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 Apotheosis of Donald J. Trump
The constitutional structure of American government forces politicians, no matter what their motives, to “feel constrained to say and do the right thing according to the Constitution whether or not they are sincere
.. But Trump, according to Tulis, is “unique in that no other previous major party presidential candidate has felt so unconstrained by these constitutional norms.”
In fact, the separation of powers under the Constitution was explicitlydesigned to prevent the usurpation of power by a political leader appealing to popular passions and prejudices. If the framers saw anything coming, it was exactly this: a demagogue in the true sense of the term, someone with a privileged background pretending to be a man of the people, channeling their grievances. In other words, a Trump-like candidate.
.. No previous nominee has been so much the creation of social media and so little the creation of a political party.
is not his determination to close the doors to immigration (that has all too many precedents in the American past), or his criticism of open world-trade agreements (that, too, is closer to the historical norm of U.S. policy than is commonly imagined), or the barely disguised racism (which was his entry, via the Birther movement, into national politics).
What is most distinctive is the strongman, authoritarian style of politics that he radiates so strongly both in the bigger-than-life-or-politics persona he projects and the trust-me, I’ll fix everything and make us great again, program he promises.
.. Capitalizing on legitimate discontent, Trump is both the exploiter and the beneficiary of stagnating median household income, declining productivityand gross domestic product growth, as well as a worldwide refugee and immigration crisis.
.. According to the American Psychological Association, some 72 percent of adults reported experiencing financial stress in 2014.
.. “His incoherent and contradictory utterances have one thing in common: They provoke and play on feelings of resentment and disdain, intermingled with bits of fear, hatred and anger,” Robert Kagan, the Republican foreign policy analyst, wrote in May.
.. According to a June Reuters/Ipsos survey, the percentage of Trump voters who agree with such statements as “blacks are less intelligent than whites” and “blacks are more lazy than whites” far outstrip supporters of any other candidate, Democrat or Republican.
.. the nomination of Trump signals
the burnout of modern conservatism. Trump, or Trumpism, is the residue of that burnout — thick with the nativism, racism, and authoritarianism that were always there.
.. One of the “most egregious misreadings of Trump is that he is part of the populist tradition of Andrew Jackson,”
.. Trump, Wilentz concludes, is just “the sort of gouger and business sharper that the Populists organized to stop.”
.. The conservative movement, Richardson writes, had a built-in conflict that it failed to resolve. In order to win white working class support for deregulation and smaller government, Republican leaders had to make the case
that an activist government redistributed wealth from hardworking white men to lazy African-Americans, women and organized workers.
.. While Trump has sent mixed signals on gay rights issues, he and his operatives stood aside while members of the Republican Platform Committee produced a document affirming hard right social conservative values.
What It Means for Trump to ‘Speak From the Heart’
“Trump speaks from the heart.” For months, Mr. Trump’s supporters have been leaning hard on those words to turn his vengefulness and vigilantism into a virtue.
.. Casting Mr. Trump’s incitements to xenophobia and violence as heartfelt evidently makes them slightly less terrifying. A through-line of the convention has been to set up a powerful antagonism between “political correctness,” the province of the hypocritical, intellectual and weak-willed, and “speaking from the heart,” as a province of … Donald Trump.
.. I’m going to speak from the heart tonight.”
The phrase sounds smarmy. It compromises the Republican Party’s usual claim of hardheadedness over and against the bleeding-heart emotionalism of the other party.
But it’s probably the only possible rhetorical move of the Trump campaign.
.. It’s become impossible for Mr. Trump’s supporters to lend reason or logic to his vendettas, daft misogyny, thoroughgoing racism and bloodlust. Instead, they advertise it as lovable.
How Roger Ailes Created Modern Conservatism
Toppled by a cascade of sexual harassment charges and said to be nearing the exits at Fox, Ailes will be remembered for undermining the dominant 20th-century model of objective journalism with his defiantly right-wing news channel. But he was equally important in transforming politics itself. Not only did he tutor presidents from Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan to George H.W. Bush in the ways of media politics, but he was largely responsible for two of the signal changes in American political culture since the 1960s: the rise of television as a national force and the emergence of cultural populism as a key feature of the Republican Party.
.. In fact, apart from the presidents he served, he was arguably the single most important figure in the creation of modern conservatism. By fusing television’s power to conjure feelings of anger and resentment to an ideology of cultural populism that demonized liberal elites, Ailes set forth the methods and the message that would help conservative politicians win and maintain power for decades. That is, until Trump, who, this week in Cleveland, officially closed his hostile takeover of the party that Ailes helped build, using the very tactics Ailes had pioneered.
.. Ailes also encouraged Nixon to practice the politics of resentment that came naturally to him, creating the basic formula used by Reagan, both Bushes and countless lesser conservative politicians: playing on the public’s sense that powerful liberal were getting ahead at the expense of Middle America.
.. An emerging wisdom held that television watchers absorbed their knowledge about public affairs at a gut level, more visceral than newspaper readers, making them especially susceptible to emotional appeals, particularly of the conservative kind.
.. Ads and other forms of messaging would emphasize how spineless or elitists liberal politicians were betraying these voters on a host of values-laden issues—often racially charged ones—including crime, drugs, busing, welfare, affirmative action and national security.
.. The pinnacle of Ailes’ direct political influence came in the 1988 campaign of Vice President George Bush. When
.. Ailes, serving as Bush’s media adviser and unofficial strategist, injected anger and fight into Bush’s message and persona by prodding the candidate to go on the attack. After a weak showing in the Iowa caucuses, the effete Bush viciously assailed his main rival, Bob Dole, in the ensuing primaries, and in the fall he shamelessly smeared the cerebral Michael Dukakis, painting the Democratic nominee as soft on crime, unpatriotic and even un-American. An Ailes protégé, Larry McCarthy, developed the infamous Willie Horton ad that highlighted the case of a black inmate
.. Ailes convened focus groups to test which messages would most effectively make the case for using military force to drive Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait.
.. In 1992, while assuming no formal position in the reelection campaign, Ailes persuaded Bush to deride Bill Clinton’s patriotism, which the president did by making baseless insinuations about a trip Clinton had taken as a young man to Russia.
.. Early on, he appreciated the emotive power and influence of talk radio, including rising stars like Rush Limbaugh. In 1992, Ailes created and produced a TV show for Limbaugh—it ran until 1996
.. Limbaugh and a bevy of similar radio and TV hosts operated very much in the Ailesian vein: militant in their ideology, aggrieved in their attitudes, provocative in their rhetoric.
.. He led CNBC for a while
.. Kelly made her name by embarrassing Karl Rove on election night 2012, when he insisted, against the evidence, that Mitt Romney might yet win Ohio and that calling the election for Barack Obama was premature. Later, Kelly surprised Dick Cheney by telling him, “History has proved that you got it wrong in Iraq, sir.” Her willingness to confront Donald Trump over his record of sexist rhetoric in last summer’s Republican debate launched her to new heights of fame, embodying Fox’s bid for broader respectability
.. Given changing attitudes about women and sex, the macho and often anti-feminist conservative populism in which Ailes believed so deeply had become increasingly hard to tolerate or justify. The women accusing Ailes aren’t, for the most part, liberal, but their charges are made possible by the triumph of liberal ideas on gender equality.
.. If Republican regulars opposed Trump for his centrist deviancies, he owes his success in the primaries to the fact that he ran to the right of his rivals on the most salient issues of the campaign—immigration and terrorism. In short, he espoused a variety of the very same brand of politics that Ailes has successfully promoted, and the GOP has prospered with, since Nixon’s day:If Republican regulars opposed Trump for his centrist deviancies, he owes his success in the primaries to the fact that he ran to the right of his rivals on the most salient issues of the campaign—immigration and terrorism. In short, he espoused a variety of the very same brand of politics that Ailes has successfully promoted, and the GOP has prospered with, since Nixon’s day: the substitution of bluster for reason, the angry scapegoating of others, the blind hatred and exaggerated fear of liberals in power,
.. Trump used his own celebrity to circumvent the rules of television altogether—gaining free media by capitalizing on the endless appetite for debate, argument and talk that Ailes had done so much to popularize.
In a way, Donald Trump beat Roger Ailes at his own game. Like so many other revolutions, the conservative revolution now eats its own.