Accurate reading of writing on US wall
IHAVE spent the past several weeks listening to dozens of speeches by Donald Trump. Curiosity about Trump’s appeal is really like driving past an accident scene and feeling drawn to ogle at the spectacle.
Like many outsiders, I am quite intrigued, a little unsettled, by his immense popularity.
But Trump has harboured presidential ambitions for a long time.
His first official presidential campaign was in 2000, when he stood under the banner of the Reform Party.
Although he did not officially run again after that, Trump has often commented in public about potentially running for president.
The idea of a potential Trump candidacy has thus long been implanted into the US popular imagination. Of course most political observers could not have taken Trump seriously; he has always been the object of ridicule and lampooning amongst certain segments of the US chattering classes because of his showmanship as portrayed on the television show The Apprentice.
While the intelligentsia expected Trump to fall away soon, fellow Republican politician and former Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich commented early on in 2015 that Trump would get more and more acceptable everyday.
Gingrich believes that a Trump presidency would have beneficial “disruptive” effects and undo political stagnation.
But if Gingrich were more honest, the reality is Trump is merely a more rambunctious example of increasingly hardline rightwing politics that has taken root in the Republican party.
The real question is, why Trump over other Republican candidates?
Here are my five reasons why the persona of Donald Trump resonates with the majority of Republicans:
Firstly, much like President Barack Obama, the Trump campaign offers the promise of making history.
Although much media lampooning focuses on his narcissism, Trump often speaks in the collective. He constantly uses the following phrases which I quote directly: “we are going to win, we are going to take it”; “we have something going, its something we haven’t seen before”; “we’re doing great; “we’re not gonna be the dummies anymore”; “we don’t make good deals anymore, we don’t win anymore”; “we can’t beat ISIS, here we have a military but we can’t beat ISIS”, “our country is falling apart, we’ve become third world in many respects”.
Secondly, Trump has positioned himself as an anti-establishment, maverick outsider who is upsetting an “out of touch” traditional Republican party that sees him as a threat. He speaks in a manner that appears to bring common sense to people’s problems. He is the antipolitically correct, anti-politician who is here to sort out a mess that the Washington establishment from George Bush to Obama have created.
Thirdly, it is not that he talks tough on immigration from developing countries, it is that unlike career Republicans, Trump seems absolutely sincere about doing something to curtail it.
The simplicity of his “border wall” proposition, as ludicrous as it sounds, tells his followers that Trump genuinely means it when he says he wants to keep immigrants out.
Fourthly, he speaks just like he does on The Apprentice – his is a firm, decisive, non-nonsense approach to “deal-making”.
There is no distinction between the television character of Trump and the presidential candidate Trump.
He is like the WWE’s Hulk Hogan, or Isidingo’s Cherel de Villiers – a television character who takes up a place in our everyday lives that seems to inhabit our actual reality.
Finally, as counter-intuitive as this may seem, his audience does not take him literally; they take him as a symbol of the disruption they wish to see.
I have noted in many speeches that Trump’s crowd will clap with a little hesitation if he says something completely absurd. I think it’s because they know he is a bit over the top, but that is why they want him anyway – to disrupt what they think is an underwhelming Washington culture.
● This is a rerun of a column written by Mkhize in May
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