But politics generally and especially intra-Republican political battles are really about demonstrating dominance – not policy mastery or polling leads but a series of symbols and actions that mark the dominating from the dominated.
.. But what has really hurt Bush is not so much that Trump is calling him names. It’s that Trump has used these attacks to demonstrate that Jeb is unable or unwilling to defend himself. Trump hits him and Jeb takes it. His responses are hapless and weak and generally meaningless. You probably barely remember them. The impact of this is not tied to Trump calling Bush “weak.” Trump is engineering encounters that show that Bush is weak.
.. He says things that would kill a political mortal (ban members of an entire religion from entering the country) and yet he doesn’t get hurt. Virtually everything Trump has done over the last six months, whether it’s a policy proposal or personal attack, has driven home this basic point: Trump is strong. He does things other people can’t.
.. As I’ve said, this kind of dominance symbolism is pervasive in GOP politics. It’s not new with Trump at all. Most successful Republican politicians speak this language. And yet somehow for most it is nonetheless a second language. Not Trump. It’s his native language.
.. he seems to intuitively get that for this constituency and at this moment just demonstrating that he gets his way, always, is all that really matters. Policy details, protecting the candidate through careful press releases and structured media opportunities … none of that matters.
.. there’s really not even the pretense that there is any real dispute about debate rules or bias or fairness or anything like that at the core of this. There’s not even any there there in Trump’s supposed ‘feud’ with Megyn Kelly. It has all the emotive credibility of a professional wrestling rivalry. It really is more or less openly just him saying I’m going to jack you guys up for the fun of it and make a spectacle of this.
Just to make trouble.
Because I can.
.. But these kinds of antics, really unprecedented in their nature, are less an attack on the ‘establishment’ than a deeper structure of the political system itself.
The Governing Cancer of Our Time
But that’s sort of the beauty of politics, too. It involves an endless conversation in which we learn about other people and see things from their vantage point and try to balance their needs against our own. Plus, it’s better than the alternative: rule by some authoritarian tyrant who tries to govern by clobbering everyone in his way.
.. As Bernard Crick wrote in his book, “In Defence of Politics,” “Politics is a way of ruling divided societies without undue violence.”
Over the past generation we have seen the rise of a group of people who are against politics. These groups — best exemplified by the Tea Party but not exclusive to the right — want to elect people who have no political experience. They want “outsiders.” They delegitimize compromise and deal-making. They’re willing to trample the customs and rules that give legitimacy to legislative decision-making if it helps them gain power.
.. Ultimately, they don’t recognize other people. They suffer from a form of political narcissism, in which they don’t accept the legitimacy of other interests and opinions. They don’t recognize restraints. They want total victories for themselves and their doctrine.
.. People say that Trump is an unconventional candidate and that he represents a break from politics as usual. That’s not true. Trump is the culmination of the trends we have been seeing for the last 30 years ..
.. Trump’s supporters aren’t looking for a political process to address their needs. They are looking for a superhero. As the political scientist Matthew MacWilliams found, the one trait that best predicts whether you’re a Trump supporter is how high you score on tests that measure authoritarianism.
Is the new populism about the message or the medium?
None of the candidates, not even the party favorites, are campaigning on behalf of their party; most are campaigning to crash it.
.. It began in 1787, during the debate over the Constitution, a debate waged in ratifying conventions but also, more thrillingly, in the nation’s hundreds of weekly newspapers. Some favored ratification; these became Federalist newspapers. Others, the Anti-Federalist newspapers, opposed it. If it hadn’t been for the all-or-nothing dualism of this choice, the United States might well have a multiparty political culture.
.. Revolutions in communication tend to pull the people away from the élites. (The printing press is the classic example; think of its role in the Reformation. But this happens, to varying degrees, every time the speed and scale of communication makes a leap.) In 1833, refinements in printing technology lowered the cost of a daily newspaper to a penny or two; in the eighteen-forties, newspapers got their news by telegraph; the post office set a special, cheaper rate for newspapers; and, in the eighteen-fifties, newspapers began printing illustrations based on photographs.
.. In 1920, Warren Harding became the last Presidential candidate to send his speeches to voters, on a vinyl album. His successors turned to radio.
.. He led the crowd in the Pledge of Allegiance, facing a third flag, held by Gary Dipiero, a Cruz supporter from Saugus, Massachusetts, who was carrying a “Hillary for Prison” sign. (Dipiero told me that he expects this of a Cruz Presidency: “He’s going to prosecute her and throw her in jail.”)
.. Apart from the bluejeans and the boots, which Reagan liked to wear, too, very little about Ted Cruz is reminiscent of Ronald Reagan. Where Reagan was warm and prided himself on being welcoming, Cruz is cold: he likes to make threats.
.. Some Republican candidates deny press passes to journalists they consider to be part of the “liberal media,” preferring to bypass the press in favor of a direct feed. Trump’s decision to sit out the last debate in Iowa before the caucuses took this one step further, but in the very same direction.
.. The American party system is not only a creation of the press; it is dependent on it. It is currently fashionable, indispensable, even, to malign the press, whether liberal or conservative.
.. But when the press is in the throes of change, so is the party system.
.. With our phones in our hands and our eyes on our phones, each of us is a reporter, each a photographer, unedited and ill judged, chatting, snapping, tweeting, and posting, yikking and yakking. At some point, does each of us become a party of one?
How Trump Did It
This gathering of New York’s political class was not held on the eve of Trump’s announcement. It was much earlier than that – 25 months ago, in the weeks before Christmas of 2013
.. Trump nixed that strategy in favor of a June entrance for two reasons. The first was that it would allow him to test the waters long enough to exit the race in time for the fall season of his reality show The Apprentice in case his campaign flopped.The second was that Trump, an astute observer of the television industry, saw a news void he wanted to fill during the summer doldrums of the campaign — when most candidates are busy fundraising and building ground organizations.
.. Trump, according to those who have known him for years, has never relied on scripts, talking points or a teleprompter. During his 14 seasons on The Apprentice, Trump would tell producers, “I don’t work with scripts.”
.. Trump didn’t foresee the furor his Mexico comments would generate
.. Like the Mexican controversy, Trump’s feud with Kelly and Fox was unplanned. But unlike with that first episode, his team was eager for him to walk it back. Lewandowski and Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, prepared memos outlining various ways to ease off the Kelly story. But Trump wouldn’t relent; he doesn’t do damage control.
.. “In all these cases, he’ll take the memos people put in his hands and listen to people’s comments, but he’s still going to do his own thing
.. Not apologizing has only bolstered a candidate who appeals to voters fed up with political correctness and establishment niceties. Many of Trump’s most controversial statements and proposals, in fact, have been validated by the polls.
.. Trump saying that Hillary Clinton got “schlonged” in losing the 2008 Democratic primary and his calling her “disgusting” for using the bathroom during a debate that prompted her to call out his “sexism.” That, in turn, is what he cited as his reason for focusing again on Bill Clinton’s sex scandals, which he claimed are “fair game” because Hillary was attacking him.
.. Most campaigns aren’t so secure as to make such declarative statements or shrewd enough to understand where it’s going to go,” said an operative close to the Trump campaign. “If you don’t have the same risk tolerance, he’s got you beat before you’re even in the game because you’re not willing to risk the way he is.