COUNTRY POISED TO ELECT THE LESSER OF TWO EVILS
TRUMP HAS CHANGED AMERICAN POLITICS.
Eighteen months after it began, the U.S. presidential campaign seems headed for the second-worst possible conclusion.
Donald Trump will probably — probably — not become president, a nightmare beyond all imagining. But the damage he has done just by running — to his party, to American politics, to the country’s sanity — is grievous enough. If the result Tuesday night is as close as now seems likely, he and his followers promise to remain a disruptive force in the Republican party for years to come.
Just a few weeks ago, Hillary Clinton seemed headed for an easy win. Now, the race having closed to within two points, nothing is definite. To be sure, she has a lock on at least 14 states, mostly on the two coasts, worth a combined 182 electoral college votes. Another seven states — Virginia, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Maine, Minnesota, Michigan and Wisconsin — are almost as certain wins, bringing her to 258. And she will probably wobble home in New Hampshire and Colorado. That gives her 271, one more than a bare majority.
Beyond that, all is flux. Florida and Nevada, which not so long ago looked to be in the bag, are now considered toss-ups. Ohio and Iowa, previously toss-ups, are probably now lost. Democratic hopes of stealing Republican states like North Carolina, Arizona, or even Georgia are fading.
That’s if the polls are to be believed. But these, too, are shrouded in doubt. Perhaps some pro-Trump voters are too shy to tell the pollsters of their unfashionable opinion. On the other hand, Trump’s notoriously chaotic organization may prove as incompetent at getting the Republican vote out as it has at most things.
What is certain is that Trump has changed American politics, and not for the better. It isn’t just his appalling persona, a composite of all of the worst qualities it would be possible to combine in a candidate: the casual racism, the virulent sexism, the comprehensive ignorance, the deep insecurity, the volatile temper. It isn’t the campaign he has run: the bullying, the boorishness, the appeals to violence, the constant, hyperbolic lying even about facts that are not in doubt.
It isn’t his singular unpreparedness for the job: not only the wholesale lack of relevant experience, but the career littered with bankruptcies, bilked suppliers and accusations of fraud. It isn’t the ridiculous parade of fake policies with which he pretends he would deal with America’s real problems — when he offers any policy, beyond a breezy “I’ll make things so great you won’t believe it” — from deporting 12 million illegal immigrants to building a wall along the Mexican border to banning Muslims, or the wreckage he would make of U.S. foreign policy, from ripping up NAFTA to reneging on NATO commitments and beyond.
It isn’t that he gives every appearance of being in the pocket, if not the pay, of Vladimir Putin, or his frequent expressions of admiration for other dictatorships, from China to Saddam Hussein. It isn’t his publicly stated vows, surely unique in American political history, to use the powers of the office to get even with his enemies or order the military to break the law: to torture terrorism suspects and murder terrorists’ families.
It isn’t even the accusations, from more than a dozen women, that he sexually assaulted them, accusations he would be in a better position to deny had he not been caught on tape boasting of his modus operandi.
It is that for all of these testaments to his unfitness for office — and this summary barely scratches the surface — he has paid no price. Far from disqualifying himself, he has succeeded in dragging everyone else down to his level. If only by the vastness of his own unconcern, he has made the idea that a candidate for U.S. president should behave like a petulant child seem, if not normal, than somehow … usual. And by his example he has enabled others, of still darker intent and crazier views, to advance out of the shadows.
That he and his merry band of charlatans would be so contemptuous of fact, principle or common decency is one thing. We have seen their kind before. That they should have persuaded so many Americans, if not to roar with approval, then to shrug with acquiescence, is something new, and more disturbing; the sophistries of his media defenders, even more so. But what is most confounding of all is that even his critics have been disarmed. For outrage, to be sustained, must be stoked with novelty. At some point, even the gravest offence gets priced in, through sheer repetition. The first eight or nine women accusing a presidential candidate of molesting them, that’s news. But by the time we get to double digits, it barely rates a mention.
We have to understand how different Trump is from any previous political phenomenon, how completely detached he is from any of the norms that might have restrained his counterparts in the past. And norms — custom, expectation, convention — are all we’ve got. We live under a system of laws, but ultimately it’s only a convention that we obey the law. For most people, convention is enough: indeed, people bow to convention who would not obey the law. Richard Nixon was a crook, when no one was looking. But even Nixon, ordered by the Supreme Court to hand over the tapes, handed them over. Would a President Trump? Pray God we don’t have to find out.