Such frequent, deliberate cursing by presidential candidates addressing campaign audiences in this election cycle seems to be without modern precedent. It is a striking departure for a party whose 2012 nominee, Mitt Romney, let fly expressions like “H-E-double-hockey-sticks” when he wanted to be puckish.
.. “He does it because he needs attention and can’t control himself,” Stuart Stevens, who was Mr. Romney’s chief strategist, said of Mr. Trump. “Both are not qualities in demand in a president.”
.. Even the now-mellowed Mr. Carson has participated, gingerly.
“This is a bunch of crap,” he said at the debate in Boulder, Colo., last month, discussing government regulations.
.. The language has posed a complication, though, for news organizations. Generally, style guidelines dictate that obscenities should not be printed unless the precise words are newsworthy.
The New Jacksonian Rebellion (and Trump, too)
Broadly, Jacksonian democracy, in contrast to the Jeffersonian era, promoted the strength of the executive branch and the presidency at the expense of Congressional power, while also seeking to broaden the public’s participation in government. Jacksonians believed in enfranchising all white men, rather than just the propertied class, and supported the patronage system that enabled politicians to appoint their supporters into administrative offices, arguing it would reduce the power of elites and prevent aristocracies from emerging. They demanded elected (not appointed) judges and rewrote many state constitutions to reflect the new values. In national terms the Jacksonians favored geographical expansion, justifying it in terms of Manifest Destiny. There was usually a consensus among both Jacksonians and Whigs that battles over slavery should be avoided.
.. Manifest Destiny? What right-thinking American — in stark counterpoint to the left — doesn’t believe that the American experience is exceptional? That the nation hasn’t been ordained by God to be a beckon of freedom and hope in a dark world of tyrannies? Who, among the friends of liberty, doesn’t want to shout this from rooftops?
.. Like the Jacksonians (certainly like Jackson), liberty rebels spoil for the fight, and aren’t waiting around for the left to take the first shots anymore. Trump is showing how to knock the left and its establishment lackeys on their keisters.
Donald Trump — The Jacksonian Candidate
“The Jacksonian hero dares to say what the people feel and defies the entrenched elites,” Mead writes. “The hero may make mistakes, but he will command the unswerving loyalty of Jacksonian America so long as his heart is perceived to be in the right place.”
.. For Jacksonians, Mead writes: “Every administration will be corrupt; every Congress and legislature will be, to some extent, the plaything of lobbyists. Career politicians are inherently untrustworthy.” Trump is obsessed with how other countries are taking advantage of us. He is tapping into the Jacksonian fear of, in Mead’s words, politicians “either by ineptitude or wickedness serving hostile foreign interests.”
.. Trump is hell on criminals and unwelcoming to illegal immigrants and Syrian refugees, reflecting what Mead characterizes as the Jacksonian’s “absolute and even brutal distinction drawn between the members of the community and outsiders.”
.. Trump never sweats the details. Jacksonians, according to Mead, believe “that while problems are complicated, solutions are simple.” In fact, the side in a public debate that “is endlessly telling you that the popular view isn’t sufficiently ‘sophisticated’ or ‘nuanced’ — that is the side that doesn’t want you to know what it is doing, and it is not to be trusted.”
.. Trump doesn’t believe in limited government. “Jacksonians believe that the government should do everything in its power to promote the well-being — political, moral, economic — of the folk community,” Mead writes. “Any means are permissible in the service of this end, as long as they do not violate the moral feelings or infringe on the freedoms that Jacksonians believe are essential in their daily lives.”
.. Trump isn’t ideologically consistent. The Jacksonian philosophy, Mead notes, “is an instinct rather than an ideology — a culturally shaped set of beliefs and emotions rather than a set of ideas.” Finally, national honor is a paramount value for Jacksonians, a concern that can be heard in Trump’s signature promise to make America great again. He will out-bully and out-fox our adversaries and, as for ISIS, he will bomb and water-board it into submission.
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/427536/donald-trump-appeal-jacksonian
The Ecstasy of Donald Trump
“I’m against the anchor babies, and I’m against the Muslims,” says Kathy Parker, a tiny former elementary-school teacher with gold hoop earrings. “We can’t have churches in their countries—why should they have mosques in ours? He is the only one with the guts to speak out and say it.”
.. The other night, at a Trump rally in Alabama, a black protester who shouted “Black lives matter!” was surrounded by white men who punched and kicked him. Far from apologizing for this, Trump is gloating about it: “What an obnoxious, terrible guy that was,” he tells the crowd in Myrtle Beach, who turn around and hiss at the press on his cue.
.. Someone must have suggested to Trump, presumably not flatteringly, that his racial-wedge strategy resembled Nixon’s coded appeals to the “silent majority.” Trump, rather than deny it, put it on his signs: They say, in red cursive letters, “the silent majority stands with Trump.”
.. Despite all the negativity and fear, the energy in this room does not feel dark and aggressive and threatening. It doesn’t feel like a powder keg about to blow, a lynch mob about to rampage. It feels joyous.
.. citing an unspecified Secret Service directive, the campaign hasannounced that reporters may not mingle with the crowd until Trump has left the building; one is escorted to the restroom while he is still working the rope line. (Last week, Trump’s campaign manager threatened to “blacklist” a CNN reporter who tried to leave the pen to film a protester.)