have been rumors of unions nationally considering endorsing Trump. SEIU president Mary Kay Henry even admitted in January that Trump appeals to members because of the “terrible anxiety” they feel about jobs.
“I know guys, union guys, who talk about Trump,” says Rand Wilson, an activist from the Labor for Bernie organization. “I try to tell them about Sanders, and they don’t know who he is. Or they’ve just heard he’s a socialist. Trump they’ve heard of.”
This is part of a gigantic subplot to the Trump story, which is that many of his critiques of the process are the same ones being made by Bernie Sanders. The two men, of course, are polar opposites in just about every way—Sanders worries about the poor, while Trump would eat a child in a lifeboat—but both are laser-focused on the corrupting role of money in politics.
Both propose “revolutions” to solve the problem, the difference being that Trump’s is an authoritarian revolt, while Sanders proposes a democratic one. If it comes down to a Sanders-Trump general election, the matter will probably be decided by which candidate the national press turns on first: the flatulent narcissist with cattle-car fantasies or the Democrat who gently admires Scandinavia. Would you bet your children on that process playing out sensibly?
In the meantime, Trump is cannily stalking the Sanders vote. While the rest of the GOP clowns just roll their eyes at Sanders, going for cheap groans with bits about socialism, Trump goes a different route. He hammers Hillary and compliments Sanders. “I agree with [Sanders] on two things,” he says. “On trade, he said we’re being ripped off. He just doesn’t know how much.”
He goes on. “And he’s right with Hillary because, look, she’s receiving a fortune from a lot of people.”
At a Democratic town hall in Derry, New Hampshire, Hillary’s strangely pathetic answer about why she accepted $675,000 from Goldman to give speeches—“That’s what they offered”—seemed doomed to become a touchstone for the general-election contest. Trump would go out on Day One of that race and blow $675,000 on a pair of sable underwear, or a solid-gold happy-face necktie. And he’d wear it 24 hours a day, just to remind voters that his opponent sold out for the Trump equivalent of lunch money.
Trump will surely argue that the Clintons are the other half of the dissolute-conspiracy story he’s been selling, representing a workers’ party that abandoned workers and turned the presidency into a vast cash-for-access enterprise, avoiding scrutiny by making Washington into Hollywood East and turning labor leaders and journalists alike into starstruck courtiers. As with everything else, Trump personalizes this, making his stories of buying Hillary’s presence at his wedding a part of his stump speech. A race against Hillary Clinton in the general, if it happens, will be a pitch right in Trump’s wheelhouse—and if Bill Clinton is complaining about the “vicious” attacks by the campaign of pathological nice guy Bernie Sanders, it’s hard to imagine what will happen once they get hit by the Trumpdozer.
The electoral roadshow, that giant ball of corrupt self-importance, gets bigger and more grandiloquent every four years. This time around, there was so much press at the Manchester Radisson, you could have wiped out the entire cable-news industry by detonating a single Ryder truck full of fertilizer.
Like the actual circus, this is a roving business. Cash flows to campaigns from people and donors; campaigns buy ads; ads pay for journalists; journalists assess candidates. Somewhat unsurprisingly, the ever-growing press corps tends in most years to like—or at least deem “most serious”—the candidates who buy the most ads. Nine out of 10 times in America, the candidate who raises the most money wins. And those candidates then owe the most favors.
Meaning that for the pleasure of being able to watch insincere campaign coverage and see manipulative political ads on TV for free, we end up having to pay inflated Medicare drug prices, fund bank bailouts with our taxes, let billionair
es pay 17 percent tax rates, and suffer a thousand other indignities. Trump is right: Because Jeb Bush can’t afford to make his own commercials, he would go into the White House in the pocket of a drug manufacturer. It really is that stupid.
The triumvirate of big media, big donors and big political parties has until now successfully excluded every challenge to its authority. But like every aristocracy, it eventually got lazy and profligate, too sure it was loved by the people. It’s now shocked that voters in depressed ex-factory towns won’t keep pulling the lever for “conservative principles,” or that union members bitten a dozen times over by a trade deal won’t just keep voting Democratic on cue.
Trump isn’t the first rich guy to run for office. But he is the first to realize the weakness in the system, which is that the watchdogs in the political media can’t resist a car wreck. The more he insults the press, the more they cover him: He’s pulling 33 times as much coverage on the major networks as his next-closest GOP competitor, and twice as much as Hillary.
Trump found the flaw in the American Death Star. It doesn’t know how to turn the cameras off, even when it’s filming its own demise.
The problem, of course, is that Trump is crazy. He’s like every other corporate tyrant in that his solution to most things follows the logic of Stalin: no person, no problem. You’re fired! Except as president he’d have other people-removing options, all of which he likes: torture, mass deportations, the banning of 23 percent of the Earth’s population from entering the United States, etc.
He seems to be coming around to the idea that having an ego smaller than that of, say, an Egyptian Pharaoh would be a sign of weakness. So of late, his already-insane idea to build a “beautiful” wall across the Mexican border has evolved to the point where he also wants the wall to be named after him. He told Maria Bartiromo he wanted to call it the “Great Wall of Trump.”
