Though the candidates themselves made efforts to hide any hurt, Trump’s delay in endorsing them had occasioned cries of dismay from Republican stalwarts, who were aghast that Ryan, in particular, after all that he had done for Trump—including serving as the honorary chair of the Party’s Convention—might have to face an opponent without the benefit of Trump voters and Trump rhetoric. Didn’t Donald owe them that?
.. But as Trump’s policy statements remain outrageous, and his behavior makes his comments about Clinton’s “unhinged” temperament look like a study in projection, balancing that equation demands ever more from G.O.P. politicians. To say that Clinton is more dangerous than Trump requires signing on to a picture of her as a criminal madwoman, and of the political process that produced her nomination as irretrievably corrupted and broken. It leads to diatribes about Benghazi. It means believing in conspiracy theories.
.. A particularly baroque Trumpian line this week was the notion that the election might be stolen from him. The occasion for this was the issuing of court decisions overturning overly restrictive voter-I.D. laws. (Jedediah Purdy has more on that.) In Green Bay, Trump said, “What does that mean? You just keep walking in and voting?” (No.) He added, “So you have to be very careful, very vigilant.” And yet this is also a point where he is in unity with the larger Party, which has long supported measures that are supposedly aimed at insidious attempts to destroy the integrity of the ballot but that serve, really, to suppress the turnout of minority and low-income voters.
.. Trump’s raw material has long been there, in other words—Benghazi, voter fraud, and the perfidy of Clinton were the subjects of fervid nights on Fox News well before this election cycle—but there is less deniability for allegedly respectable Republicans who might want the electoral benefits without the taint... Yet if she wins, by preëmptively questioning the legitimacy of a Clinton Administration they will have made sane governance all the harder.
Why Trump’s Crazy Talk About Obama and ISIS Matters
At this stage, some will argue that it isn’t worth the effort to interpret Trump’s misstatements, or to point out the truth of the matter—in this case, that a Jordanian named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi founded isis, in 2004. At the very least, it should be obvious to everyone by now that Trump doesn’t deal in reality; he deals in mythmaking, demagoguery, and carnival barking.
.. But, just for the sake of argument, let’s assume that Trump is smarter and less myopic than he seems. Let’s assume that what he’s really focussed on isn’t winning this year’s election, a task he now realizes is beyond him, but creating a long-term Trumpian movement. A nationalistic, nativist, protectionist, and authoritarian movement that will forever be associated with him, but which also has the capacity to survive beyond him. A movement that in some ways would resemble other right-wing political parties around the world, such as France’s National Front, Austria’s Freedom Party, and the U.K. Independence Party, but which would also harken back to earlier moments in American history, such as the rise of the anti-immigrant Know Nothing movement of the eighteen-forties, and the formation, a century later, of the isolationist America First Committee, which sought a negotiated peace with Hitler.
.. for right-wing populist movements to succeed, a number of things need to be in place. For one thing, they need a narrative that mainstream political leaders, and political parties, are guilty of not merely incompetence but betrayal. The most notorious example is the “stab-in-the-back” myth, widely believed in Germany after 1918. That narrative held that the German military didn’t really lose the First World War; the soldiers were betrayed by traitorous civilian politicians who signed an armistice.
.. in withdrawing almost all U.S. troops from Iraq, helped bring about the conditions that enabled isis to seize territory and create a self-styled caliphate. (He fails to point out that the Bush Administration initiated the troop withdrawal.)
.. He certainly doesn’t sound like he’s trying to win over the soccer moms in Columbus, or the office workers in Tampa, that he needs to win the election. He sounds like he is talking to his angry base, and supplying them with an inflammatory narrative that can be trotted out for years, and decades, to come. It’s a tactic that politicians outside the United States, such as Jean-Marie Le Pen and Jörg Haider, have used to good effect in building up far-right nationalist movements.
.. It is, of course, a staple of extremist parties of the left and right that democracy is a sham, and that elections count for nothing. And once you have delegitimized an election result, or an elected leader, you can justify all sorts of extra-electoral, and indeed anti-democratic, actions.
.. Four years from now, or eight years from now, a more disciplined and self-controlled figure could take up where he left off. If at that time the United States were facing a serious economic or national-security crisis, more Americans—conceivably even a majority of them—might be willing to accept the argument that regular politicians have failed and betrayed them, and that drastic measures are called for. Healthy democracies don’t decay overnight. They gradually rot from within, with termites like Trump undermining their foundations.