NYBooks: Trump
Two qualities more than any others have driven conservatism in our time. The first is cultural and racial resentment, felt by the mostly older and very white population the GOP increasingly represents—resentment against a fast-changing, more openly sexual America, as well as against dark-skinned immigrants, and White House occupants, and gay people and political correctness and the “moocher class” and all the rest. The second is what we might call spectacle—the unrelenting push toward a rhetorical style ever more gladiatorial and ever more outraged (and outrageous), driven initially by talk-radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh and now reproduced on websites, podcasts, and Twitter feeds too numerous to mention. There is a strong tendency, perfected over the years by Fox News, to cover and discuss domestic politics as a combination of war, sport, and entertainment all at once.
.. Trump is conservative resentment and spectacle made flesh.
.. And as for spectacle, Trump is one of the defining showmen of our new Gilded Age, whether we like that fact or not. Grandiosity, ostentation, and at least a touch of vulgarity have been his hallmarks from the beginning
.. Karl Rove wants desperately for the party establishment to block him. They all wish he would go away, even while they must know that they are responsible for Trump because they have spent many years creating an audience that was just waiting for someone like him to come along.
.. Bush has raised the money and lined up the endorsements, but his aura so far is definitely not that of the default choice. One has the sense that if he didn’t have such a familiar name, he might not even have qualified for that first debate
.. The final cause of Trump’s rise has been the intense attention given to him by the political media. The ratings obsessions of the three cable news networks drive the constant Trump coverage. Every morning, cable news executives are able to see which segments did best the previous night among the crucial twenty-five-to-fifty-four-year-old demographic. Chances are it was usually the Trump segments. For news websites from The New York Times on down to individual blogs, Trump means traffic.
.. he told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer in 2004. “It just seems that the economy does better under the Democrats than the Republicans.”4
.. What makes the book a bit different, though, and what separates Trump from your typical candidate, is the degree to which he sees politics as a negotiation. He, being the world’s greatest negotiator bar none, because he’s become a very wealthy man through the art of negotiation, will set lots of things right by force of will.
.. This is an understandable yearning to some extent, in an age in which the United States’ ability to call the global shots is so much reduced from what it was fifty years ago. But it has a more sinister aspect, this wish for a strong man who can just fix everything. And surely it’s also the case for some Trump supporters that after eight years of Obama, a bullying white man is exactly what is needed to restore things to their natural order.