Anyone who is denying the seriousness of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign now or arguing that he’ll lose at this point is in denial. Trump has morphed into the rampaging elephant with wings. He’s sitting at the top of the polls and looks like a safe lock for the nomination, but there are still people continuing to lie to themselves about the possibility of a Trump presidency. I don’t mean the everyday neighborhood butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers, either; I mean full-fledged politic-heads who are versed in the nuances of the Geneva Conventions and Human Rights Constitution are going on the Tube and launching into blithering dumbass mode in efforts to talk themselves into evidence against Trump being real. They can give all the lectures in the world if they want, but they’re exemplifying Kurt Vonnegut’s famous statement about how lies become true if they get repeated often enough. It’s probably a self-survival mechanism.
People are acting like the rise of Donald Trump is some big surprise, but if they had been paying attention, it would have shown up right in front of their faces years ago. For me, this isn’t even hindsight. This is the horrifying climax of a stunt Trump pulled just before the last presidential election. He had threatened presidential runs before, but never with such an intensity. I’m not sure anyone noticed, but Trump was drawing some passionate crowds five years ago. I openly said that if Trump decided to ever run for President, there was a good chance he could win. Everyone I told that to laughed me off. Of course, now they’re pretending I never said anything like that in the first place.
It’s hard to take satisfaction in watching this whole sorry political episode pop into fruition. Since I understand international politics and come from a place that doesn’t, its been easy to read into Trump’s main selling point: That wall. The Trump Wall has been the only consistently detailed idea Trump has been using. It’s all he’s needed, with occasional lip-synching about how he’s just going to hire the best and brightest to do his thinking for him. (Because no other President has ever done THAT before, right?) People can and HAVE argued that the other Republican candidates are worse for the country, but there’s a reason they aren’t as scary as Donald Trump: It’s because Ted Cruz, Paul Ryan, and John Kasich all have a sense of civil servitude. Say what you will about their policies, but they all come across as being part of the race for a chance to make America great again. A Trump presidency would be four years of a bullheaded ego with no sense of feasibility or humility. The Trump Wall is the perfect example of it. Donald Trump says he’s going to build a big wall along the Rio Grande to keep the Mexicans out, and that he’s going to make Mexico pay for it. Now, this is a fairy tale. Mexico is already laughing it off, and the question of what Trump will do when Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto takes him off the speed dial hasn’t been addressed. Will Trump have the good sense to just leave it alone? Or will his ego cause him to spend trillions of US dollars on an invasion with our depleted Military to force Mexico to comply? Trump is already famous for his inability to shake off personal insults. What happens if he gets control of the Military? Going to extremes here, think a two-front war against the European Union and the Chinese which we don’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell of winning. Then consider that he’s already been thrown out of England.
There’s a reason Trump is doing so well, though, and it has nothing to do with his brand name. It has a lot more to do with the fact that he doesn’t hold rejects from The Jerry Springer Show to any moral failings they have. I’m not silly enough to believe Trump has any conscious grasp of sociology, but if you’re a white person who’s in extreme poverty, the views of you don’t exactly run the gamut: You’re seen as either a personal failure who made bad choices or a moral failure who deserves everything bad that comes your way. There’s no consideration for surroundings, upbringing, or mental programming; you just suck. Yes, Donald Trump is taking advantage of stupidity, but he’s effective because he’s not running around saying that his potential constituents deserve to be sleeping in the beds they made for themselves. Other politicians and intellectuals keep telling bottom-rung whites that it’s their own fault they live down there. Trump is the only one who is telling them that everything is not their own fault, it’s someone else’s, and that’s music to the ears of people who get treated like disposable napkins.
Since there are a lot of poor white people who have educations comparable to those of any poor minority people, Trump has an easy sell. He’s not a politician, but he’s pandering to millions of people who don’t know anything about politics. That’s key: Donald Trump can easily sell himself as less a presidential candidate and more of a messianic figure or magic man who has solutions or ideas BECAUSE he’s not involved with politics. There are a lot of people who believe the President is supposed to be a wizard, and that’s what Trump is selling himself as. Trump himself seems to believe this; he’ll snap his fingers, and all of America’s problems will go away. The fact that trying to play politics will involve doing politics will be lost on everyone, including Trump himself, a fact which his head strategist took note of – before quitting his campaign because of it.
Our own Americentrism is also playing a part in it. The United States is only arguably the superpower it used to be, and with the rise of both the European Union and China, other countries aren’t exactly quaking in their boots at the prospect of pissing off the Americans anymore. We like to play up our victory in World War II as a statement to just how awesome we are, but there are a couple of points worth considering: The first is that the historical record says less “the United States won the war” and more “the United States provided a huge assist to the Soviet Union by hammering the western front in Europe and then island-hopping in the Pacific.” The second is that World War II ended in 1945, and our record since then has been putrid: We fought the Koreans to a draw, fought an eight-year stalemate in Vietnam before figuring out it had nothing we wanted, and bungled two invasions in the middle east. Yet, we still fly on the belief that we’re the best and only superpower in the world, and Trump exemplifies that ethos. Not a man who has often been shown paying respects to other cultures or people, Trump is the perfect Ugly American. He and his followers still believe that others will automatically pay deference to America no matter where they are because… AMERICA! Trump believes himself to be immune to criticism, and that little bunnies should and will dance paths for him everywhere he goes, which is a common idea in this country.
When all that is taken into consideration, the question isn’t “how is a guy like him able to make a serious bid at the presidency?” It’s “How did this take so long?”
The Windy Nickel 