Donald Trump’s arrival in the UK, at a seminal moment in British history, may seem like Satan gatecrashing the Day of Judgment. But he is just opening a golf course. It’s a free country.
More intriguing is the gradual de-monsterising of Trump the phenomenon. The US media have seen him as an outrageous buffoon, a menace, an incipient tyrant, a creation of the fascist Twittersphere. Yet the longer he occupies the political stage, familiarity seems to breed a sort of acceptance.
The astute American novelist Dave Eggers reported last week in the Guardian on a Trump rally. To Eggers’ evident astonishment, he found those present “a broad cross-section of regular people … genial, polite and, with few notable exceptions, their opinions within the realm of the reasonable”. To them, Trump’s miserabilism was clearly comforting. The appeal was comedic, “the forbidden delight of hearing inappropriate things spoken into a microphone”. Trump was “crazy shit”, and people wanted to see and hear it, and drift back home.
At another Trump rally, Mark Danner of the New York Review of Books “could feel the pull … enfolded in the warm grandeur of his narcissism”. The man was mesmerising, ranting against the establishment’s mistreatment of him to an audience who identified with that mistreatment. When Danner asked the rally-goers why they liked Trump, he heard, “time and again the word ‘honesty’”. The content, its lies and contradictions, were immaterial. The audience just want the thrill of seeing celebrity in the flesh.
Amid all the noise there has been little on which to grip. Trump is not a conventional rightwinger. He dances to a populist tune. He was, after all, a child of liberal New York. His campaign music is not country and western, but Springsteen, the Rolling Stones and Elton John. His three marriages and his sexual boasts are hardly Tea Party material. He has been for gun control, as well as against it; for planned parenthood, as well as against it. “I love the poorly educated,” said Trump, bizarrely, in Nevada. In South Carolina he called George W Bush a liar and war criminal. He hates “the Republican donor class”. He supports public spending: “We’re gonna have new roads, bridges, all that stuff.”
Trump claims to be always in search of a fight, which is why he recklessly attacked Mexicans and Muslims. He wants to fight Obamacare, but he also wants to “fight for social security and Medicare … fight unjust wars [such as Iraq] … fight unfair trade”. He is an opportunist in the round. Small wonder the conservative National Review calls him “a menace to American conservatism”.
The protectionist cry on trade, one of Trump’s few policy specifics, is a gift to the dispossessed supporters of Bernie Sanders. A poll of 700 Sanders supporters in a Guardian callout last March found 500 ready to contemplate a switch not to Hillary Clinton but to Trump. Possible switchers liked Trump’s distaste for any sort of establishment. Like Sanders, Trump “understands problems facing me personally”. There was a synchronicity on “healthcare, war, campaign finance and trade”. Even on foreign policy, Trump hints at a make-up with Putin, an end to intervention in the Middle East, and no more “crazy” alliances with the Saudis and the Gulf.
Some Sandernistas even liked the anarchist in Trump. One woman remarked that he might be “a horrible, racist, misogynist idiot … but I feel like he could at least inspire a revolution, even if it is against him. I prefer chaos to stagnation.” He might be a fascist pig, but he was her kind of fascist pig.
The demographics of this “opening to the left” also run in Trump’s favour. In a CNN/ORC poll in February, Sanders and Trump both scored stronger with working-class “dispossessed” white voters than with richer ones. The one area where they diverged was age, the young being far more for Sanders. But Trump’s older voters were more likely to vote.
Celebrity populism of the Trump variety is hardly new. Such demagogues have strutted their hour upon the stage, from Britain’s Oswald Mosley to America’s William Jennings Bryan and Huey Long. As the Long biographer AJ Liebling said, to understand America you sometimes need to think Latin America. Trump may be a creation of reality television and social media, but there is something pre-digital (or perhaps post-) in the appeal of his presence in the flesh. It is the appeal of a flawed authenticity, of the unreliable, the unexpected. It is the element of risk that makes Britain’s Boris Johnson appealing, and the lack of it that makes David Cameron dull.
The nearer Trump gets to the seat of power, the more he is hedging and shaving. A former aide has revealed that he never expected his degree of success. He meant just to show off, a “protest candidacy” against the establishment. He would have been happy with 12% of delegate votes at the convention. Hence the disorganised airport rallies, the lack of policy back-up, the rambling, unprepared speeches.
Trump is now clearly taking himself more seriously. He knows he needs senior Republicans – and their money – on board to have any chance of success. No candidate at this stage has ever had a smaller war chest: just $1.3m to Clinton’s $43m. He has just 70 staff against Clinton’s 700. He is trailing her by 38% to 44% in the polls. At Republican party instigation, Trump this week sacked his maverick campaign chief, Corey Lewandowski, author of “let Trump be Trump”, which has wowed the primaries.
On Wednesday Trump spoke for the first time from a teleprompter. Gone were the past references to Mexican walls and Muslims bans. Appealing to Sanders supporters, he said he was for “jobs, jobs, jobs”. Clinton, he said, “has grown rich by making you poor”. At this rate, he may yet win a Guardian endorsement.
The greatest danger to Trump’s project has to come when he seeks respectability at the expense of authenticity. The one-man freak show that appeals to the anarchist (even in me) will slither into the greasy maw of the US Republican party. Trump rampant was outrageous. Trump boring would be intolerable but, even worse, perhaps electable.
