The appalling truth is that Trump IS as stupid and ignorant as he seems
THIS was a moment that millions of Americans, some of them very weird indeed, have been praying for. This was the moment that tens of millions of others viewed with fear, revulsion, disbelief. The most divisive political figure in modern u.S. history became his party’s standard-bearer for the presidential election.
After I wrote in the Mail in February that a Donald Trump presidency was a real possibility, I was teased as if I had suggested that it might snow in July.
Today, a distant spectre has grown into something much bigger and scarier. The prospect will give sleepless nights to many world leaders, both America’s friends and foes.
Vice-presidential candidate Mike pence said the country ‘has only one choice’ at the ballot box: ‘It’s change versus the status quo, and when Donald Trump is president, the change will be huge.’ This is, indeed, the reason that a mendacious and xenophobic braggart could win the greatest elective office on earth.
His opponent is Hillary Clinton. She’s widely hated — ruthless and bossy.
even my clever east Coast friends, who are petrified of Trump, say they will need to take painkillers before going out to vote for her.
Across middle America, in the vast territories where this election will be decided, away from the country’s narrow sophistication belts, many people are happy to believe the worst conspiracy stories about any member of the Clinton family.
The only thing that prevents Trump from being sunk by his many lies are those that Hillary has been caught telling.
After all the insults that Trump has heaped on women and racial minorities, especially Mexicans, he should have no chance of their votes.
But then Trump seems blissfully unaware that America is becoming ever less Anglo-Saxon: its white electorate shrinks by 2.4 per cent every four years, while Latinos could become the country’s majority ethnic group by mid-century.
Both the form-book and demographics make Hillary seem a shoo-in for the White House.
But these are strange times in most of the world’s democracies.
Foreign visitors to the u.S. are awed by its wealth, energy, originality, infinite capacity for reinvention. Yet a huge number of Americans agree with Trump when he brands his own country a ‘hellhole’ that is threatened by Muslim terrorism, Chinese exports, stagnant middleclass incomes, blacks who shoot policemen — and that same rising tide of Latinos fed by huge immigration from Mexico.
Technology is killing off semi-skilled and even skilled jobs. Many who heed Trump’s siren song are those whom I would characterise as the ‘deserving poor’. That is to say, they are hardworking, decent people who simply seek fair rewards for their labour; employment security; the prospect of making their own lives, and those of their children, progressively better.
BuT, in today’s harsh conditions, none these are on offer. It is if a huge swathe of working people find themselves living on quicksand. The American Dream seems skewed in favour of Chinese billionaires, Wall Street bankers and Silicon Valley techno-freaks.
Trump touches the spot when he denounces such people with messianic fervour, when he promises in almost biblical language to tear down the temple and hurl out the money-changers.
You may ask: how can this be squared with the fact Trump proclaims himself a successful businessman, indeed a billionaire?
But the fact is that consistency does not seem important to his disciples.
Once, it was thought that Trump would be crippled by refusal to publish his past tax returns — presumably because they would show him much less rich and successful than he pretends. They might even expose some previous relationships with the Mob. They would certainly show that he does not do charity, never mind philanthropy.
Yet many Americans seem willing to close their nostrils to Trump’s own-brand stinking cheese, to stake everything on that glittering Trump-promise to bring Change, Change, Change.
Here we get to another bizarre bit of the story.
The one thing on which Trump’s supporters and enemies agree is that, if he gets to the White House, he will not abandon his bucking bronco political programme.
He will seek to turn the existing order on its head; build a wall along the Mexican border (at a cost of £9billion, according to his numbers, double that according to his enemies); go head-to-head against China on trade; expel 11 million undocumented immigrants; and seek to use American military might to bludgeon American enemies. The people who are rooting for Trump — this week with their cries to ‘Make America great again!’ and ‘Make America safe again!’ — would agree with Michael Gove’s Brexit-campaign assertion that people are sick of experts.
Trump’s supporters do not want political surgery, performed by top surgeons: from him, they are buying homeopathy, snake-oil straight from the vat. They do not wish to be told, for instance, that effective gun control legislation would do far more to stop America’s dreadful killing sprees than kicking Muslims out of the country.
They spurn statistics showing that the globalisation of trade has made nearly all of us better off. They yearn for a God-fearing white America where everybody knows his or her place, and TV runs perpetual loops of Wagon Train, Sergeant Bilko and I Love Lucy.
Yet it would be foolish merely to deride the Trump phenomenon when his pledge of creative chaos, the overthrow of The System, has brought him within conceivable reach of the presidency.
This fearsome man’s popularity reflects a new kind of politics which is probably here to stay — and not only in America.
Democracy is in trouble because of a breakdown of trust, a collapse of the old idea that those in charge know best.
Millions of voters no longer want to hear rational arguments involving unwelcome facts, the limits of the possible, the reality that all governance is about compromise.
Influenced by social media and talk radio, which empower them to connect exclusively with folk who think like themselves, they are raring for a fight.
SuppOrTerS of Trump believe that foreign states, allies and enemies alike, exploit American naivete and generosity. They are fed up with waging futile wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. They do not want to hear about America’s responsibility to play world policeman.
Instead, they demand an American government that rules in the interests of its own people, and nobody else’s. That is why Trump thinks so well of Vladimir putin, who he believes speaks in his language, rules on his terms.
The veteran u.S. columnist George Will is a lifelong republican, yet now says that he wants to see Hillary Clinton win all 50 states. He told me: ‘Don’t listen to anybody who says Trump is not as bad as he is made out. He’s worse.’
Will abandoned the republicans after spending some hours alone with Trump, an experience that convinced him the candidate is quite as stupid and ignorant as he seems.
Will’s is one of many voices — especially influential because of his long history as a republican sage — warning that with Trump, what you see and hear is what you will get, with disastrous consequences.
The tycoon lacks a single credible adviser. The shambolic nature of his campaign was laid bare at the party convention, not least when his wife’s speech proved to have been copied from one of Michelle Obama’s.
The u.S. constitution’s checks and balances — through Congress and the Supreme Court — are supposed to prevent a mad chief executive from doing too much harm.
But most political commentators predict that the members of the republican majority in the House and Senate are far too frightened of their own constituents to pull the brakes on president Trump.
So what are the chances of this extraordinary figure winning in November? Do not exclude the possibility. Hillary Clinton, who has waged a pretty wretched campaign, could yet implode or fall victim to a new scandal.
In the privacy of the polling booth, some Americans who do not today admit support for Trump could embrace what they see as the exhilarating option of flushing traditional Washington down the sewer.
Yet I cling to a deep and almost lifelong faith in the country’s fundamental wisdom. I say ‘almost’, because as a very young man I reported from the u.S. in 1967-68, a time of murderous riots, political assassinations, drughopped teenagers and frenzied antiVietnam protests. At the time, I thought America was collapsing.
Instead, it experienced a triumphant resurrection, such as it has reprised a few times since.
If Hillary Clinton becomes president, nobody will feel like celebrating. Yet at least this curiously joyless woman is sane, highly-experienced and responsible. Should she reach the White House, we may echo the singer Maurice Chevalier’s view of old age: it does not seem so bad when you consider the alternative.