What Drives Trump
Sidney Blumenthal has suggested that Trump is “the dog who caught the fire truck,” that he never saw that he could get this far and now that he’s here, it’s really without precedent, but that he’ll hopefully run out of steam quickly. This is certainly a more positive view of the campaign that has so far resulted in rising racism in schools, mirrors Hitler and Mussolini’s rise and reeks of the same blind nationalism that drove the Brexit vote. The hope that this will yet fizzle out is still a common view among the logical and measured, even if it is no longer the majority view as it was at the beginning of the Republican race. But on the heels of the Republican convention and midway through the Democrats’ one, Trumps going up in the polls whilst Clinton, who is really the only thing standing in the way of a Trump presidency, is going down.
Belief in a higher power that will somehow make sure that an absolute outright idiot like Trump won’t get elected is, at best, foolish and, on a slightly worse end, dangerous. People should not expect something bigger than themselves to get them out of the mess they’ve gotten themselves in, because, unfortunately, that never happens. And to be clear, democracy and the will of the people is an example of such a higher power.
I don’t think anyone can say with certainty and sincerity that they know that either Clinton or Trump will win. It seems almost inconceivable that even the American people would elect Trump as their president, but it has often seemed inconceivable to me that they would have elected either Bushes, as well as several others. Yes, I have no faith in the US electorate. I see it now only as a game of who can appeal to emotion more.
And yes, this entire campaign is simply an appeal to emotion on both sides. On Trump’s, the anti-immigrant and nationalist sentiment is obvious. His America-in-ruins speech made a lot of things clear and, scarily, a lot of people at the Republican convention seemed to love it (personally I was hoping for this response, which seems far more… intelligent). On Clinton’s side, there is fear of Trump, a desire for a more sound, stable government and ruler and, most interestingly, the painting of it being almost a responsibility for women to vote for her (there’s a “special place in hell” remember). Even while the Democrats (and the Republican establishment, though lesser so the Trump team) try hard to project a fact-based campaign with down-to-earth, logical solutions to the many things that seem to ail the United States, in the end this is really just that: a projection. It’s the feeling of certainty, the sense of science and, some might say, the facade of fact. It really doesn’t matter whether or not they have things right or wrong, all that matters is that they can make people think that they do.
You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but if you can fool a plurality at election time, it’s the only time that counts.
But what’s driving the campaigns and, in particular, the people behind them? For Clinton, it would seem obvious, but for Trump, even though many people have tried, a unified narrative hasn’t really yet been created. So is he really the dog who caught the fire truck?
When you think about it, the dog probably doesn’t think that it can catch the fire truck; it doesn’t think that it can’t either! It simply sees the truck, invading it’s territory, moving fast (possibly a danger!) and runs after it. It doesn’t think “can I catch it?” and it certainly doesn’t think “if I catch it, what will I do?”
The same goes for Trump. Likely at the beginning of his campaign, he was thinking less about actually being president and more about just being the Republican nominee. Looking at his campaign, this is sort of obvious, as he and his team seem to have given no consideration whatsoever for what they’ll actually do while in office. (We’re hearing stories now that Donald Trump Jr., the presidential candidate’s son, had reached out to someone and asked if they wanted to be Trump’s VP, and also be in charge of domestic and international affairs. When this someone asked Trump Jr. what Trump would be doing, he said “Making America great.”)
What Trump likely did think about when he first started his campaign was about winning. He doesn’t really care about being president (unless he thinks that being president will let him with his company), but he cares about the thrill of getting there. He wants to show people, especially the media and the pundits that he can and will do it. Everything else he says is just pawns in his game, though whether or not he thinks about them that way, no one knows (he probably doesn’t himself).
Most politicians lie or tell half-truths to get the office of their desire. They might say that they support Policy A, but really in their heart of hearts, they don’t really care about it at all. It doesn’t matter, because their pollsters and strategists (and maybe even their common sense) tell them that supporting Policy A will make it more likely that they’ll get the office. They might convince themselves that they do really believe in Policy A (and really, it doesn’t take much to do that; you probably to it to yourself a lot!) and in the end, to the voter, it doesn’t really matter. If the politician can convince a plurality of the electorate that they do believe in the really extraordinarily popular Policy A, or convince the people that like the not-so popular Policy A that they’re in support and the people that like the opposing Policy B that they really don’t support Policy A, but instead are super big fans of Policy B, then they’ve got the election, and the office, in the bag.
The same goes for Trump. He doesn’t have policies, but instead kind of grand ideas that have no content, force or sense to them, but they can still be somewhat counted, for the sake of argument, as similar to the policies that normal, evil-within-human-parameters politicians have. These “policies” are just things that he says because he thinks they’ll have popular support and will win him the election. The important distinction between him and other politicians is that he cares about so much less and is thus willing to give so much more.
Trump doesn’t care about immigration or terrorism. He just sees those as issues that will get him elected, or, I should say, make him win, and he chooses the position that he thinks will be the most likely to do for him what he wants it to do. Looking at immigration, he sees a whole bunch of people worried about their jobs or looking around for someone to blame about something, and he, much like Hitler, has the solution: Immigrants. Immigrants are causing all these problems (those bloody foreigners!)! Also, he promises to do something about it (cut immigration, build the wall!), and he gains popular support without really having said anything of substance at all.
The same goes for his ban on Muslims entering the United States. I doubt he really cares how many Muslims come and go, nor really what the make-up of Muslims to Christians to other religions there are in the US (he himself is an Atheist; apparently he has never opened a Bible in his life). What he does care about is winning, and since he sees that a lot of the electorate is either anti-Muslim or can easily be turned that way, he proposes his ban (which, by the way, is what first made me worry that he was going to win and what first made the Canadian media really talk about him).
What Trump likely does believe in also turns out to be, in many cases, contrary to Republican policy. He supports single-payer healthcare (although he may have dispensed of this early on in a bid for the nomination). He’s against the TPP, NAFTA and helping out the US’s NATO allies. He has stated, quite clearly, that he thinks the Iraq war was a mistake (for once, he’s correct!). It turns out he also used to support Ms. Clinton, though this definitely has changed now.
But when it comes to the TPP, NAFTA and NATO, these are the few things where what he says sounds like what he really means. I think he really does hate the TPP and NAFTA and probably really doesn’t care about NATO. And so he chooses not to lie, but instead places his real opinion at the forefront, even as it opposes conventional Republican thinking.
Luckily for him, the anti trade agreement and anti-NATO rhetoric has tapped into a nationalistic sentiment among many Americans, the same sort of sentiment that drove the Brexit vote in the UK. These are people who think other countries are out to hurt them or are dragging them down, that these places are sending horrible immigrants to cause trouble and take jobs and that the US would do so much better without them.
But this is where the interesting thing comes in. Not all Republicans are this stupid, but the majority of the ones who aren’t somehow are able to convince themselves that Trump is only going to do what they want or they support. Many Trump supporters know that he can’t possibly ban Muslims from entering the United States or require them to wear ID tags and so, if that is something that they don’t support, they put their minds to rest on it. But at the same time, they manage to convince themselves that he will do the other things that they support, like tearing up NAFTA and renegotiating the TPP and they think that once he’s president, he’ll stop acting “like a drunk stumbling through a restaurant knocking over every table in his path to the bathroom.”
Actually, there’s a literary precedent for this sort of supporter: the Party workers of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Each worker employs doublethink, the practice of holding two opposing ideas as truth simultaneously. It seems that Trump supporters (and, to some extent, normal Republicans and really the majority of the US electorate anyway) employ this practice as well.
It is often tempting to call the sort of people who support Trump stupid or uneducated, but in reality, they aren’t. They’re simply taken in, just as most voters are taken in each election by the promise of their party, only to have their hopes dashed in the intervening years.
It’s also tempting to say that Trump has some sort of mental deficiency or some reason that he’s willing to say things that he so obviously doesn’t believe, things that he might even know will go catastrophically wrong. This viewpoint is, I believe, incorrect as well. I could easily see myself doing the same as he is if only I didn’t have the morals I do, and I know many people who haven’t yet formed the morals that would prevent themselves from doing this, but are simply held back because they really don’t want the power or they are afraid of the social criticism. Trump is thin-skinned, but he still somehow bounces back, perhaps simply because he has persuaded himself that the media and everyone else against him simply hates him, are corrupt and aren’t thinking reasonably.
Trump is the bully of the playground and, exactly like the bully, he’s not an uncommon occurrence.
