openpolitics.com

Here’s the part of the 2016 story that will be hardest to explain after it’s all over: Trump did not deceive anyone. Unlike, say, Sarah Palin in 2008, Trump appeared before the electorate in his own clothes, speaking his own words. When he issued a promise, he instantly contradicted it. If you chose to accept the promise anyway, you did so with abundant notice of its worthlessness. For all the times Trump said believe me and trust me in his salesman patter, he communicated constantly and in every medium that there was only thing you could believe and trust: If you voted for Donald Trump, you’d get Donald Trump, in all his Trumpery and Trumpiness.

 .. The television networks that promoted Trump; the primary voters who elevated him; the politicians who eventually surrendered to him; the intellectuals whoargued for him, and the donors who, however grudgingly, wrote checks to him—all of them knew, by the time they made their decisions, that Trump lied all the time, about everything. They knew that Trump was ignorant, and coarse, and boastful, and cruel. They knew he habitually sympathized with dictators and kleptocrats—and that his instinct when confronted with criticism of himself was to attack, vilify, and suppress. They knew his disrespect for women, the disabled, and ethnic and religious minorities. They knew that he wished to unravel NATO and other U.S.-led alliances, and that he speculated aloud about partial default on American financial obligations. None of that dissuaded or deterred them.

.. Polls in late May show 85 percent of Republicans now supporting Trump.

.. It’s often said that a good con is based upon the victim’s weaknesses. Why were conservatives and Republicans so vulnerable? Are these vulnerabilities not specific to one side of the political spectrum—are they more broadly present in American culture? Could it happen to liberals and Democrats next time? Where were the guardrails?

..  The first guardrail to go missing was the old set of expectations about how a candidate for president of the United States should speak and act.

.. Donald Trump, by contrast, former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney lamented, exemplifies what millions of parents would fear in their sons: “the bullying, the greed, the showing off, the misogyny, the absurd third-grade theatrics.”

.. The second broken guardrail is the expectation of some measure of trustworthiness in politicians.

.. Donald Trump’s dishonesty, however, is qualitatively different than anything before seen from a major-party nominee.

.. A third broken guardrail is the expectation that a potential president should possess deep—or at least adequate—knowledge of public affairs.

.. It’s a fair generalization that Republicans demand less policy expertise from their national leaders than Democrats have usually expected from theirs.

.. What’s different now is the massive Republican and conservative rejection of the idea that a candidate for president should know anything substantive about governing at all. As of November, 2015, 62 percent of Republicans insisted that “ordinary Americans” would do a better job solving the country’s problems than professional politicians.

.. Over the past three cycles, Republicans have elevated a succession of manifestly unqualified people to high places in their national politics. Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann shot to stardom in the Tea Party era. For a brief period in late 2015, Ben Carson led the Republican polls—Carson being the only candidate who made even Donald Trump look knowledgeable by comparison.

.. Although Republican voters in the aggregate are better informed than Democratic voters in the aggregate, their votes are guided by two more urgent and immediate feelings: bleak pessimism

.. Despairing yet obdurate, Republicans have come to value willpower over intellect, combativeness over expertise.

.. “A party whose leading factions often seemed incapable of budging from 1980s-era dogma suddenly caved completely to a candidate who regards much of the conservative vision with indifference bordering on contempt.”

.. Trump urged evangelical leaders to “trust him” on traditional marriage. Days later, he told a reporter that he’d “move forward” on gay rights. He then resolved the contradiction by refusing to answer more questions about the issue.

.. “We love him most for the enemies he made,”

.. Donald Trump would have been hemmed in a generation ago by a fifth guardrail: the primacy of national security concerns. Trump has no relevant experience, no military record, scant interest in the topic—and a long history of casual expressions of sympathy for authoritarian rulers. He famously explained that he gets his military advice from TV talk shows.

.. There’s something more going on here than an Iraq War hangover. Trump’s foreign policy is predicated upon an apocalyptic vision of the United States as a weak and fading country, no longer able to shoulder the costs and burdens of world leadership. That view aligns with the deeply pessimistic mood of today’s Republican voters. Sixty-six percent of them say that life has gotten worse for people like them as compared to 50 years ago.

.. Trump’s ramshackle statements do present a coherent point of view. His instinct is always to abandon friends and allies, to smash up alliances that have kept the peace, to leave the world to fend for itself against aggressors and predators.

.. Trump’s online presence is strongly reinforced by pro-Putin trolls and bots.

.. Republicans still care that their candidate be “strong.” They thrill to Trump’s rhetoric of massive violence against ISIS. What they seem no longer to care about is the larger architecture of security built since 1941 to keep America and its friends safe, prosperous, and free.

.. A deep belief in tolerance and non-discrimination for Americans of all faiths, creeds, and origins also once functioned as a guardrail against destructive politics.

.. n the words of the 1980 Republican platform: “The truths we hold and the values we share affirm that no individual should be victimized by unfair discrimination because of race, sex, advanced age, physical handicap, difference of national origin or religion, or economic circumstance.”

.. Trump has appealed to white identity more explicitly than any national political figure since George Wallace. But whereas Wallace was marginalized first within the Democratic Party, and then within national politics, Trump has increasingly been accommodated.

.. One-time Trump opponents like former Bush White House spokesperson Ari Fleischer now dismiss criticism of Trump’s slurs and insults as “a Northeastern look down your nose at other people who are different …. That [criticism] is disdain for the voters.”

.. That’s the summary of a set of experiments by psychologists at Northwestern University. Their work is supported by abundant evidence across the social sciences, including perhaps most famously a 2007 paper by Robert Putnam showing that increases in ethnic diversity lead to collapses in civic health. Trust among neighbors declines, as does voting, charitable giving, and volunteering.

.. Trump is running not to be president of all Americans, but to be the clan leader of white Americans. Those white Americans who respond to his message hear his abusive comments, not as evidence of his unfitness for office, but as proof of his commitment to their tribe.

.. Ticket splitting in 1984 was only a little less dramatic

.. Partisan identities have hardened since then.

.. Once you’ve convinced yourself that a president of the other party is the very worst possible thing that could befall America, then any nominee of your party—literally no matter who—becomes a lesser evil.

.. Policy, however, is not the first or second or third impetus of the Trump campaign. It’s driven by something else—and the source of that something is found inside the conservative and Republican world, not outside. The Trump phenomenon is the effect of many causes. Yet overhanging all the causes is the central question: Why did Republicans and conservatives react to those causes as they did? There were alternatives. Of all the alternatives for their post-Obama future, Republicans and conservatives selected the most self-destructive of the options before them. Why? What went wrong? That will be the excruciating mystery to ponder during the long and difficult work of reconstruction ahead.