In his bid for the White House, Donald Trump is playing many roles: law-and-order strongman, sky’s-the-limit builder, dealmaker extraordinaire. But perhaps none is more emphatic than all-American patriot.
.. His patriotism brims with grievances...Last week he suggested to The Times’s David Sanger and Maggie Haberman that if Russia invaded a NATO ally that wasn’t pulling its weight financially, he might not rise to its defense...On one hand, it leads him to echo conservatives’ longstanding charge that President Obama belittles our country by apologizing too much for it. On the other, Trump told Sanger and Haberman that he’d refrain from reprimanding allies with poor records on civil liberties because the United States is no paragon.. And he attacked Ted Cruz anew, again mentioning the National Enquirer story that linked Cruz’s father to John F. Kennedy’s assassination and saying that the Enquirer deserves more respect than it gets... I’m suspicious of two of the most commonly used yardsticks. But by both of those measures — a readiness to serve in the military and a devotion to domestically made goods — Trump isn’t much of a patriot... And there’s nothing simple about a patriotism that’s really an amalgam of nativism, racism, isolationism and xenophobia and that denies this country’s distinction as a land of fresh starts, its arms open to a diverse world... Patriotism,” the 18th-century writer Samuel Johnson once said, “is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” It’s also a convenient cloak for a narcissist.
The Polls May Be Underestimating Trump’s Support
It starts with working-class voters across developed countries being under severe economic pressure because of competition with foreigners at home (immigration) and abroad (EU/trade). They respond to people and parties who tell them this state of affairs isn’t inevitable, and they are often impervious to cries of racism. Their lives are just plain harder than they used to be and working-class voters don’t see elites doing much—or wanting to do much—to make them better. Donald Trump is simply the American version of Nigel Farage, Geert Wilders, and many other European leaders of working-class, anti-immigrant parties who profit from stoking the flames of resentment because there is so much kindling available to light.
.. It turns out that a nontrivial share of these same working-class, anti-immigrant voters won’t tell a live person who they support but will share their true feelings when their support is secret—like on Election Day. This is no surprise: Support for immigration and globalization are perhaps the only political sentiments that unite elites from both business and the academy, from right and left.
.. This doesn’t mean Trump is on his way to the nomination. Public Policy Polling, an automated robocall pollster, consistently poses hypothetical one-on-one matchups between Trump and other GOP candidates. Though Trump regularly trashes Jeb Bush, Trump loses or runs roughly even with Bush in the Public Policy Polling one-on-ones. And it’s the same with all the other Republican candidates. Even when poll respondents are assured anonymity, there is simply a hard ceiling of support an anti-immigrant candidate can receive. When the field is more limited, Trump loses his edge. (General-election polls also show Trump does worse against the likely Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton than other leading Republican contenders do.)