Donald Trump: America's solution for Tony Abbott envy? in The Amalgamated Aggromulator

Trump, Trump, Trump… I do not want to write about Donald Trump. But it worries at me, and I pace, and there is no Gwen for the mutual balm of talking. If I smoked cigarettes, he would be making me chain-smoke.
And it is not fitting, not meet, to let such a strange time-passage go by unremarked by my tapping fingers.

Trump is still in the ascendancy in the Republican race for the nomination.

(The most recent poll has him up again, a bit. Again. After all that. And maybe because of all that. Yes.)

What shall I say of him? He should be a buffoon, the sort you smile at disgustedly. Were he not the so-stable front-runner, I would still think that. Were there different reasons why he is the so-stable front-runner, he would not have me awake in the dark annoying my snuggly cat.

(I have a dead laptop, being mailed tomorrow to a friend for restoration, so anything else would be on hold anyway. My valiant definitive defense of trans people against those horrid people called TERFs - a long troublesome essay draft anyway, which may for the current generation (even for my friends) be doomed to the “tl;dr” impotence by my very impulse to thoroughness - is sealed away aboard the dead laptop. Meanwhile my great, long-slumbering critical-thinking treatise-for-kids problem, dating back to 2001 or even earlier, would be even more quiet even with the laptop; regardless of whether I resolved the problems inherent in doing it, I finally researched the problems of finding an illustrator… and finally put together that my giant picture book would necessitate paying the illustrator, well, probably most or all of the illustrator’s yearly income. I really should have learned to draw.
All of which leaves me here, with my mom’s borrowed laptop… and Donald Trump.)

He is offering red meat to the deep dark base. To judge by his past utterances only a few months ago (immigrants are great, Muslims are great), it is a marketing decision - he has decided that there is a window for him if he offers radical solutions to the fearful radical right. But it comes out with a heedlessness that comes from the utter lack of worry about himself that is Donald Trump.

And his devotees love him for it. It is easier for me to know what to think of Trump’s supporters than it is to be sure of what to think of Donald Trump. Trump’s supporters are people who have been led by Republican politicians to fear and distrust and live in a sealed ball, and who have never quite been delivered what those vote-courting politicians have led them to expect and to find absolutely necessary. They have been steadily nurtured by the Republican Party’s “Southern Strategy”, originally a cold calculation by Nixon to harness race resentment for the Party’s purposes… which may now be about to finally swallow the Republican Party whole, because these people are not listening; they are the latitude of the right that does not listen. Beyond not listening to Democrats, who are now seen as never saying anything that isn’t a lie, they are now also no longer listening to the Republican politicians or, well, what there are of Republican intellectuals and statesmen.

And Trump is now promising them delivery. With a special egomaniac not-worried-about-own-mouth crudity that sounds to them totally unfeigned. Is it unfeigned? Does even Trump care? When Trump promises to bring back waterboarding and says “even if it doesn’t work, they deserve it,” he cuts straight to the savage red-blooded heart of the thing, that the torture-supporting other nominees have always only smarmed past, saying other things about ticking bombs and ersatz interrogation effectiveness with only the signal brutal lack of interest. The point of torturing is torturing. The feel of it (the feel of the idea of it, for armchair torturers). And the jungle right hears their own blood roaring out of Donald Trump’s throat. He gets it, they think. And he says it and is unashamed, with total contempt for shame.

And now other Republicans, John Kasich most of all, are saying he’s going too far - some actually mentioning fascism.

But what can most of them do? Have they not talked of the dangers of immigrants and of Muslims in ways that admit of no moderation whatsoever, always talking only of the perils of the Democrats’ approach? Is not support for resuming enhanced interrogation techniques a common line across the Republican field? Is not our gulag at Guantanamo sacred? Have not they pointed at the Obama Administration as the center, nadir, and single hinge of what is bad and a threat to American democracy, simultaneously threatening and weak (producing such weird effects as the reported corridor conversation among Tea Partiers in which, given the choice, almost all of them preferred the Russian strongman Putin to Obama - so vigorous, clearheaded, decisive)? So they want to call Trump dangerously fascistic. They want to say Trump goes too far. They can say those things, but what beyond those word-formulas? What uncrossable lines, unmentioned before except largely by Democrats, can they now bring up that they have not been nudging their constituency toward as their side of the argument, downplaying any problems?

What strong-conservative orthodoxy could they stand on to denounce him from that wouldn’t be seen as a swerve, betrayal, and horrible surprise? They’ve been casting not much less shade on the principled rock they’d want than they have on the ACLU. (“We need to say, clearly, without PC obfuscation, that it is Muslims!”) If, when speaking in strong language to the future Trump Party, they haven’t meant to be headed where Trump is going, they have not quite been keeping it a secret, but something not far off.

… Trump himself.

Is he more scary to me than the other Republican nominees, himself, as a candidate? It’s a more interesting topic than it should be. Of the others on that slate, I tend to think that on the issues they are simplistic or horrific or both. The extremes for me are common for them. (Recently there was Christy’s mocking of the whole idea of Constitutional rights meaning a thing in the face of security concerns. And I remember Guiliani in the last election, happy to win the Iran-issue bid-up by promising pre-emptive nuclear strikes to settle Iran’s nuclear program.) And I don’t think I’d be happy thinking about any of the other Republican aspirants being strongly dominant (the least unhappy with Rand Paul, with his notions that inconvenient Constitutional rights might be roadblocks, or with John Kasich, who, well, concedes that global warning is real although he thinks the government shouldn’t do anything about it… those two are as good as it gets, and even Kasich is in the bring-back-torture line). And a common thread with all of them is the Republican administrators and other managing infrastructure they would let loose, which is not in view.

But it’s harder to know what to expect from Trump.

Trump is unique in that he’s not (unless he happens to really be) a real ideologue, and he’s not a political type working to get the votes and then going through a political career with all the tricks. It’s fascinating that no one in a bunch of volunteered pieces by Trump supporters that Conor Friedersdorf collected had any illusions about the nature of Trump’s motivations. The center of Donald Trump is this howling wind-tunnel of selfish vanity.

Trump in power might actually temporize and bloviate and back off things and mismanage stuff but be relatively harmless. It depends where he finds ego-biscuits.
But he’s such a narcissist that I don’t know to what extent he is even guided by flattering or ego-damaging voices from outside. He doesn’t even feel the need to sound clear.
And he - as far as I can discern - would feel no moral problems with going ahead with - whatever. With anything. Because nothing is going to make Donald Trump look bad to Donald Trump in the mirror.
So he might just be whistling - but unlike the calculating ideologue-politician Cruz, he has no restraining or countervailing felt need to just be whistling, or to at least nuance anything, in any respect.
What would such a pure vain man find grand when under the influence of the American presidency?
While… we cannot know for sure what part of his views might be sincere, but we do know that he has no qualms about grabbing the brutal, xenophobic, racist no-limits far right. None at all. (With, of course, for example - I cannot keep from stopping to put this in - his use of neo-Nazi-sourced false statistics! Again, completely uncaringly.) So we know what his range is.

It’s different than with anyone else. The illusion factor here is very similar to what it would be if, in a university experiment or something, we were peering at a previously confirmed compulsive-liar sociopath and trying to predict, from her utterances, what she might or might not do. And this is a presidential candidate.

What is meanwhile certain is what has risen with Trump - his constituency.

The underbelly. The thing that Democrats have always said Republicans were dog-whistling to with rhetoric and votes, and many Republicans (sometimes sincerely) have taken this as false accusations or of there being no non-racist reasons and been insulted (or have loudly pretended insult), the great dance… well, the inconvenient providers of votes who have been interpreting things in the same way as the Democrats are now crawling out from under the carpet with a Trump battle flag.

The most certain and present danger of a surging Trump who has not collapsed and who is not successfully rebuked and repudiated by the Republican side in general… Well, gerrymandering has made most Republican seats in the country safe for Republican politicians, which means that they need only fear challenges from the right in the Republican primaries - and they do fear them, and act accordingly. Republicans should condemn and repudiate these extremes of this hideous Trump…

… But they would have to openly and fairly directly nuance-repudiate ice-shelf-sized chunks of their own side’s rhetoric and emphasize to successfully do so. And if Trump does not collapse on his own, which a whole lot of desperate Republicans are praying that he will magically do somehow, then the most easy and likely path is that Republican politicians will have to appeal to these same voters and their new levels of demands, and their demands for actual delivery, on into the future.

(And, after all, what is an “uncrossable fascist un-American line” if you don’t worry about it? There’s always defeating “socialism,” there’s always the debt. Republican conviction that the Republicans can be trusted with fiscal matters is not in doubt. And so on…)

Which means that, to the horror of some of its accustomed members, the Republican Party will have finally become, much more operationally and finally, what a lot of Democrats have thought it is. And I don’t know what else after that.

I have seen a savagely gleeful Dem-side argument that we should hope Trump destroys the Republican party - but I don’t think that works either; I think it confuses an ascendancy for a demise. Yes, it’s fun to think the Republicans have always reeeeeeeally been just like this, but it makes a difference if that becomes literally true - and it’s self-indulgently fun to say how you long for when the Republicans lose and die off, as this person said, but Republicans and the Trumpers aren’t going to die off now or magically boil into steam and disappear no matter what happens in this election. A lot of desperate Republicans are going to be trapped in the Big Tent no matter who’s running it, because they can’t imagine voting for Dems, for their own reasons.

I am not a Republican or a Republican-sider. And what galls me, what nags at me is that, strategically, what I say about Trump or what Democrats say about this does not matter. Because these frightened, bumptious, proud cretins are absolutely not listening to us. Anything bad we say about Trump bolsters their faith in his rightness.

This is an internal family matter on the Republican side. The Republicans have to deal with this. And I just don’t see how they’re going to manage it.

Beyond praying, praying, praying for Trump to finally somehow go away. Somehow.

For archiving, I’m going to append a long comment I left in Facebook on the same subject, that says some of the exact same things much more concisely but that also says some things I didn’t quite here. (The most pessimistic thing - regarding him actually winning - admittedly does not factor in how Trump is likely to do with nonwhites.)

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One thing that is striking me is how out of position Republicans are to repudiate him effectively. They have been leading the same people to want and expect strong things in these directions, strategically, to get their votes. But somehow never delivering. Then when someone shows up who really does go ahead and promise red meat, and who may deliver on it not because he’s a superideologue but because he just does not care… if they now turn around and say that’s fascism, who is the underbelly going to say “screw you” to, Trump or them? What of theirs, on their very side, can they disavow in order to disavow him? Merely “too far/too extreme” is a weak, impressionistic counter to someone who is offering the very direction Republicans have been hinting is the way we have to go - particularly as heard by the very ears that gerrymandering has forced Republicans to have to play most of all to. Why would Trump voters listen?

What I think is that - well, Cruz is hoping Trump will fade if Trump loses Iowa out of the gate. I don’t think so. Trump knows he can wait and his core isn’t going anywhere.

If Trump does get the nomination - then there will now be the temptation on all Republicans in facing a choice between Trump and another Democratic administration. People adjust to supporting the side they support. So, even if Trump loses the general, I don’t want to see what sort of thing the mass of the Republican Party would be by the end of the race.

And about that…

I know a few scared somewhat-more-moderate Republicans, who think this is about the soul of the party.
But… I’m not sure how many of these could make themselves vote against Trump, for the Democrat! I think the most a lot of them could do is sit the thing out.
And many would just still vote Republican and prepare themselves to find Trump miserably distasteful.
This is why I can’t be sure that Trump would lose. Romney lost, but did pretty well with plain-banana capitalist Republicanism despite the remarkable fact that no one even in the GOP actually liked the guy. What happens when it’s a guy who’s actually offering them red meat, all over the place?

Either way… Megan McCardle missed the point in a piece I read where she pointed out that Trump isn’t really a fascist in the sense that he’s unlikely to overthrow democracy and become a dictator. This, to her, makes the question of whether he’s a fascist just cocktail-party conversation.
This piece of literalism misses the point in that the big worry, the reason for the tension, is whether - led by political-“demand”-exploiting Trump - America might come to settle into 1930s-like fascistic policies by consumer (voter) demand.

:-(

Last updated December 12, 2015