To Understand the 2016 Election You Should Watch The Nightmare Before Christmas

We love strong men, we always have. We love them even though we’ve predicated hundreds of years of social change and progress — democracy, gender equality, the rule of law — on our recognition that strong doesn’t mean good, it doesn’t mean wise, and it doesn’t mean able. Strong just means you get your way.

Lately, the man most colorfully and mortifyingly living this chauvinist dream is, of course, Donald Trump, the first candidate in recent history to run for president of the United States not as an everyman but as a strongman.

Trump has found considerable success as a self-anointed patriarch. He doesn’t canvas for votes based on a democratic affectation of man-to-man appeal. Instead, he has obsessively cultivated an image as living mascot of the one percent. It’s a counterintuitive expression of the authenticity that voters perennially demand, which we’ve previously interpreted as a mandate for blue-collar affability, yet Trump seems to have unearthed a dormant yearning for a Daddy Warbucks figure.

Not long ago at a rally Trump warned of the possibility of a protester throwing a tomato at him. He asked the crowd to “knock the crap out of” the tomato-thrower and promised to pay the inevitable legal costs. This exchange captures the essential promise of the Trump candidacy: protection in exchange for fealty. Unlike traditional candidates, Trump isn’t offering himself as a leader among peers, he isn’t hawking programs and reforms to help people help themselves, and he doesn’t harp on individual responsibility. Instead, his panacea is prescriptive, top-down and concrete: a ban on Muslim immigrants, protective tariffs on Chinese imports, and a physical barrier along the Mexican border. These marquee policies aren’t empowering, they’re infantilizing. If the electorate is a child afraid of the dark, Trump has cast himself as the stepfather — a non-establishment authority figure — and has appealed to those parts of the electorate that won’t be soothed by measured, data-backed explanations that there are no monsters under the bed. Trump takes the monster epidemic seriously, validating it, and the border wall is his Rube-Goldberg monster trap that concretely addresses the underlying problem: not monsters, which don’t exist, but fear, which does.

Fear is a tricky emotion that can manifest itself in unexpected ways. Often it’s mistaken for hate. Both can be expressed in similar terms, but fundamentally they’re as different as smoke and bricks, the former an obscuring reaction and the latter a weighty intention. Fear is often a symptom of our brains misfiring, negatively processing an external stimulus based on faulty information or the lack of any information at all. Hate, though, is deliberate, cultivated and a constituent part of our identity.

Trump’s critics frequently paint him as a hateful person spewing hateful ideas in a hateful manner, but this characterization seems off the mark. Trump is a self-professed deal-maker, with a decades-long history of pragmatism at the heart of his business and political decisions. His lack of any clear, fixed ideology is exactly what riles many of his critics on the Right. Pragmatism, though, is lousy fuel for animus. True hatred is born of deeply held, fixed beliefs, which are exactly what Trump lacks. This isn’t to say that Trump doesn’t hold beliefs, make statements, or advocate policies that are sexist, racist, and xenophobic. It just seems unlikely that they arise from hatred. It’s a facile explanation, inconsistent with his personality.

Instead, Trump’s denigrating and inflammatory views seem to be an unfortunate combination of two distinct factors: on the one hand, a fearful electorate that feels vulnerable and is lashing out in time-honored fashion at unpopular, marginalized minority groups and, on the other hand, Trump’s own approach to the world: famously vain and opportunistic, and blithely unscrupulous.

Much has been written about the stagnating economic opportunities and job insecurity of the American middle and lower classes. Feeling left behind by politicians and the wealthy, disaffected portions of the electorate see only a tattered remnant of the nation’s social fabric. We all struggle to transcend our baser instincts when we feel embattled and disoriented, and some people have, predictably, adopted a reactionary, defensive stance. It seems, then, that rather than a sudden flourishing of hatred, the likelier explanation for Trump’s ample support is widespread feelings of insecurity and fear.

Trump has been all too happy to validate people’s fears, not necessarily because he shares them, but because he can capitalize on them. That’s what a smart businessman does. Perhaps the best example of this approach came years before this election cycle when Trump became a de facto leader of the Birthers, a reactionary grassroots movement of people who could not accept the reality of a black president and demanded that Obama publicly release his birth certificate. To suggest that Trump, himself, harbors some deep, abiding hatred of black people, or people of any other race, seems simplistic. What Trump saw was an opportunity, and what he lacked was any scruple about repeating and validating an inane and racist strain of paranoia, particularly when it could hone his influence and — best of all — bend the president of the United States to his will, even if just for one pointlessly degrading moment.

Not that Trump would cop to any of this. As Evan Osnos found in his profile of Trump for The New Yorker, “Plumbing Trump’s psyche is as productive as asking American Pharoah, the winner of the Triple Crown, why he runs.” Trump’s xenophobia, sexism and racism are of the casual sort, echoes of an imperfect society, unimpeded by any attempts at introspection. His is an act of incidental evil.

In his bid for the Oval Office, Trump has invited many comparisons, from Biff Tannen to Mussolini, but a more overlooked comparison may be to Oogie Boogie, the blustering, gambling, burlap bag of an archvillain from Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas. Like Oogie Boogie, Donald Trump is vitriolic and threatening, but also flamboyant and entertaining. He may sound hateful, but there doesn’t seem to be any depth to it, emotional or otherwise. In the climax of the film, Jack Skellington snags a thread of Oogie Boogie’s stitching on a revolving contraption that unravels him, revealing not some paragon of evil but mounds of wiggling, impotent bugs who, acting in concert, had brought life to an aggressive and blustering figure with no other substance to speak of. On their own, though, it was everything the bugs could do just not to get squashed.

That’s not to dismiss Trump’s supporters as bugs, or at least not any more so than the rest of us. We’re all vulnerable and insignificant in isolation, transcending our bug-ness through the meaning we create collectively. But, in acting together, we can sometimes forget about transcendence, and instead just amplify our bug-ness, in one form or another. By recognizing this distinction between the limitations of individual ambition and the possibilities of collective aspiration, and by admitting our own fallibility as individuals, we’ve come to reject the strongman model of politics. Trump may have proven that the old model still has legs, but he’s also reminded us of the reasons we’ve worked so hard to scrap it in the first place.