Fear trumps hope
Donald Trump is going to be the Republican candidate for the presidency. This is terrible news for Republicans, America and the world
His success, in short, is based on inviting the most exaggeratedly down-in-the-mouth Americans to indulge their meanest instincts. To attend a Trump rally, as hundreds of thousands of Americans now have, is to participate in a ritual enactment of injury and vengeance; an enactment which has, on occasion, done real harm.
.. It is probably only a matter of time before one of the journalists Mr Trump keeps caged up at the back of the rallies gets badly beaten. One of his party tricks is to insult them—“some of the most dishonest people in the world”—and invite his crowds to jeer. From the cage, as opposed to the privacy of his Manhattan office, where Mr Trump is immensely charming, he does not seem solicitous. He seems threatening and vile.
.. On primary day in Indiana he also gave voice to an outlandish slander against Mr Cruz’s father, a well-known evangelical preacher. (He suggested, on the basis of no evidence, that Mr Cruz senior had been involved in the murder of John F. Kennedy: “I mean, what was he doing—what was he doing with Lee Harvey Oswald shortly before the death? Before the shooting? It’s horrible.”)
.. If Mr Trump’s diagnosis of what ails America is bad, his prescriptions for fixing it are catastrophic.
.. Mr Trump’s economic positions, some of which he rehearsed in his office, are also fantastical. For example, he has pledged to pay down America’s $19 trillion national debt in eight years, while at the same time cutting taxes by $10 trillion. Given that he has also pledged to protect Social Security, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, an advocacy group, has estimated that he would have to cut other areas of government by 93% to meet his objective. He disagrees, citing the growth he promises to unleash by improving America’s trade terms and the savings he would make by rendering the government more efficient.
.. Mr Trump has in the past bragged about his many sexual conquests. He has had recourse to bankruptcy law four times. His every speech is littered with lies. By one calculation, 76% of his political statements last year were untrue. In a normal year, his Republican critics would have stopped him; why did they fail?
.. First, though it is a caricature to suggest, as Mr Trump and others have, that the Republicans have long made fools of distressed working-class whites by offering them God, the flag and tax cuts to the rich, it is a caricature with some truth to it. None of Mr Trump’s 16 rivals spoke convincingly to the concerns of wage-distressed workers; none had a thoughtful answer to them.
.. The several recent crises Republican congressmen have engineered over the passage of the federal budget, which they sought to hold hostage to their unrealistic and unconstitutional demands of Mr Obama, have earned the voters’ disdain. In that sense, the Trumpian revolt is not a continuation of the false promise raised by the anti-government Tea Party, but its successor. With Mr Trump’s nomination almost assured, its fires, too, must now rage and burn out.