Donald Trump doesn’t cross the line. He erases it.
Time and again Mr. Mouth Almighty has recklessly insulted, defamed, mocked and affronted his fellow citizens. He has instigated stupid feuds and is now quarreling with the pope. He has gaffed repeatedly on policy matters. He has indulged himself in nutty conspiracy theories. And—how to put this delicately?—he has lied like a con artist, and when caught has squirted ink into the water to obfuscate. Two weeks ago, he denied having called John McCain a “loser,” which he did in July 2015. This week, after getting busted for falsely claiming in the South Carolina debate that the George W. Bush administration lied to smooth the way for war in Iraq, Trump told the Today show, Bush “could have lied. Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. I guess you’d have to ask him.”
What makes Trump immune to the political forces that routinely sink other candidates? What accounts for Trump exceptionalism? If I knew the answer I could sell it to his infuriated Republican opponents, or bottle the stuff and offer it to the Democratic Party’s nominee this summer. But I don’t know. All I can offer is a measure of conjecture—subject to refutation, of course—and that starts with amassing the many positives that have allowed Trump to slither his way past his critics and naysayers.
The lack of specificity to his proposals is what really distinguishes Trump.
The secret to Trump’s campaign is his relentless optimism. It doesn’t matter than he has a deficit of real plans, genuine programs and identifiable advisers. Quite the opposite: These shortcomings are actually strengths. If he were better anchored to reality like some of the other candidates, all that accountability would weigh his balloon down. The ad hoc quality of his politics, the endless winging and self-contradiction, allow Trump access to all the tools we associate with a salesman or a con artist. Trump need only tell his supporters what he thinks they want to hear—that everyday will bring three extra hours of sunshine—and package it in the braggadocio that has served in so well in real estate, TV and the merchandising of this name.
No presidential candidate in memory has been less interested in process; no Republican candidate has made more extraordinary promises of what he can deliver. But the lack of specificity to his proposals is what really distinguishes Trump. He provides emotional placeholders where messy political ideas belong. Trump’s short-form answer to most policy questions is to invoke the word “best,” a neat trick that both identifies his position and tags his opponents with “worst.” Health care? His administration will produce “the best health care you’ve ever, ever had.” His cabinet? “I want the best people.” Military leadership? Noting that picking talent is “something I’m so good at,” he said he’d get “the best person to represent us militarily.” Invocation of “the best” is an ancient Trump trope—a word that is as filled with aspiration as it is empty of meaning. Likewise the word “great,” which is the key word in his campaign slogan and regular modifier when he’s on the stump: “I have the greatest business people in the world dying to come and help me out with China and Japan.” See also “win” and its mirror image, “lose,” perhaps Trump’s favorite words.
In a 1996 New York magazine piece, Lisa Birnbach called Trump on his linguistic obsession. “I’ve heard you use the expression the best a lot tonight,” Birnbach said, to which Trump responded, “The best is a very important expression to me,” and to which Trump’s PR man interjected, “Donald would never be satisfied to have the second-best of anything.” It probably didn’t go unnoticed by Trump that “Why Not the Best?” was the successful main slogan of Jimmy Carter’s first presidential campaign and also the title of his 1975 campaign book.
Trump encourages his believers to think he will assume the power to resolve all of the nation’s problems promptly.
The word “best” will never raise goosebumps when used in a speech, but its positivity resonates when paired with the other reductionist language in the Trump vocabulary. “We’re going to strengthen our military,” he told Sean Hannity in December. Our country will command new respect! We will destroy ISIS. We will be the winners and not losers! We will dispense with the “stupid” and “corrupt and incompetent” people in government.
No other campaign—even that of Bernie Sanders, which promises a utopia through the magic of deficit spending—can match Trump’s for this kind of positivity. Never mind the division of powers, checks and balances and bureaucratic inertia: Trump encourages his believers to think he will assume the power to resolve all of the nation’s problems promptly. That pesky immigration problem? “They shouldn’t be here in the first place. They will be out so fast your head will spin,” Trump told Bill O’Reilly last summer. He also promised that the Trump administration will bring “head-spinning” military acumen. Sometimes Trump’s promises become so grand he neglects to hitch them to anything concrete, as happened in a December appearance on Sean Hannity’s TV show. “If I get elected, you’re going to see things happen that you wouldn’t have believed possible. We’re going to win again,” Trump said.
The promise to get all things done holds a special appeal in our complaint-based culture. There’s too much traffic, too many flight delays, the Muslims are out to get us, crime is out of control, the economy should be growing at 6 percent, there’s a war on Christmas!, jobs are vanishing, China is getting too powerful, and so on. Always there with the simple solution, Trump eases his supporters’ woes with additional promises. His words fall flat on my ears because the job of president just doesn’t work that way: We’re electing a chief executive, not a dictator. But the same words inspire his supporters, who discover joy in sharing annoyances with him and hear music in his “solutions.”
Trump has always known how to put on a show. But the ultimate source of his exceptionalism resides in his supporters.
It’s almost as if Trump is broadcasting on separate frequencies for his detractors and his supporters. What detractors hear when they tune into Trump is a negative, racist, improbable and slightly stupid message because they know—especially if they’ve read Politico’s Michael Grunwald—America is very much not in decline. But to the ears of Trump supporters, the same trash-talking text arrives on a different frequency, sounding like a positive, proud, plan-to-action from a can-do patriot. Trump supporters, familiar with the theatrical insults and taunts that made his show, The Apprentice, so watchable, take his verbal excesses less seriously than do his detractors. That best example of this came at a January rally, when he said, “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” Detractors heard the ravings of a sociopath. Supporters heard Trump expressing his sense of his invincibility, and by extension theirs. By accepting Trump’s authority, they magnify their own.
Trump has always known how to put on a show. But the ultimate source of his exceptionalism resides in his supporters. Without them, he and his sunny, hollow promises are nothing. They, who have given their man wider sanction to say horrible, naughty and transgressive things about individuals, ethnic groups and religions than any major candidate to run for president. At the same time, his supporters have made no demands on Trump to demonstrate even a cursory understanding of how public policy works—allowing him to take squishy and flexing positions on such issues as Planned Parenthood, gun control, Iraq and medical insurance. (“I want to thank Donald Trump for being just as divided as this country is,” as Stephen Colbert recently put it.) When you don’t stand for anything but “greatness,” flip-flops or lies make little difference to your followers.
Trump’s exceptionalism looks less and less to me like a political phenomenon as the campaign progresses and lot more like a cult of personality, residing somewhere on the sliding scale between that of Mao Zedong and L. Ron Hubbard. This critique will never touch Trump, who must be having the time of his life, and probably has no chance of reaching his supporters, who have tuned to the other frequency. But let’s hope it does, because unlike a failing Trump company, a failing Trump presidency could not sneak away into the night by declaring bankruptcy.
Favorite demagogue: Huey Long. Yours? Send via email to Shafer.Politico@gmail.com. My email alerts have declared war on Easter. My Twitter feed says “Get your hands off my Medicare.” And my RSS feed is the last vestige of the Great Leap Forward.