CARTOON CANDIDATES DON’T LAST
Donald Trump, Jesse Ventura — political performance artists
As demagogues go, Donald Trump is not a very good one. I’ve been studying his speeches on YouTube, and what a sloppy orator he is. He can blow for an entire hour in a loose oleaginous confabulation of detached sentences drifting toward crescendo and then, swerving away, non-sequiturs segueing into non-sequiturs as his audience waits for the message (They are stupid, we are smart, let’s be great again.) as he brags about his numbers, his success, coasting, camping, posing, lounging against the lectern, scowling, hands outstretched in his trademark “What gives?” gesture.
Sloppy. As he himself would say, “Unbelievable!” His audience expects him to be yuuuuuge, and instead he comes off as the most irritating cabdriver you ever had to listen to.
Twitter was made for this man. More than 140 characters and his mind wanders. Short sentences are his medium: People are tired of stupidity. Foreigners are pouring across the border. We’ll build a wall. It’ll be beautiful. ISIL was created by Hillary Clinton. Let’s take over Saudi Arabia. You’ve got to be strong. And smart. China is robbing us blind. The press is unfair.
RASSLING VILLAIN Racism? Sexism? Whatever. The guy is a cartoon, campaigning in captions. He is a very rich man who is lucky that his father was born before he was and, like so many fortunate sons, he is long on confidence, short on social skills.
Here in Minnesota in 1998, we elected a cartoon candidate, the rassling villain with the shaved skull and the pink boa, Jesse (The Body) Ventura, who squeezed past two standard-issue candidates to sneak into the governor’s office with a 37% plurality. He hung in for four years, fulminated, blustered, and in the end did not seem to be enjoying himself. Meanwhile the sky stayed up where it should be, perhaps because the governor of Minnesota doesn’t command a few thousand nuclear warheads.
Ventura didn’t run for re-election and his Reform Party, now known as the Independence Party, dwindled to less than 3% of the vote in 2014. It perhaps was not a good idea to make a man named Philip Fuehrer the state chairman, but beyond that, the party lacked candidates with massive chests who could bellow.
Trump’s yuuuuuuge ego trip could not have lasted this long but for the fact that a large class of Americans is suffering and nobody is offering them hope that things will improve. They are hard-working men and women who believed they were solidly in the middle class and now find themselves slipping and for good reason are fearful about the future. Their ship is leaving.
THE MORE YOU SEE Washington is locked in intramural combat and incapable of action. The president worries about Iran and Syria and global warming. These people are angry and don’t know what to do, and in Trump they find a man who is also very angry and doesn’t know what to do. He is careful in a whole hour of “Unbelievable!” and “Stupid!” and “Take my word for it!” not to offer specific proposals. He has no ideas. His rationale for running is that a lot of people like him.
What 1998 did for Ventura was to give him a whole new career as a paid fulminator on the lecture circuit and a cable TV host with a book contract, which, for an aging rassler with back problems, was a very good deal. What it did for Minnesota was to make us the butt of a joke.
Trump is already a joke in most of the rest of the world. Onward he goes, leaning on his podi- um like a big old mud turtle, leering, grimacing, bragging about his poll numbers and attendance figures and his net worth and his alma mater, and I expect he will do respectably well in Iowa and New Hampshire and South Carolina. But he is too clumsy to get very far. The more you see, the less there is. I expect he will find a graceful way to bow out, throw his support to Ted Cruz and go back to Olympus.
Someone in the Trump organization should tell him that his campaign is not good for business. When you parade around bellowing, you get a reputation. His name is on his hotels and buildings and golf courses, a name that now gives most Americans the willies, and I doubt that people who can afford to play his courses in Ireland and Scotland and Dubai or stay in his luxury hotels in Las Vegas, Vancouver, Washington and Chicago will want to have to explain to their friends that they are not knownothing chauvinists and mouthbreathers and carpet-chewers.
Conrad Hilton stayed out of politics; Benito Mussolini didn’t go into the hotel business. There are reasons for that.