There is a palpable state of terror among US Republican Party leaders that may be likened to the experience of watching science fiction horror movies. You know the ones in which a monster arises from some natural phenomenon or human experiment and goes rampaging uncontrollably with indeterminate consequences.
The Republicans’ real-life horror is being generated by the party’s presidential nominee, Donald Trump. Party chieftains have all but conceded that he is going to lose — probably badly — to Democratic Party nominee Hillary Clinton. What strikes fear in them is that Trump’s relentlessly uncouth and tempestuous rhetoric may be blighting the party beyond repair.
In horror movies, the urgent task is to find some way to corral the monster — Godzilla, for example — and make the world safe again. But such movies stoke the sense of horror by making all known solutions ineffectual. And that, in essence, is the plight of Republican leaders. Even those who publicly remain committed to Trump must be conceding in private that he is sinking the party.
Earlier on, the general view of many Republicans was that all it would take to straighten up Trump was some political polishing. But that’s like treating the symptoms of a life-threatening affliction and expecting it to be healed.
Trump wouldn’t oblige even to the polishing, anyway. He won the Republican primaries by being abrasive, so why change, he has argued. In thus failing to distinguish between the requisites of the primaries and general elections, he betrays his naivety. Perhaps something worse.
Horror movie directors always attempt to plausibly explain how the monster came to be. For the Trump phenomenon, there is no shortage of such explanations. Did the self-proclaimed multi-billionaire decide to foray into presidential politics as an attention-getting gimmick only to have the gimmick go beyond his intentions? Could it be that he was hurt by snickers during the 2012 election that rumours of his candidacy were a big joke, and so wanted to prove the jokesters wrong?
Is his popularity among some segments of society a backlash against stifling political correctness? Does the popularity stem from the frustrations of poor and unemployed rural whites, who scapegoat others for their plight? Or, on a related matter, did Trump emerge from the toxic political atmosphere that the Republicans created in their attempt to stymie the Obama presidency?
I will return to these matters, but first some reflections on what the Trump phenomenon could portend for politics elsewhere. Might political players in emerging democracies see themselves in Trump and their parties in the GOP? And what lessons would they take from that mirror of themselves? Will they be inspired or will they recoil, as we all do when the mirror shows us in a most unflattering light?
In many ways, Trump’s candidacy embodies what is wrong with politics in developing countries. Campaigns in most emerging democracies are literally taken as wars. And so, as in war, all is seen to be fair. Vilification of opponents has no bounds and the language of debate is often debasing. Of gravest consequence, candidates engage in ethnic incitement. That’s why there was obscene bloodshed in Kenya in 2008 following an election. And that explains the civil wars in South Sudan, Central African Republic, and in many a struggling democracy.
Trump practices much of such coarseness and divisiveness. He would want Americans to believe that much of the violence in the country is perpetuated by illegal immigrants and that most Moslems are terrorists. He vulgarly calls his rival crooked Hillary, not in a moment of indiscretion, but as a campaign routine. He has asserted that Clinton and President Barack Obama created ISIS. He has sought to undermine America’s centuries-old electoral process by claiming repeatedly that it is rigged, even as he was winning elections during the primaries.
Then in the ultimate of political recklessness, Trump hinted that if Clinton wins, it may be necessary to assassinate her. He was just joking, he later claimed, following a firestorm of protests. Yes, joking in calling for the assassination of a president, in a country with a history of it, a country in which the mentally unhinged legally tote assault weapons, a country in which there are recurrent incidents of mass shootings, a country in which political resentments are becoming ever more incendiary.
This last bit of rascality got even the conservative New York Daily News to run a front-page editorial with the usual big-sized headline: “This isn’t a joke anymore.” Below that appears this summation: “When Trump hints that gun-rights supporters shoot Hillary, he went from offensive to reckless. He must end his campaign. If he doesn’t, the GOP needs to abandon him.”
Even before Trump’s ultimate in political recklessness, a blogger for the Chicago Tribune had written that Trump was ready to call it quits. Trump’s unrelenting recklessness had to be his way of signaling disinterest, the blogger argued.
But that has to be wishful thinking. Trump shows no such inclination. For the past week or so, he has managed to avoid inflammatory assertions. But he has also warned that it is just a break, that he will continue to be his rampaging self.
It is entirely plausible that Trump got into this race as a publicity stunt, and some political realities took the stunt far beyond its intended sphere. It could be that he underestimated the support he would get from the white underclass, the people derisively referred to as “white trash,” hillbillies, and rednecks. They are the people who feel most resentful of what they see as an America that is getting away from them, being taking away by “others.”
But the Trump phenomenon can’t be fully explained without reference to the declared and concerted attempt by Congressional Republicans to frustrate the Obama presidency from the outset. As Richard Wolffe argues in a recent column in the UK Guardian, they sought to sink Obama and ended up imploding their party.
“If your political priorities are the total defeat of a single politician — not the advancement of your own policies through debate or legislation — then … you fan the flames of extremism that will burn anyone in the center, ”Wolffe argues.
Cynicism in politics breeds cynicism in the populace. It creates a rampaging Trump.
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