On Monday, Donald Trump held a rally in Manchester, New Hampshire, where he merrily repeated a woman in the crowd who called Ted Cruz a pussy. Twenty-four hours later Donald Trump won the New Hampshire primary in a landslide.
I'm not here to clutch my pearls over Trump's vulgarity; what was
telling, rather, was the immaturity of the moment, the glee Trump took
in his "she-said-it-I-didn't" game. The media, which has grown used to
covering Trump as a sideshow, delighted in the moment along with him —
it was funny, and it meant clicks, takes, traffic. But it was more than
that. It was the frontrunner for the Republican nomination for president
showing off the demagogue's instinct for amplifying the angriest voice
in the mob.
It is undeniably enjoyable watching Trump. He's red-faced,
discursive, funny, angry, strange, unpredictable, and real. He speaks
without filter and tweets with reckless abandon. The
Donald Trump phenomenon is a riotous union of candidate ego and voter
id. America's most skilled political entertainer is putting on the
greatest show we've ever seen.
It's so fun to watch that it's easy to lose sight of how terrifying it really is.
Trump is the most dangerous major candidate for president in memory.
He pairs terrible ideas with an alarming temperament; he's a racist, a
sexist, and a demagogue, but he's also a narcissist, a bully, and a
dilettante. He lies so constantly and so fluently that it's hard to know
if he even realizes he's lying. He delights in schoolyard taunts and
luxuriates in backlash.
Trump is in serious contention to win the Republican presidential
nomination. His triumph in a general election is unlikely but it is far
from impossible. He's not a joke and he's not a clown. He's
a man who could soon be making decisions of war and peace, who would
decide which regulations are enforced and which are lifted, who would be
responsible for nominating Supreme Court Justices and representing
America in the community of nations. This is not political
entertainment. This is politics.
Trump's path to power has been unnerving. His business is licensing
out his own name as a symbol of opulence. He has endured bankruptcies
and scandal by bragging his way out of them. He rose to prominence in
the Republican Party as a leader of the birther movement. He climbed to
the top of the polls in this election by calling Mexicans rapists and
killers. He defended a poor debate performance by accusing Megyn Kelly
of being on her period. He responded to rival Ted Cruz's surge by
calling for a travel ban on Muslims. When two of his
supporters attacked a homeless man and said they did it because "Donald
Trump was right, all these illegals need to be deported," he brushed
off complaints that he's inspiring violence by saying his supporters are
"very passionate."
Behind Trump's success is an unerring instinct for harnessing anger,
resentment, and fear. His view of the economy is entirely zero-sum — for
Americans to win, others must lose. "We're going to make America great
again," he said in his New Hampshire victory speech,
"but we're going to do it the old fashioned way. We're going to beat
China, Japan, beat Mexico at trade. We're going to beat all of these
countries that are taking so much of our money away from us on a daily
basis. It's not going to happen anymore."
Trump answers America's rage with more rage. As the journalist Molly Ball observed,
"All the other candidates say 'Americans are angry, and I understand.'
Trump says, 'I’M angry.'" Trump doesn't offer solutions so much as he
offers villains. His message isn't so much that he'll help you as he'll
hurt them.
Trump doesn't. He has the reality television star's ability to
operate entirely without shame, and that permits him to operate entirely
without restraint. It is the single scariest facet of his personality.
It is the one that allows him to go where others won't, to say what
others can't, to do what others wouldn't.
Trump lives by the reality-television trope that he's not here to
make friends. But the reason reality-television villains always say
they're not there to make friends is because it sets them apart, makes
them unpredictable and fun to watch. "I'm not here to make friends" is
another way of saying "I'm not bound by the social conventions of normal
people." The rest of us are here to make friends, and it makes us
boring, gentle, kind.
This, more than his ideology, is why Trump genuinely scares me. There
are places where I think Trump's instincts are an improvement on the
Republican field. He seems more dovish than neoconservatives like Marco
Rubio, and less dismissive of the social safety net than libertarians
like Rand Paul. But those candidates are checked by institutions and
incentives that hold no sway over Trump; his temperament is so immature,
his narcissism so clear, his political base so unique, his reactions so
strange, that I honestly have no idea what he would do — or what he
wouldn't do.
When MSNBC's Joe Scarborough asked Trump about his affection for
Vladimir Putin, who "kills journalists, political opponents and invades
countries," Trump replied, "He's running his country, and at least he's a
leader, unlike what we have in this country." Later, he clarified that
he doesn't actually condone killing journalists, but, he warned the crowd, "I do hate them."
It's a lie that if you put a frog into a pot of water and slowly turn
up the heat the frog will simply boil, but it's a fact that if you put
the American political system in a room with Trump for long enough we
slowly lose track of how noxious he is, or we at least run out of ways
to keep repeating it.
But tonight is a night to repeat it. There is something scary in Donald Trump. We should fear his rise.
