Donald Trump is drawing a huge following from voters angry about the direction of the country; they see the America they loved coming apart.
Their dismay can be attributed partly to a decade of economic enervation, poor job growth and a sense of precariousness afflicting the working class, which presidential aspirants detect and are trying in their different ways to address. Voters will forgive a great deal if their prospects seem bright. But they seethe over a wide array of cultural and political grievances if they feel financially threatened.
Trump is taking advantage of this anger, which has built up during the last seven years. His reckless and direct incitements to violence have borne the fruit one would expect; his followers have assaulted people, thrown sucker punches, and have hurled racial and antisemitic slurs.
Candidates in most elections have some overzealous supporters who give others a bad name. But that isn’t what we are seeing now. Candidates don’t usually cheer supporters’ thuggery and lack of self restraint. Yet Trump has frequently expressed an explicit desire to see protesters physically harmed. “You know what they used to do to guys like that when they were in a place like this?,” he asked at one Nevada rally last month. “They’d be carried out on a stretcher, folks. It’s true … I’d like to punch him in the face, I’ll tell you.”
Trump’s most obvious incitement was his offer to pay the legal bills of anyone who “knocks the crap out of” a protester at his rallies. This Sunday, he followed through on this promise, confirming that he’d finance the sucker puncher who, he said, “got carried away” but “obviously loves his country.” The man he clocked had committed the offense of showing his middle finger to rally-goers. “People are there doing harm,” Trump said of protesters when discussing this incident. “You have to use equal force.”
No presidential candidate in living memory has done this sort of thing. Trump brings out the worst in many people who listen to him. It should be remembered that he was saying this stuff before a mass of left-wing protesters sought, successfully, to shut down his rally in Chicago. He cannot claim that his incendiary rhetoric is a reaction to their violent behavior.
Without exculpating Trump for his provocations, it is important to keep in mind that even if he is going further than any presidential candidate has before, he has not arrived out of a clear blue sky to destroy what had been a polite civic polity. America’s political culture has been brought to a very low point over many years, not just by recent events. Trump is in some ways a symptom, not merely a cause.
Last week, President Obama dismissed the notion that he was in any way to blame for today’s ugly scenes of demagoguery and confrontation. And it’s true that Obama is not inciting people. But the anger that Trump is taking advantage of has been fed by the president’s determination to govern divisively, even after winning election in 2008 with promises of healing unity.
He has stigmatized principled disagreement as unconscionable obstruction. He has treated Congress as though it were an exogenous non-governmental body with no right to interfere with his agenda. He has treated opponents as he once derided them, as bitter clingers, whose demand for religious freedom and the right to bear arms are the product of atavistic weirdness rather than cardinal guarantees of the Constitution.
Trump becomes possible only when working-class and middle-class people feel they are being treated with contempt by the federal government. A president is entitled by his election to govern. He is not entitled to rule by himself.
But let us not confuse this long-term problem with the immediate cause of the debacle. Both Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz criticize Obama harshly on many topics, yet somehow they manage to speak in public without stirring such rage. The passion of these candidates’ supporters is restrained in a manner appropriate to a free and self-governing people. When they are confronted by hecklers, Cruz and Rubio know how to handle it, with the gentle mockery that hecklers deserve.
Obama banked up the tinder for a political bonfire over the past seven years. But Trump has doused it in gasoline and is dropping lighted matches on it. The tinder includes the license given to law breakers so long as they support approved left-wing causes, as with the unjustifiable disruption of Trump’s rally in Chicago. But no presidential candidate should respond, as Trump did, by threatening to send his supporters as a counterforce to disrupt the rally of an opponent. Trump did just that after accusing Democratic contender Bernie Sanders of organizing the Chicago confrontation.
Instead of stoking resentments and escalating threat levels, a candidate worthy of the presidency would seek to cool things down and call on the massed ranks of his supporters to exercise restraint. Trump’s lack of judgment in failing to do so says quite a bit about how he would likely run the Justice Department, the military, and the IRS if he somehow became president.
The environment Trump encourages is peculiar to his own events and no other candidate’s from either party. Those Trump followers who have come to his side for innocent reasons, for his stance on trade, perhaps, or his legitimate objections to the lawlessness that is American immigration policy, must understand what they will be tacitly approving if they fail to renounce him now. History will be harsh on those who turn a blind eye to the damage he is doing to civic life in America.
