Fever Swamp: A Journey Through the Strange Neverland of the 2016 Presidential Race

by Richard North Patterson

  Introducing Pence, Trump spoke glowingly and at length about . . . himself. “Back to Mike Pence,” he said at long last, then forgot Pence altogether. After several minutes of this a certain fascination settled in—how often, one wondered, would references to Pence interrupt Trump’s song of self. Rarely, it turned out.

  Finally, he summoned Pence, treating America to a middling Republican cheerleader, speaking as though to persuade a crowd of Rotarians that Trump was, contrary to the evidence of their senses, one of them yet also their salvation. His hit parade of provincial pieties—God, country, family, freedom, Reagan, and the diabolical threat of Hillary Clinton—culminated in a church organ recitation of his Majesty’s mythic virtues. With enough huffing and puffing, one thought, Pence might inflate himself sufficiently to resemble the last vice president from Indiana—Dan Quayle.247 Nostalgia did not ensue.

  As for the coronation in Cleveland, it, too, boasts those special touches worthy of a rump regime in Ruritania. One particularly charming feature may turn out to be armed Republicans—a redundant phrase, perhaps—brandishing assault weapons outside the convention hall to dramatize their support for an armed America. Some stalwart delegates, thwarted by the Secret Service in their desire for a convention bristling with handguns, plan on packing heat at satellite events. As one delegate explained, “I think it’s part of Republican values, American values, to be responsible for our own safety.”

  Good luck with that. Under Ohio’s open carry law passed by Republican legislators, other upstanding Americans are also free to carry weapons outside the hall. Less enthusiastic are the Cleveland police, hoping not to be caught in the crossfire.248

  Should they make it inside, those delegates willing to brave the combat zone unarmed could anticipate a no doubt tasteful exploration of Bill Clinton’s sex life. Further intellectual sustenance is being provided by Rudy Giuliani; practitioners of mixed martial arts; several border patrol agents; The Donald’s third wife; and four of Trump’s kids.

  This Z-list of luminaries is intended to compensate for the absence of the last two Republican presidents; the two prior presidential nominees; the entire Bush family; a brace of Republican senators whose alternate plans include getting reelected; the governor of the host state, John Kasich; and pretty much every GOP officeholder who ran against Trump save for the ever-charming Ted Cruz. The chief difference between purgatory and four nights in the court of King Donald is that the latter may feel like forever.

  But day one was merely what this year has taught us to expect. As demonstrators gathered outside the convention hall, Trump blamed the murder of three Baton Rouge police officers on Barack Obama’s “lack of leadership.” And on Monday night we learned from various hectoring speakers that the poisons of terrorism, race, and racial violence—fed, in their telling, by a black man and a white woman, Obama and Clinton—will vanish if we but license Donald Trump to “make America safe again.”

  But that was not all. Not content with victory, Trump’s campaign manager picked a pointless fight with John Kasich. Clumsily if briskly, Trump’s housecarls put down a rebellion on the floor, an unwelcome reminder of discontent in the realm. Then a cadre of brave or emotionally wounded men and women appeared to pillory Clinton—one, the mother of an American who died in Benghazi, to accuse her of lying and worse—while certifying the strength and patriotism of a man who had pretzeled himself to avoid military service.

  Good enough for a night’s work, one would think. But though a would-be nominee has never spoken before his actual nomination, Trump could not deny his followers the balm of his presence. And so The Donald appeared from a cloud of blue smoke to introduce his wife—for a brief, crazy moment, the imagination struggled to substitute Mitt and Ann Romney before accepting that the GOP as we knew it was, indeed, smoldering embers in a dumpster fire.

  To the surprise of those who have never read from a script, Melania affirmed that Drumpf is every inch the king we never knew him to be—a caring friend to women and minorities, the spirit of American inclusiveness. Even by the standards of conventions this was, to say the least, a bold reinvention.

  But though Mrs. Trump delivered it well, her text was oddly impersonal, without a trace of emotion or anecdote to attach it to the man she lives with. No accident, it turns out—whoever wrote her speech appeared to have plagiarized whole chunks from the 2008 convention speech delivered by, of all people, Michelle Obama.249 Thus the evening ended on a bizarre if not disastrous note, evoking the hollow panoply of a craven court, assembled to clothe its naked emperor’s ravenous ego in empty praise and cynical falsehoods designed to gull the masses.

  And so they have hunkered down in Cleveland: a once great party that now stands for little but racism, fundamentalism, and AK-47s, led by a bombastic narcissist with no program but self—leaving the rest of us with nothing but the hope that, like lemmings, they will save the country by drowning in November.

  A Tale of Two Conventions

  Hillary Versus the Man on Horseback

  JULY 26, 2016

  Seldom have our national conventions provided such enlightenment.

  Usually these quadrennial talkfests are mounds of verbal tapioca, as riveting as a four-hour walking tour of your own living room. Their ostensible purpose is to unify the party and burnish the candidate, launching the campaign with a burst of enthusiasm that swells the hearts of voters. But this year’s conventions sharpened our divisions and exposed one candidate’s craving for adoration and submissiveness, provoking waves of uncertainty and fear.

  The Republican convention was notable for its emptiness—of vision, ideas, or even hope. Its singular aim was to frighten us into entrusting our future to a demagogue.

  The strategists for Donald Trump have concluded that stoking anger and division is their only way to win. An opening night dedicated to the theme “Make America Safe Again” became a hymn of hatred against Hillary Clinton. The second night was more venomous yet, its centerpiece Chris Christie’s indictment of Clinton as delegates shouted “Lock Her Up!”

  Indeed Clinton, not Trump, was the central figure of both nights. Bereft of credible reasons why Trump should be our president, the party resorted to hysterical reiterations of why Clinton should not.

  A grieving mother of a son lost at Benghazi essentially accused Clinton of murder. A state representative from New Hampshire said she should be “shot for treason.” And the inimitable Ben Carson revealed that Clinton is the handmaiden of Satan himself.

  Like Lucifer, we discovered, Hillary Clinton is responsible for all evil in the world. Thus Paul Manafort’s revelation that Melania Trump’s plagiarism—a stunning example of organizational ineptitude—had become an issue only because of Hillary Clinton’s war on other women.

  And what of Paul Ryan, the GOP’s erstwhile man of big ideas? His presentation was largely Trump-free. To tepid applause, he assured those assembled that unity is everything and Hillary must go—truly a program for the ages.

  To whom, one began to wonder, are they appealing beyond partisans who are as beyond reason as Pavlov’s dogs? Even the assembled loyalists began evincing a certain fatigue of spirit.

  So they seemed resuscitated by Ted Cruz—whose remarkable achievement it was to give them someone other than Hillary Clinton to hate. Specifically, Cruz himself.

  True, inspiring loathing is his greatest gift. But your own party’s convention is a unique opportunity, and Cruz did not disappoint.

  Like the legion of others who can’t stomach Trump and have ambitions of their own—John Kasich leaps to mind—Cruz could have stayed away. Instead he delivered a self-satisfied paean to principle that ran fifteen minutes overtime, which he capped by imploring conservatives to vote their conscience in November. He might as well have said that any conservative with a conscience should never vote for Trump.250

  True enough. But delegates booed the apostate vociferously. So visceral was the atmosphere that Heidi Cruz had to be escorted from the floor.

  Were
Cruz not the epitome of oleaginous opportunism, an observer might have seen his moment of payback as simple justice. It was Trump, after all, who mocked Cruz’s wife’s appearance in a tweet, and who linked Cruz’s father to the JFK assassination—low points even in a year where The Donald dragged our politics into the primordial ooze.

  But where the two antagonists so richly deserve each other, we were left to ponder why Trump allowed yet another night to veer from any sane person’s idea of a message—especially given that Trump’s people knew what was coming well beforehand. Compelling us to wonder yet again whether Trump is stupifyingly incapable of running a convention, a campaign or, God help us, a country, or whether his idea of a successful liftoff stems from WWE.

  And so Mike Pence’s moment in the sun became an afterthought. Though he proved himself a serviceable attack dog, his speech was standard right-wing boilerplate that had little to do with anything Trump purports to believe.

  This raised a question—had Trump indeed taken over the party or, in the minds of its establishment, was he merely a veneer on the same old stuff that had gotten the GOP in such trouble with its base? A companion curiosity is whether Trump even noticed.

  But the ostentatiously Christian Pence recycled another familiar trope—lying. Invoking the deaths at Benghazi once again, he declaimed, “It was Hillary Clinton who left Americans in harm’s way in Benghazi and after four Americans fell, said, ‘What difference at this point does it make?’”

  This was no casual lie. Quite deliberately, Pence wrenched Clinton’s response to a question about the attacks during a congressional hearing completely out of context, converting her comment on the question itself to an expression of indifference about four tragic deaths.

  The GOP makes much of Clinton’s supposed character flaws. But Pence’s self-proclaimed Christianity, it seems, does not preclude slander and mendacity in the service of ambition, especially when Pence is forging a personal relationship with his political savior—not Jesus Christ but, regrettably, Donald Trump. Even more lamentable is that his master has made such smears so routine that his acolyte’s emulation went widely unremarked.251

  As for Trump himself, there was no mistaking the meaning of his acceptance speech.

  It introduced a GOP without pride or principle, an empty soundstage in the service of Donald Trump. As David Brooks put it, “This is less a party than a personality cult.” And the personality it serves is that of a demagogue who stampedes the electorate with lies and fear in order to serve himself.

  His speech was a remarkable moment in our political history. As a matter of intellectual rigor, I routinely deplore the facile references to fascism and its progenitors that the left too often deploys as shorthand for leaders or movements they detest. I will try to do better here.

  But first, a confession. When Trump appeared on stage, I began wondering where I had seen those mannerisms before—the semi-comical strut, the pursed lips and look of self-satisfaction, the self-preening tendency to present his profile for the crowd, first left, then right. Then the original came to me: film clips of Benito Mussolini.252

  You can’t say this in a column, I admonished myself at once—it’s too glib, too cheap, and, ultimately, explains nothing. Then Trump started speaking. And so honesty requires me to acknowledge the historical antecedents for Trump’s performance—all the more so because far too many in the media have normalized this speech beyond its due.253

  Its components were classic and quite simple.

  First, fear.

  Relentlessly, Trump painted a dystopian America, for Obama and Clinton are killing off our safety and our future. Best to simply quote examples:

  The irresponsible rhetoric of our president, who has used the pulpit of the presidency to divide us by race and color, has made America a more dangerous environment than, frankly, I have ever seen.

  Not only have our citizens endured domestic disaster, but they have lived through one international humiliation after another.

  I have embraced crying mothers who have lost their children because our politicians put their personal agendas before the national good.

  Decades of progress made in bringing down crime are now being reversed by the administration’s rollback of criminal enforcement.

  Nearly 180,000 illegal immigrants with criminal records . . . are tonight roaming free to threaten peaceful citizens.

  But to this administration, their amazing daughter was just one more American life that wasn’t worth protecting. One more child to sacrifice on the altar of open borders.

  This is the legacy of Hillary Clinton: death, destruction, terrorism, and weakness.

  And on and on, depicting America as too dangerous to place in the hands of a woman who “wants to essentially abolish the Second Amendment”—in order, we learned, to deprive Americans of their means of self-defense against the barbarism that she and our first black president have unleashed.

  Second, lies.

  With respect to crime, Trump deployed falsehoods as a fear-enhancer in order to depict a violent country swamped by a rising tide of murder.

  In truth, since 1991 the rate of violent crime has been cut in half. Trump’s assertion that the murder rate for police has risen by 50 percent this year is a blatant lie. And his claim that decades of progress in reducing crime are being reversed—a lie in itself—also throws our federal system and Constitution on the trash heap of mendacity.

  As a matter of basic civics, the federal government is not responsible for law enforcement in American cities. Either Trump does not know this or, far more likely, does not care. In this area, as in so many others, Trump’s America is a fiction conjured to serve his grasp for power, here enhanced by a peculiar irony—the suggestion of a federal takeover of law enforcement that abridges the GOP’s commitment to local control.

  Trump’s dire economic portrait is also daubed in lies. His claims about black unemployment and Latino poverty—virtually his only effort to address minorities—are blatantly untrue. He doubled the unemployment rate for black youths, and ignored that the percentage of poverty among Latinos has declined. His assertion that household incomes are down more than $4,000 since year 2000 is based on stale numbers from 2014, and ignores that incomes have risen substantially in the intervening years he so conveniently omits.

  His claims about taxes are equally deceptive. His charge that Clinton “plans a massive . . . tax increase” ignores that 95 percent of Americans will see little or no change. His promise of the “largest tax reduction” proposed by any candidate this year ignores that virtually all of the benefit goes to the very wealthy. And it omits another inconvenient truth—that according to non-partisan experts Trump’s proposals will explode the deficit by $10 trillion in a decade.

  Ditto Trump’s appeals to xenophobia. As one example, he asserts that there is no way to vet the Syrian refugees who, in his telling, threaten our lives. In truth, the thorough vetting process that already exists takes eighteen to twenty-four months. And of all the immigrants admitted since 9/11, not a single one has committed an act of terrorism. Here, as elsewhere, one marvels at Trump’s shamelessness and cynicism, the harbingers of an utter lack of conscience.

  But the most disturbing element was his only solution to the problems he conjured from fear and lies—himself.

  Throughout, the speech was naked of concrete remedies. All he offered us was the authoritarian promises of history’s man on horseback, a malign fairy tale told to children with no power to reason or even to think: that his mere presence in the White House—and only his presence—would become both ends and means, our last hope of salvation from all the forces that beset us.

  Again and again, Trump invoked the magical power of himself. And, again, only quotation will suffice:

  Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.

  On January 20, 2017, the day I take the oath of office, Americans will finally wake up in a country where the laws of the United States are enforced. />
  I have a message for every last person threatening the peace on our streets and the safety of our police: when I take the oath of office next year, I will restore law and order to our country.

  I have made billions of dollars in business making deals—now I’m going to make our country rich again.

  I’m going to bring back our jobs in Ohio, in Pennsylvania, in New York, in Michigan, and all of America.

  I am going to turn our bad trade agreements into great trade agreements.

  We’re going to defeat the barbarians of ISIS. And we’re going to defeat them fast.

  How will he accomplish these wonders? He certainly doesn’t know, clearly doesn’t care, and never even pretends to tell us. Why should he? He is not like other men and women—he is Donald Trump. And because no claim of uniqueness is complete without forging a mystical personification of a people in the leader who will determine our fate, he assures us: “I am your voice.”

  A very loud voice. Trump shouted most of his speech in the tone of a man bent on compelling fear and hatred—of all those who oppose him, and all of the enemies he promises to crush on our behalf. There was little warmth or humor, little effort to be likable. Such variations in tone do not befit a national father.

  Nor did Trump display any real interest—in tone or substance—in reaching beyond his base of angry and disaffected whites. There was no recognition of diversity, no appeal for support from people of color. There was no uplift, no indication of any high or noble purpose in the American spirit. Demographically and spiritually, Donald Trump’s America is as small as the man himself.