Think he’s the first to hand out vicious epithets to his opponents? Just ask “Tricky Dick,” “the Beast of Buffalo” and “Rutherfraud.”
“Political discourse in the United States is characterized by high productivity of coining nicknames for US Presidents,” writes Dr. Anna Gladkova, who wrote a 2002 paper on the practice. She counts 430 nicknames for (at the time) 43 American presidents
.. The problem is, Democrats today don’t appear to possess the requisite adolescent glee necessary to finding just the right few words that will stick like napalm and burn, burn, burn.
.. Back in 1800, Federalists loved to refer to Thomas Jefferson as “Generalissimo Jefferson,” underscoring the fact that beneath that Republican veneer beat the heart of an aristocrat. Andrew Jackson dubbed Henry Clay “The Judas of the West” for his supposed “corrupt bargain” in handing over the 1824 election to John Q. Adams.
.. “Granny” Harrison fit William Henry Harrison pretty well—the latter was 68 when he bested Martin Van Buren in 1840 (“Martin Van Ruin,” as he was known, for presiding over the Panic of 1837). That’s younger than all three major candidates today, of course, although Harrison would die only a month after taking office, leaving things to “His Accidency,” the much-reviled John Tyler.
.. In the age of Twitter, just as in the age of Pony Express, a good nasty nickname counts for a lot, and the Democrats need to work on this. Gladkova’s paper can help. She lists five categories into which pejorative presidential nicknames typically fall—including “Undeserved Leader” (His Accidency, His Fraudulency); “Politicians Influenced by Others” (William Howard Taft’s surname, according to his detractors, was an acronym for “Takes Advice From Teddy” Roosevelt, his former boss); and “Person Not Able to Fulfill Promises.”
To this, I would even add another category: “Person Who Is Crazy As A Loon.” Political campaigns have historically done quite well in painting opponents as nuts. During the William McKinley-William Jennings Bryan contest in 1896, the McKinley-supporting New York Times published an interesting little article entitled, “Is Mr. Bryan Crazy?” The paper then interviewed several prominent “alienists” (that’s what they called psychiatrists in those days) who claimed that Bryan suffered from megalomania (delusions of grandeur); paranoia querulent (complaining too much); and querulent logorrhea (talking about complaining too much). In 1964, LBJ’s advisers agreed that the way to defeat Barry Goldwater was to portray him as “unstable, impulsive, reckless.”
Is Everything Wrestling?
the rest of the world has caught up to wrestling’s ethos. With each passing year, more and more facets of popular culture become something like wrestling: a stage-managed “reality” in which scripted stories bleed freely into real events, with the blurry line between truth and untruth seeming to heighten, not lessen, the audience’s addiction to the melodrama. The modern media landscape is littered with “reality” shows that audiences happily accept aren’t actually real; that, in essence, is wrestling.
.. The way Beyoncé teased at marital problems in “Lemonade” — writing lyrics people were happy to interpret as literal accusations of her famous husband’s unfaithfulness — is wrestling. The question of whether Steve Harvey meant to announce the wrong Miss Universe winner is wrestling. Did Miley Cyrus and Nicki Minaj authentically snap at each other at last year’s MTV Video Music Awards? The surrounding confusion was straight out of a wrestling playbook.
..In politics, as in wrestling, the ultimate goal is simply to get the crowd on your side. And like all the best wrestling villains — or “heels” — Donald Trump is a vivacious, magnetic speaker unafraid to be rude to his opponents; there was even a heelish consistency to his style at early debates, when he actively courted conflict with the moderator, Megyn Kelly, and occasionally paused to let the crowds boo him before shouting back over them. (The connection isn’t just implied, either: Trump wasinducted to the WWE’s Hall of Fame in 2013, owing to his participation in several story lines over the years.)
.. Ted Cruz’s rhetorical style, with its dramatic pauses, violent indignation and tendency to see every issue as an epic moral battleground, was sometimes reminiscent of great wrestling heels. The way Rick Perry called Trump’s candidacy a “cancer” that “will lead the Republican Party to perdition” before endorsing Trump and offering to serve as his vice president: this was a tacit admission that all his apocalyptic rhetoric was mainly for show. Pure wrestling, in other words.
.. (In wrestling, it’s considered a cardinal sin to genuinely hurt your opponent, thereby limiting their ability to work.
.. to analyze each narrative not just through its in-world logic (“this guy will win the championship because he seems more driven”) but by considering external forces (“this guy will win the championship because he is well-spoken enough to represent the company when he inevitably shows up on ‘Today’”
.. So when I think of how politics and pop culture are often compared to wrestling, this is the element that seems most transferable: not the outlandish characters or the jumbo-size threats, but the insistence on telling a great story with no regard for the facts. Donald Trump can claim there were thousands of Muslims in New Jersey cheering when the World Trade Center came down.
.. When everything becomes a story, the value of concrete truth seems diminished. There’s too much going on in the world to dive this deep into something as frivolous as entertainment, you might say.
.. And ultimately, we can’t expect that post-truth culture will somehow collapse because of its perfidiousness. The WWE, for instance, now tells its story without challenge: It’s outlasted all its major competitors and holds the rights to the very images wrestling’s history is made of.
If Trump Breaks Up the G.O.P., It Won’t Be a First
Only months ago, Senator John McCain of Arizona, a professed maverick Republican, was berating Mr. Trump for inciting the fringe “crazies.” Now he backs the presumptive nominee. “I believe that the Republican Party must maintain its viability as a party,” he said.
But what if the Republicans are no longer a viable national party?
.. The first momentous collapse occurred in the election of 1800, and nativism proved central to it. In order to suppress rising unruly democratic forces aligned with Thomas Jefferson, the dominant Federalist Party of John Adams and Alexander Hamilton stirred popular fears of a menacing enemy within, including immigrants friendly to the Jeffersonians.
.. In 1854 the Whigs, one of the two major parties, collapsed over slavery. But while some Whigs joined the antislavery cause, others switched to the nativist Know-Nothing or American Party, which for a time looked as if it would supplant the Whigs. Out of the chaos emerged a new antislavery party, the Republicans, which got Lincoln elected to the presidency in 1860.
.. After World War I, though, the old guard in the Republican Party, announcing a return of American greatness, regained the initiative, buoyed in part by a resurgent nativism that brought about the law drastically restricting immigration in 1924.
.. Yet when the crash of 1929 led to the Great Depression, conservatives had little to offer. The Republican supremacy collapsed in the election of 1932; the Democratic Party picked up the mantle of reform, and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal shaped the contours of American government and politics for the next two generations. Between 1932 and 1968 only one Republican, Dwight Eisenhower, won the presidency.
.. The reckoning began to unfold with the election of Barack Obama, weeks after the crash, which signaled the impending defeat of the Republican culture war. By momentarily corralling the rebellious Tea Party movement, the Republicans regained control of the House in 2010, thereafter blocking much of the Obama White House’s agenda.
.. As the 2016 elections approached, old and new fissures began to crack open. The party’s base, including Tea Party insurgents and evangelicals, had become furious with a Republican leadership powerless to halt the growing diversification, racial inclusiveness and cultural openness of American life, which it associated with Mr. Obama. At the same time, the party establishment had nothing to offer hard-pressed, working-class Republican voters except discredited bromides about tax cuts, deregulation and plans to slash Medicare and privatize Social Security.
.. Should Mr. Trump and his followers consolidate their control over the Republican Party, they will have converted it into something that Reagan would hardly recognize. But no matter how the power struggle is finally decided, it is clear that the party of Reagan’s era, uniting free market, small government conservatism with white working-class cultural fears and resentments, has come unglued — and no Republican leader or faction seems capable of putting it back together.
Does Democratic Weakness Create Republican Opportunity
Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House and a presidential candidate in 2012, released a set of recommendations for Republicans running for election this year. Gingrich put together the 22-page manifesto, “2016 Election Principles,”
The document — in essence a master plan that comes with the strong endorsement of Reince Priebus, the chairman of the R.N.C. — stresses the need for “widespread inclusion of ethnic groups.” It sounds remarkably like an across-the-board renunciation of Donald Trump’s campaign strategy.
This presents something of a paradox, though, because Gingrich claims to be one of Trump’s strongest supporters.
.. But Trump won the Republican presidential nomination by appealing specifically to just those voters most opposed to “widespread inclusion of ethnic groups.” His core support in primary after primary has been white voters who rank highest on scales of ethnocentrism and racial resentment.
.. Gingrich argues that
the goal has to be inclusion, not outreach. Outreach is when the old order makes a decision and then calls the community leaders to inform them. Inclusion is when the community is in on the discussion before the decision.
.. Gingrich is convinced that there has been a weakening of the Democratic Party over the last eight years at the state and local level — including in key battleground states — which has left a door open for a broad Republican victory this November.
.. when Barack Obama took office, 51.8 percent of voters identified with the Democratic Party and 38.4 percent with the Republican Party, a solid 13.4 point Democratic advantage.
In 2016, however, the average of the first five polls shows that the Democratic advantage has shrunk to a far more modest 5.2 point edge ..
.. In Pennsylvania, the 16 point Democratic advantage fell to 3 points.
.. In effect, Stewart supports Gingrich’s claim that the Obama years have “done more to grow the Republican Party than any Democratic president in our history.”
.. To get a sense of the depth of the Democratic Party’s decay at the state legislative level in the Obama era, consider that since President Obama took office, 85 of 98 legislative bodies have become more Republican than they were when he was inaugurated.
.. Gingrich claims that Republicans are on the cusp of a game-changing “revolution” in microtargeting through the use of a new technology called “Voter Score.” Voter Score is a database that ranks every voter in the nation on a series of 100 point scales for their likelihood of casting Republican or Democratic ballots, their stands on issues and their turnout history.
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