On the crazy train with Donald Trump
Reflections on a campaign that was never short of eyebrow-raising moments
WASHINGTON— Donald Trump couldn’t stop talking. I couldn’t stop smiling. This, I knew, was a catastrophe of a campaign speech. I loved it.
The whole thing seemed ridiculous. The ninth word out of his mouth, “thousands,” was a blatant lie: the crowd was no bigger than a few hundred. The Trump Tower venue symbolized nothing but his own ego. And he was rambling about nonsense. He made fun of Marco Rubio’s sweating, promised a “great wall” on the Mexican border, pronounced himself “really rich,” complained about how a buddy had trouble exporting a boat to devious China. As I posted quotes on Twitter, I found it hard not to laugh out loud.
Donald Trump was as advertised: a really rich train wreck.
When he finished, I rode the gold-hued escalator and found a bench to write. Before I filed, I thought I should call some Republican activists to get some dismissive quotes. They weren’t dismissive. “I think he’ll be taken seriously,” said Brandon Newton, a polite South Carolina county chairman. “We don’t always just want to have people who are currently in elected office . . .”
I was missing something. Everybody was missing something.
All that Republicans came to like about Trump was there in the monologue. His willingness to offend elites and minorities, his status as an outsider, his antipathy to free trade, his pledge to restore a glorious past.
But I wrote up the speech as a kind of humour story. The article, scheduled for page 2, ended up getting bumped from the paper. I understood. There was real news breaking, and this joker didn’t qualify. He was at 1 per cent in the polls.
And then people started attacking him for being a racist.
Trump’s speech was so bizarre that his most abhorrent remark, calling Mexican immigrants “rapists,” didn’t dominate headlines. But Hispanics responded with justified fury.
Which led to a wave of media coverage. Which led millions of Republicans to quickly learn that the new guy was a hardliner on immigration.
By the end of the week, Trump was in second place in New Hampshire. Within a month, he was the national leader for good. *** I went to Trump rallies in Virginia, Iowa, New Hampshire, Florida and New York. What sticks with me is the sound of his crowds. It’s a defiant masculine roar, like you might hear when a home-team lineman blindsides an unsuspecting quarterback.
The roar is never louder than the moment when Trump promises to build “the wall.” His supporters like “the wall” as policy. But it’s also effective as metaphor: Trump as the last barrier between the us and the them. When I ask Trump devotees why they like him, they often respond, “He says what everybody’s thinking.” When I ask what is it they’re thinking, the answer is usually something about Hispanics or Muslims.
After Trump announced his plan to ban Muslims from entering the country, Republican elites lined up to denounce the idea. I knew they were out of touch with their voters. When I called up party activists around the country, more were excited than concerned.
Some liberal pundits have taken to mocking the “economic anxiety” explanation for Trump’s rise. Trump’s popularity, they suggested, was the simple product of white intolerance.
If “economic anxiety” is too generous, this is too harsh. In between interviews with xenophobes, I’ve met dozens of pleasant supporters who like him for any number of reasonable reasons: his business acumen, his professed skepticism of war, his desire to tear up NAFTA. They believe regular politicians were captive to shady donors.
“He can’t be bought,” one man told me at a fall rally in Richmond, Va. “We just need a change, man.”
I drove back to D.C. with one conviction: Trump wasn’t going away. I’d felt this kind of devotion once before. *** I thought I had left the once-in-alifetime madness of Toronto’s Rob Ford-era city hall for the serene normalcy of the American government. Twice in a lifetime? The attacks on elites, the unblinking support base, the habitual dishonesty. It was eerie: America was sweating through the Toronto fever dream. As pundits churned out essays arguing Rubio or Cruz was the front-runner even though Trump was up in every poll, I wanted to shout them out of the delusion.
Trump is the front-runner! Toronto lived through this!
I no longer think our experience is comparable. Ford, a politician, stayed on his best behaviour long enough to get elected mayor in a cheap non-party election. Trump, having never held office, spent a year confirming every concern about his personality. And voters liked it.
Enough to hand a whole party to him instead of a billionaire-backed alternative. Enough to give him a real shot at the nuclear codes.
Can he win? The evidence suggests his chances are so poor that he might have already lost. No nominee in decades has been so loathed.
But if the endlessly boasting demagogue has taught us anything, it’s some forecasting humility. This week, I made another call to Newton.
“I don’t put nothing past him,” he said.