Right Time; Wrong Guy
We have come a long way, to be sure, but after two terms of a black man in the White House, a time we naively believed meant that we were suddenly "post-racial," a time that has been punctuated by the ugliest racism we’ve seen since the Sixties, it is obvious that for as far as we have come, we have a really long way to go.
I produce and syndicate talk radio shows and podcasts, so I spent the week at the RNC in Cleveland. I’ve never seen a more hateful group of people or a major political party so loosely tethered to reality. Early Tuesday morning I was with a right leaning radio host (whom I actually like as a person). The GOP/Trump reality distortion field was so effective, that he railed about the media and Hillary making much ado about nothing concerning Melania Trump’s plagiarized speech. I told him that the only fact in evidence was that she had, wittingly or not, spoken Michelle Obama’s words as if they were hers, and had done so without attribution—the very definition of plagiarism. He protested that what really mattered was that the evil media and Crooked Hillary were to blame. Obviously spouting the campaign line, he, and all the others who attempted to do so, were humiliated later in the week when the Trump associate who had cribbed the lines came forward and apologized.
Every speech was fraught with the darkness Trump hopes to convince us has engulfed our world. Hillary Clinton was vilified by nearly everyone who took the podium, and The Q rocked with chants of “Lock her up.” The head of the New Hampshire Republican party suggested that she should be “Lined up and shot” for treason (which caused the Secret Service to pay him a visit). So much hate. So much fear.
My worst fear is that while we have all known the game is rigged in favor of the rich and powerful, Donald Trump is the first office seeker to express the new found right wing populism effectively enough to win his party’s nomination. I suspect that Trump is exactly the wrong person at exactly the right time. We are kidding ourselves if we think he is unelectable.
As Tony Schwartz, the (real) author of the bestselling Trump book, “The Art of the Deal”, states in the New Yorker, Donald Trump is a narcissist and a sociopath whose gnat-like attention span is only elongated when the topic is him. That so many Americans find him appealing is the fodder for an onslaught of academic papers and books that are forthcoming. Let us hope they will be forensic in nature, and not commentary on a sitting U.S. president. Our country has been waiting for a populist strong enough to break the system. It is most unfortunate—potentially tragic—that Trump is the breakout candidate fulfilling this middle class wish. While it would be enough to say the system is rotting from the inside, and that we need new rules to restrict the power of the incumbent class, we have instead gotten a demagogue willing to use the divisive tools of hate and prejudice.
Right time; wrong guy.