WHY TRUMP TOWERS
He’s the loud-mouthed businessman famous for his bad comb-over and for sneering at Mexicans, women and war heroes, yet while the chattering classes fume, America’s solid blue-collar voters adore the man they call The Donald... and here’s the real reason w
FOUR years ago, during one of Barack Obama’s most hilarious speeches to the movers and shakers of Washington, the President spent over two minutes ripping in to Donald Trump.
Trump can be seen squirming in his chair at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner as he is lampooned with a volley of jokes from the President. Like all professional orators, Obama saves up his very best Trump gag for last.
‘Say what you will about Mr Trump,’ says Obama, ‘but he would certainly bring some change to the White House.’ Up on the screen flashes a ludicrous picture of the White House, which has now been dubbed ‘Trump White House’, complete with Hotel, Casino, Golf Course and Presidential Suite.
How the audience howled; one can only imagine how Trump must have been grinding his teeth as he soaked up this presidential broadside. Because at the time, at least, the very thought of Trump occupying the White House must have seemed just absurd. Fantastical. Not just beyond reason, but utterly preposterous. The Donald in the White House? You have got to be kidding!
And yet today, despite the most earnest hopes and wishes of America’s PC press and the Washington chatterati, President Obama’s ridiculous little joke has more than a fair chance of becoming a reality.
Although a lot of Europeans are still playing catch-up on the latest extraordinary developments in US politics, it would seem that 69-year-old Donald Trump is the out and out front- runner to be the Republican candidate for the 2016 Presidential Election.
In the three months since Trump declared his intention to run for president, his campaign has snowballed.
He heads every single opinion poll, is leading in practically every single state, and – much more strikingly – has, in the process, become completely and utterly bomb-proof. Hardly a week goes by now without Trump committing the sort of spectacular verbal gaffe which would have sunk any of his rivals.
One week he’s branding Mexican immigrants as ‘criminals and rapists’, the next he’s taking a completely senseless side- swipe at the former Republican presidential candidate John McCain. ‘He’s a war hero because he was captured,’ says Trump. ‘I like people that weren’t captured, okay?’
OKAAAAY, Donald… And although we’re all for politicians saying what they genuinely mean rather than just prattling endless party political soundbites, Trump’s comments about McCain seem, well, off-the-wall bizarre. What sort of person, let alone a frontrunner for the US presidency, would denigrate a pilot for being captured by the Viet Cong?
No other presidential candidate could have survived making such an asinine remark – and yet The Donald sails on, serene.
A few days later, Trump was causing yet more stunned outrage by accusing Fox News’ Megyn Kelly of suffering from PMT, saying that she had ‘blood coming out of her whatever’. It’s difficult to conceive of any serious politician in the West who would make such a remark.
It’s not just a throw-back to over 40 years ago, but it alienates the entire women’s vote.
No matter: the Trump juggernaut did not even stall for one solitary second. The man is made of Teflon. Nothing seems to stick and the more outrageous he gets, the more he seems to endear himself to diehard Republicans.
Even though there’s a long, long way to go yet before the presidential election, Trump must be the odds-on favourite to be the Republican candidate.
And then… and then, well who knows, but he may face Hillary Clinton, and though she will have an enormously slick campaign machine behind her, she’s made an awful lot of enemies.
In 2011, when President Obama was making his fanciful ‘Trump White House’ gag, it was quite inconceivable that it might ever have become a reality. What a difference four years makes. Trump for President? Well you wouldn’t like to bet against it.
Europe, of course, is still a little behind the times.
In Ireland Trump is still treated as a brash buffoon with a weird comb- over. A loud-mouth. A rampant ego-maniac. A multimillionaire property developer with a penchant for hard-nosed pneumatic lovers ( including, bizarrely, Carla Bruni).
We hear him spout his latest piece of grandstanding hyperbole, and we roll our eyes, and we laugh in amazement, and we believe that the Americans, even the red necks, will soon come to their senses.
Because how could anyone – at least any sane human being – want to elect this self-aggrandising billionaire to be the President of America? Political pundits across America have consistently dismissed Trump as a political lightweight, and every time he commits another ‘blunder’, they say he’s finished. But the more they seem to throw at him, the stronger Trump gets, and the media classes and the chattering classes are confounded.
How could this extraordinary freak of nature still be in the running to be president, when according to common sense, and according to every historical model going, Trump should have been out for the count?
HE seems to have complete contempt for Mexicans, thus alienating the entire Latino vote; he is given to casual misogyny; and wherever he goes, he leaves a trail of gratuitous offence.
The American media has been completely unable to understand it. They commission polls and focus groups into what it is, exactly, that makes Trump so popular with the Republican rump, and they get such a blizzard of different opinions that they find it impossible to fathom why he is such a winner.
Above all, the US pundits wail that Trump is a one- off; that no-one in their right minds could have predicted this extraordinary phenomenon that has built up over the last three months. But they are quite wrong – because almost exactly the same thing happened 35 years ago, when the one-time Hollywood B-lister Ronald Reagan stood to be president.
Reagan was pilloried. Much as
they’re doing today, the pundits threw their hands up in disbelief. Reagan wasn’t a politician, he was an actor, for God’s sake, and not a very good one at that; how could anyone take him seriously? But all the media screeching never stopped Reagan from winning two presidential elections, and today he is revered as one of the Republicans’ few Sacred Cows.
And so it is with Donald Trump. The American media can bleat and moan, and analyse all their polls to the Nth degree, but the fact is that Trump is striking a real chord in America’s heartlands. And this is – I think – because, although a lot of the time he may be saying the unsayable, he’s also saying what many blue- collar Americans actually believe to be true.
A lot of them do hold Mexicans in contempt, for instance – and would like to do exactly what Trump is espousing and build ‘a great, great wall’ on the Mexican border. Most blue-collar Americans are deeply conservative, and though they would never dare voice their views, they are repelled by homosexuality. So when Trump refuses to back same-sex marriages, his opinions will chime with a lot of people.
There are also a number of other things going for Trump.
Long before he started starring in The Apprentice, Trump was already a household name throughout America and the West. He may not be a seasoned politician, but in the last decade Trump has learned the much trickier craft of how to look good on TV.
In the Republican TV debates, Trump has consistently been the star turn, while all his rivals have come across as an amorphous bunch of grey men.
It also helps that US voters are sick and tired of professional politicians who will spout anything at all to get themselves elected. The politicians, that is, who always toe the party political line, who mouth endless platitudes and who never, ever say what they actually believe.
And it would be dangerous for any of our own politicians to scoff at the Trump phenomenon as something crass and American.
Who would have predicted that a Lefty, ‘legalise marijuana’ advocate could win a sizable chunk of the traditional rural vote? But isn’t that just what Ming Flanagan did in the last European elections. The voter-disconnect is evidenced here by the huge rise in the number of Independent politicians.
Similarly in Britain, witness the rise and rise of Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn, who may be ultra-left wing, but whose opinions are at least authentic. The Tories’ Boris Johnson is another loose cannon who is just as likely to take a pop at his own party’s prime minister as the Labour Party. The voters adore him for it.
FOR the professional politicians and for the political analysts, it must be a bitter, bitter pill to swallow. Because despite all their lofty pronouncements, America’s voters just wilfully keep on wanting to vote for a man who, by any reckoning, should be unelectable.
Trump’s 1987 book, The Art Of The Deal, gives you the complete lie of the land about why he is so popular. I read the book, a signed copy no less, in a single session; it is terrifying.
Why? Because Trump is a devious hustler whose ego and whose ambition know no bounds – and he will keep hammering and hammering until he eventually gets his way. This is a man whose greatest regret was that he ‘never had the opportunity to court Lady Diana Spencer’.
‘I like thinking big,’ he writes. ‘One of the keys to thinking big is total focus. I think of it almost as a controlled neurosis, which is a quality I’ve noticed in many highly successful entrepreneurs.
‘ They’re obsessive, they’re driven, they’re single-minded and sometimes they’re almost maniacal, but it’s all channelled into their work.’
This sort of attitude might not go down well in Europe, where we prefer our politicians to be just a little more self-deprecating, but in the States it’s going down a storm.
Blue-collar voters may not like Trump, but they love his can-do attitude. Over and over again, voters are saying that Trump is a man who can give them jobs, that he gets things done – and that, at least in America, counts for a lot.
America’s chattering middleclasses may not like it, and Barack Obama must be chewing his nails in disbelief, but Trump is the stand- out choice to be the Republicans’ presidential candidate.
By this time next year, we may well have Trump Versus Clinton. And since Trump has always been such a huge boxing fan, the analogy is irresistible: this would be The Fight of the Century.
The prospect is simply mouthwatering.