BY ADAM MICHAEL SCHENCK
Admit it. Donald J. Trump is a remarkable person.
Now read this:
For too long, a small group in our nation’s capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost. Washington flourished, but the people did not share in its wealth. Politicians prospered, but the jobs left and the factories closed. The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our country. Their victories have not been your victories. Their triumphs have not been your triumphs. And while they celebrated in our nation’s capital, there was little to celebrate for struggling families all across our land.
Pop quiz: Who spoke the quote?
- Barack Obama
- Bernie Sanders
- Donald Trump
- Hillary Clinton
A look at my title tells you the answer: none other than the pussy-grabber-in-chief spoke those words. Trump, aside from Twitter insults, doesn’t seem to read or write. His chief strategist, Steve Bannon, wrote those words with Stephen Miller and they were delivered in the 2017 Inaugural Address.
In my graduate school training in literary criticism, I was often reminded to “return to the text,” as in, read the actual words on the page closely. Trump and Bannon deserve the same treatment.
Do you find fault with that paragraph covering the power dynamics in our country’s economy? On numerous occasions I have used the similar phrasing, but with phrases like “sniveling cowards” and “milquetoast corporate Democrats.” The Inaugural was overshadowed by massive protests across the country just one day later.
But Trump and the protests have the same source. It’s the populism, stupid. The masses of people—the hoi polloi in the Latin—hold simple worries and want a leader willing to speak to their emotions. People want recognition.
While Hillary Clinton won the 2016 election’s popular vote, she didn’t have a message for Rust Belt states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin, and ended up rudely surprised. Trump nearly took proudly progressive Minnesota, my state.
Trump addressed his supporters’ fears with simple language. “We used to win! Why don’t we win anymore? Let’s make America great again.” I paraphrase, but it really was that simple.
Trump’s model: communication leads to emotional response leads to reaction. This is the game he’s played and which he is still playing.
It’s the formula that garnered him limitless free press in the campaign, and which keeps him in the headlines.
The Trump campaign started with lies, but like in fiction, the lie can lead us to the kernel of truth. What makes Americans afraid? Their jobs are getting shipped out. Immigrants, many of them undocumented, are enjoying the fruits of our country while citizens are getting squeezed. The terrorist threat, on which George W. Bush declared the “Global War on Terror,” has not been defeated. The threat has grown, if not in the U.S., then at least in other countries.
Regarding immigration, citizens actually care about the number of undocumented immigrants living in the United States. The argument that their presence undercuts American sovereignty holds truth. At minimum, a country should get to control who becomes a citizen and who does not.
We know that there are winners and losers in a global economy. Freer borders support business owners, white-collar professionals, and the immigrants working under the table sending money home.
The losers are the American laborers who would rather work above the table but can’t in many jobs: construction, roofing, landscaping, restaurant work, house-cleaning and so on. These jobs have low burdens for entry and do not require education or language skills. The depressed wages in these fields lower wages in similar jobs.
The people affected by these depressed wages should vote Democrat. Instead Hillary Clinton made diversity a key theme in her campaign.
It’s not that “Americans don’t want those jobs” with depressed wages. If my old rural-Iowa job, which involved scooping hog manure, paid like a management position at a Fortune 500 company, I’d still be doing the former. People in rich countries have high expectations for work, and they should.
The issues of immigration and labor have ethical and moral components, of course. Isn’t someone willing to work just as deserving as someone who is not, regardless of place of birth? The Statue of Liberty has Emma Lazarus’ poem “The New Colossus” inside it, which says, “Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”
A borderless world has philosophical appeal, but we have nations and nationalism, and in a democracy, people vote. Few would vote for a borderless world.
True—the argument that the USA, a land of plenty, has a moral obligation to join the countries accepting refugees is stronger than the alternative argument that the U.S. should only accept immigrants who can add to the economy. Yet, when is the last time this debate played out in the public sphere? It took Trump and his extremist rhetoric to actually address the fundamental problem.
We heard Americans expressing their fears of foreigners, yet the Democratic Party position was to celebrate diversity. It’s good to be high-minded, but, come on—foreigners have worse reputations than strangers, and strangers have a bad reputation.
You know what? The immigrants don’t like the immigrants.
We know that immigrants make our country stronger in so many ways: culturally, artistically and economically. But the status quo has been both parties doing nothing to change the status quo. Dislike of Congress is bipartisan and crosses the rural/urban divide.
I attempt conversational speech in Spanish, German, French, and Somali. I love foreign language. But when I am out shopping and I hear unfamiliar languages, I feel confused, just like Joe Six-Pack in the Rust Belt.
Why, exactly, are native-born American citizens having such a hard time making a living while people who don’t even speak English get jobs and social assistance? It feels amiss.
People voted for the candidate who said he would shake things up. We should not be surprised if he is now shaking things up.
All of Trump’s signature issues—immigration, disappearing jobs, and terrorism—addressed primal fears that Americans have held but which the bipartisan system has held in stasis. We shouldn’t be surprised that an “outsider” willing to break the rules of the elite political debate—a bipartisan debate—broke through.
My personal position on all those issues doesn’t matter, but I am admittedly to the left on all of them. Immigration? Big deal; more opportunity to learn foreign languages for me. Job loss? I didn’t want to work on a factory line or laboring anyway. Terrorism? We’re many times more likely to die in our beloved automobiles or abusing legal drugs.
We need to recognize that our politics created Trump—and created the status quo that was serving so few, just as Trump said in his Inaugural Address.
Trump is wrong about so much, but he was right when he pointed out that Bernie Sanders got shut out of the Democratic Party primary process. Both Sanders and Trump spoke the language of populism.
The latest news has politicians getting heat at town hall meetings, which some have interpreted as being about conflicts-of-interest with the Trump Administration. But I don’t see this political activism as an expression on a particular topic per se.
I see the populism that our current POTUS unleashed and I see it in a positive way. Trump wanted to do away with “political correctness” because our problems have become too big for self-censorship. With that I agree. Our system told us to stand idly by and not express our emotions. It took this election for me to recognize that.
Patterson Hood of Drive-By Truckers has a line: “I mean we try to be politically / Correct when we call names / But what’s the point of post-racial / When old prejudice remains?” That’s a saw that cuts both ways. The stereotypical Republican might say it’s better to address problems—even one’s own prejudices—in the open in plain language.
The stereotypical Democrat might say that we shouldn’t use offensive language because it’s impolitic. We want to think “our” side is in the right. The arguments contradict, but through the lens of populism, they don’t. Populism has both emotional desires: the will to identify with one’s group and the desire to not have to acknowledge anothers’ group.
Populism is not of the left or the right. It’s the act of everyday people contributing to our politics because they realize that the saying “the emperor has no clothes” is a real thing. If it took a Trump to make this happen, why then, we get what we deserve in life, do we not? Trump is proving and reproving that the emperor lacks clothes.
In essence, change has been suppressed by our political system for a long time. Power slowly became centralized—by the wealthy, by the corporations, and by the government (whose power was captured by the first two).
We should not be surprised that even a democratic system bends against democracy: that’s how power works. Trump personifies the bubbling up of these instincts from the populace, a role in which he reveled. “I’m a snake,” he said on the campaign trail.
Do not deny the man his central insight, his discovery about the American people: we don’t like our rulers. We have an ambivalent relationship with all national figures: we hate them as much as we love them, even if we don’t realize it.
Our bosses are jerks. The people in power disdain us. We knew it in our hearts.
Lately in the media, Trump has been getting the Kardashian treatment. “What an intellectual lightweight!” we say. “He represents the worst in our country!” say others. But we keep watching.
Hate-watching is watching nonetheless. The only bad publicity is no publicity; there is no such thing as bad publicity. Trump’s success should prove this.
Beyond his electoral victory, are we dealing with someone who could represent a true threat to our Republic? I don’t know about you, but I’m not worried. I wrote a piece arguing that Trump is a narcissist-sociopath. He only cares about his own needs and doesn’t follow social expectation and doesn’t feel bad when he does so.
Before the election, I was horrified when a Trump voter told me, “He might shake things up.” Trump to me was the guy willing to say anything and do anything, from insult the parents of a dead American soldier to commit sexual assault to asking questions like “Why don’t we use nukes?” I now believe that my worries were misplaced.
For instance, how do we square Trump’s private persona with his public one? During the Super Bowl, articles covered Trump’s friendships with New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady and Patriots owner Robert Kraft. The latter, Kraft, lost his wife in 2011 to cancer, and Trump, says Kraft, “’came to the funeral with Melania. He visited me at my home memorial. He called me once a week for a year,’” Kraft said in an interview with Fox News.
I have read that when Trump meets with everyday people, he shows interest in peoples’ lives and is of course engaging and gregarious. This is standard good conduct and also good “salesman” behavior, but Trump shows interest in people who can’t do much of anything for him.
Say what you will about Trump’s personality, but he simply won’t be a worse president than George W. Bush, with his endless wars wasting blood and treasure. Trump as a character knows what he wants. When George W. Bush got elected, he said, “I’m the f—— President,” not believing it.
Trump will say things that offend everyone, but he doesn’t want pointless, endless wars. He’s smarter than that. What of his fervent supporters?
In a democratic system, people get to vote their conscience and their fears. Our country was founded on the idea that the will of the people is the ultimate authority for governance. If what the people want is ugly, that does not mean it should be suppressed.
If we believe in free speech, then we also must believe in speech with which we disagree. Likewise, in democracy we must believe in the will of the people even if we disagree with it wholeheartedly.
People react to Trump’s Twitter rants, but he is not a normal person with a normal psyche. He is not like us—one could just as easily call him remarkable as find a different descriptor.
Some see an annoyed egomaniac or even take his broadsides as signals of actual public policy. Consider something much simpler: Trump enters debates because he likes to do so, because he loves himself as a media figure, and he loves fame. With each new outburst people react, but Trump just wants to be involved.
Sociologist Max Weber described three kinds of leadership: charismatic, traditional, and legal-rational. Charismatic authority creates the strongest emotional human connection, and thus creates the strongest social movements. Question whether Trump is a populist in the strict sense, but his appeal to authority is wholly charismatic and in opposition to the other forms of authority.
The question then turns to: What does Trump want? He wants fame and he wants wealth, but now he surely has both. Maybe he wants to be even richer and even more famous.
But if Trump’s delusions of grandeur—which he has made come true, by the way—continue, something must be coming.
Think of it this way. Who would you rather imitate: the self-interest of the richest man of all time, Crassus, the slave-trader, or Caesar, who founded the Roman Empire by crossing the Rubicon, thereby breaking the sacred law of the Roman Republic, but in so doing showing the corruption of the landed aristocrats in the Senate?
If Trump has world-historical ambition, and if Steve Bannon’s fetish with Roman history bears fruit, then these men follow the tradition of the vox populi—the voice of the people. (“I am your voice,” was the line from Trump’s RNC acceptance speech.) The great leader seeks triumph—in the Roman sense and a word twice used in the Inaugural—through the success and wealth of the people, not himself.
Caesar got killed by the aristocrats, not the people, who wanted to keep things the same. In fact on his way to the Forum, Caesar was set to enact policy changes that would benefit the people at the expense of the senatorial class. Trump’s Inaugural said, “The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our country. Their victories have not been your victories.”
The Trump Administration’s policies will not benefit his voters, but I don’t think they care. They ought to be voting for Democratic Party policies, but policies without populism—without emotional appeal—sit idly in think tanks like the Clinton Global Initiative.
This liberal’s apology: Sorry; our side should have moved more like Trump. We will be dealing with the fallout for four years and perhaps longer.
It’s a mistake we cannot make again.
