Intellectuals on both sides of the political aisle are scratching their heads at the Trump phenomenon. They wonder how this guy, with all his crudity and his bluster and his fascistic diatribes, can possibly be slapping the pants off the favored sons of the GOP. Liberal, conservative, it doesn’t matter, they don’t get it.
Really? Or do they just not want to admit they understand perfectly well?
Trump’s appeal is very simple. He’s putting a kind of blue collar, working class rage right out in front, unadorned, just the way you might get it at any dinner table conversation in a stressed working class household where the most serious piece of reading done is either World News or Car and Driver. Where the talking heads on Meet The Press are met with derision and complete incomprehension. He has pitched his language, according to one recent analysis, to a sixth grade or lower level because he knows that is the functional intelligence of the people he’s channeling.
Yes, I said channeling. He is the embodiment of a feedback machine. He’s taking in the inarticulate anger of people who feel helpless but who intuit that they’re being shafted and projecting it right back out at them at the same intellectual level.
The thing that sets him apart from Cruz and even Rubio is not that he gets this and they don’t, but that he knows he can make more bank by expressing it without trying to couch it in pseudo-politic, semi-intellectual, quasi-philosophical terms. He has not said one thing that the others haven’t also said over the last several years, but they do it in terms that hide the scrapyard origins of the sentiment and try to make it appeal to people who wish to believe of themselves that they have a higher grasp of these matters. The reason so much of their tactic is now failing is that they’ve been trying to play bar band music as though it were a sonata in three parts, and it doesn’t ring true enough in comparison with a guy who knows to stick to three chords and one beat.
Trump is also feeding on a kind of mythic American tough guy attitude that sees the solution to every problem to be corporal—a smack in the jaw, a kick in the groin, a death threat. When the mind has been taxed to its limit by arguments about refugees, globalization, currency exchange manipulations, multilateral negotiations, regressive tax structures, and ethnic diversity, the impulse is to just throw them all out, slam the door shut, and kick the shit out of anyone with more than a high school education.
And because we as a people rarely look past the surface of things, when confronted with problems that really are complex, we feel used, insulted, talked down to, and effectively sidelined by language and concepts we were never introduced to at home or in school. We are ignorant but have been told for decades that we have some kind of national character and virtue which doesn’t require us to learn anything in order to know what to do.
But we don’t. So we get angry and frustrated. Then someone like Trump comes along and validates our anger and plays on our ignorance and tell us he knows what to do to make us feel better.
He’s a walking, talking symbol of the anti-intellectualism we’ve been suffering and enduring since…well, in this cycle since McCarthy showed politicians how to gain support by putting down smart people.
It should surprise no one that he is popular with that kind of crowd. The question is, how large is that crowd?
We’d better hope they aren’t even close to a majority.
But if they are, then that says everything we need to know about how our educational system has failed this country. And with that failure, how our economic systems are failing us. And with that failure, how our value systems are next to worthless.
One last thing which puzzles some folks. The question rises how evangelical christians find nothing to criticize in the man, how he can get endorsements from the likes of Billy Graham Jr. and Jerry Falwell’s son. How, with a centerfold model for a wife, he isn’t everything repugnant to them with all their moralistic blatherings about family values. How they can get so exercised about Michelle Obama’s elegant bare arms and say virtually nothing about the yards of skin Melania Trump has shown in a wide variety of sexual poses.
What’s hard to understand? Trump’s wife appears to be everything these so-called fundamentalists desire in a wife. Young, sexy, and, above all, silent. For them “modesty” only means nobody else gets to play with the goodies or look at the yummies. Michelle Obama offends by quite clearly owning her arms as well as the rest of her person and being a vocal, thinking, independent woman. It ain’t, in other words, the bareness of her arms that bothers them but the fact that they are hers and she does what she wants with them. Trump’s wife looks like an Old Testament Prophet’s wet dream.
Trump is not hard to understand, nor is his apparent popularity. We just have to see, finally, what has been wrought in this country by people who have sold us a bill of goods for decades, all in the name of Amurica.