Despite the news media’s unwillingness to subject Donald Trump’s history or policies to the scrutiny routinely accorded the campaigns of less flamboyant (but more credible) presidential candidates, the greater problem is not Trump himself — we will always have the deluded and self-absorbed among us — but the large crowds that continue to cheer with wild abandon at each outrageous and ill-informed statement he makes.
Governor John Kasich of Ohio was correct when he said in the first Republican presidential debate of the season that Trump has tapped into something in the electorate. And there is much in the executive and legislative functioning of the federal government to justify voter anger. The problem is that the anger Trump feeds upon — and fuels — is often divorced from any understanding of how a constitutional democracy should work. Trump’s litany of promises — guaranteed by him to make our heads spin — leads to two possible outcomes: either renewed and heightened disillusionment (when what he proposes to do lies outside the range of presidential authority and beyond where even a semi-rational Congress will follow), or a mob-fueled discarding of constitutional order and the rise of dictatorship, fearful in its own right and even more dangerous in its irrationality.
In assessing the Trump candidacy, one should focus not on the bluster but on the presidency he promises, and how avidly and uncritically the mobs embrace the dark scenario he evokes (dark because where he would take us would lead to both financial and moral bankruptcy and perhaps to the darkest place of all: war). Of course, there is the financial bankruptcy (going bankrupt is something Trump knows about). In his dismissal of the “stupid” people he sees all around him, Trump the Builder equates constructing a casino or a hotel with sealing the United States off from the world south of its borders. The cost to build the Trump World Tower was approximately $325 million; the estimated cost of a wall sufficient to create a barrier between the United States and Mexico is approximately $3.5 billion. And whereas the Trump tower was built with private funds, that $3.5 billion price tag for America’s “great wall,” notwithstanding his claims that he would make the Mexicans pay for it, would ultimately be charged to the taxpayers, including many of those who wave Trump’s banners and cheer his name because they are furious at entrenched politicians who seem to them unable to control federal spending. Grandiosity is not cheap, and one cannot simultaneously have Trumpian excess and frugal government, a contradiction that seems to challenge the calculating abilities of his enthusiastic audiences.
But Trump offers moral bankruptcy as well. No rational person will argue that it is acceptable for the United States to continue with fully porous borders (every country in the world maintains some level of border control), simply because an uncontrolled influx of migrants has very real economic consequences for the communities that thus face added costs of maintaining their schools, roads, and hospitals. Trump, however, calls not for management but for racist exclusion (racist because of his blanket condemnation of the illegal immigrant community not merely for bypassing legal immigration procedures — a crime, but a problem that can be dealt with — but as a breeding farm for rapists and robbers). He labels as “anchor babies” those children born here to parents who entered the United States in the hope that they and their children would become American citizens — the same reason my own Polish and Lithuanian Jewish grandparents came to America. The fact is that most people who come to America do so for opportunity, advancement, new lives: The influx must be managed — entry procedures and regulated pathways to citizenship must replace unfettered flow — but there is a dark blanket of race-baiting under which Trump and his most fervent supporters have huddled.
In 1935, the American novelist Sinclair Lewis published “It Can’t Happen Here,” in which the central character, Buzz Windrip, is elected president on a platform very much like the one Trump presents today, with its promises to restore national greatness. After he’s elected, Windrip shuts down (as Trump shouts down) dissent, shoves Congress aside, and “reorganizes” government for greater efficiency and control. In doing so, he is supported by a public thrilled by the promised restoration of American power. The eerie warning of “It Can’t Happen Here” is that it can.
There is a fault here, and not just among the people who make up those cheering crowds, who seem not to be really thinking much about the implications of Trump’s rhetoric. There is a fault with news media that bask in the readers and viewers generated by his absurdities and thus fail to put him under the microscope a presidential candidacy requires. There is blame to be shared by Trump’s rivals for the presidency — the Democrats who find it beneficial to claim that his excesses are common to Republicans as a whole rather than attack the menace he poses — and the Republicans who fear angering the seething base at his command and thus mute their criticisms, simply waiting for him to go away. But he won’t go away: He’s rich. There’s a lesson in Sinclair Lewis’s novel: His fictional candidate was elected president.
Former Republican Representative Mickey Edwards is author of “The Parties Versus the People: How To Turn Republicans and Democrats into Americans” and vice president of the Aspen Institute.