Trump, despite his denunciations of employers preferring foreign to American workers, turned down 94 percent of American applicants for seasonal jobs at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Fla., and used, instead, workers brought in on H-2B visas. Not to mention that he has employed illegal immigrants on at least two occasions, the best-known in the early 1980s, when he used undocumented Polish workers to avoid paying pension and welfare benefits to unionized Americans. Trump, who was previously against increases in the importation of low-skilled and high-skilled workers, now suddenly supports those increases.
.. In short, Trump believes in nothing except the force of his own personality. Often, it’s not quite correct to say he’s lying, because he never believed anything in the first place. Donald Trump is post-truth.
Culture Rot: Donald Trump Is the Effect, Not the Cause
In 1966, which is not exactly millennia ago, Trump’s vulgarity would have had him banned from appearing on anyone’s black-and-white TV — even after midnight. Today, he is the front-runner. Today, in fact, he is coveted not by the blue channels but by the news channels. He is ratings. He sells. He is Viagra without commercials.
.. It is about what has become of us.
The Elements of Trumpism
What Trump is doing, then, is showing us something different, something that less fortunate countries know all too well: how authoritarianism works, how it seduces, and ultimately how it wins.
That rise has four building blocks.
- First, his strongest supporters have entirely legitimate grievances. ..
- Second, you have the opportunists — the politicians and media figures who have seen some advantage from elevating Trump. .. The only common threads are cynicism, ambition and a sense of Trump as a ticket to influence they couldn’t get any other way. ..
- Then third, you have the institutionalists — less cynical, not at all enamored of Trump, but unwilling to do all that much to stop him. These are people who mostly just want Republican politics to go back to normal, who fear risk and breakage and schism too much to go all in against him.
Then, finally, you have the inevitabilists — not Trump supporters, but Trump enablers, who encourage the institutionalists in their paralysis by acting and talking as if the support of 35 percent of the primary electorate means Trump Cannot Be Stopped.
.. Cable news is riddled with such voices, who daily manifest Orwell’s dictum, “Power worship blurs political judgment,” so that, “Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.”
.. a kind of highbrow nihilism about our politics, a sense that American democracy’s decadence — or the Republican Party’s decadence, in particular — is so advanced that a cleansing Trumpian fire might be just the thing we need.
.. appreciating his truth-telling on certain issues, his capacity to upset the stagnant status quo.
.. Which is the way it so often works with authoritarians. They promise a purgation that many people at some level already desire, and only too late do you realize that the purge will extend too far, and burn away too much.
What Trumpism Means for Democracy
Yet to classify him as an anti-establishment figure is to miss his true significance. He is to American politics what Martin Shkreli is to Big Pharma. Each represents in exaggerated form the distilled essence of a much larger and more disturbing reality. Each embodies the smirking cynicism that has become one of the defining characteristics of our age. Each in his own way is a sign of the times.
.. On point one: with absolute unanimity, Trump, Cruz, and Rubio ascribe to Barack Obama any and all problems besetting the nation. To take their critique at face value, the country was doing swimmingly well back in 2009 when Obama took office. Today, it’s FUBAR, due entirely to Obama’s malign actions.
.. Trump, Cruz, and Rubio are unabashed militarists. (So, too, is Hillary Clinton, but that’s an issue deserving an essay of its own.
.. In addition to offering Obama a sort of backhanded tribute—so much damage wrought by just one man in so little time—the Republican critique reinforces reigning theories of presidential omnipotence. Just as an incompetent or ill-motivated chief executive can screw everything up, so, too, can a bold and skillful one set things right.
.. Should Trump or a Trump mini-me ultimately succeed in capturing the presidency, a possibility that can no longer be dismissed out of hand, the effects will be even more profound. In all but name, the United States will cease to be a constitutional republic. Once President Trump inevitably declares that he alone expresses the popular will, Americans will find that they have traded the rule of law for a version of caudillismo. Trump’s Washington could come to resemble Buenos Aires in the days of Juan Perón, with Melania a suitably glamorous stand-in for Evita, and plebiscites suitably glamorous stand-ins for elections.