Dubuque, Iowa
Like rap music and The Simpsons, the celebrity real-estate mogul Donald Trump, who burst onto the scene looking like a six-weeks’ fad in the 1980s, still has the look of a six-weeks’ fad 30-some-odd years later. Clearly the doubters’ assumptions need to be reexamined. Straight Outta Compton shows a rising generation enraptured with rap, Bart and Lisa have been on the air longer than Gunsmoke, and the Donald looks like an increasingly plausible candidate for the presidency of the United States.
“The polls have been nothing short of tremendous,” Trump told an overflow crowd at a convention center here on August 25. This was not one of his exaggerations. When Trump declared for the Republican nomination in June, few news outlets paid attention. But his crude and colorful attacks on illegal immigration turned the primary into a spectacle, and were responsible for making the first Republican debate the most-watched nonsports event in the history of cable TV. Now an Ipsos poll shows Trump running at 32 percent among Republicans nationally, twice as popular as runner-up Jeb Bush. The arrival of savvy campaign operatives in Iowa and New Hampshire has brought organizational sinew to his effort. A CNN poll has Trump running only 6 points behind Hillary Clinton among all voters—a better showing than the supposedly mainstream alternative, Bush.
The art of the deal
Pretty Dubuque, set amid limestone bluffs and rolling farmland along the Mississippi, has nominated only one Republican to its board of supervisors in the last half-century. There is still a labor newspaper here, and the Democrats are of a zealous stripe. The socialistic Vermonter Bernie Sanders drew 2,500 people to a rally for his presidential campaign at nearby Loras College a few weeks ago, while Hillary Clinton managed only 440 at the Grand River Center. German- and Irish-Catholic, with several orders of nuns still resident, Dubuque is the oldest city in Iowa. It’s not Republican country, but maybe it is Trump country. A lead-mining, farming, and furniture-making town across the river from the Wisconsin-Illinois border, the place has been deindustrialized in recent decades. Casinos have replaced factories and department stores as the economic motor of the city’s downtown. The help-wanted ads in the local daily, the Telegraph-Herald, are pathetic, not even reaching a full page: a few paper routes at the TH itself, waitstaff at Domino’s, a part-time job at the library. Trump’s Tuesday night draw at the Grand River Center was about 3,000.
Many of the voters who showed up were checking Trump out, rather than rallying to his side. Michael Goodart, a 35-year-old vendor of campaign buttons wearing the jersey of St. Louis Cardinals catcher Yadier Molina, could tell. His generic conservative buttons (the Don’t-Tread-on-Me Gadsden flag, the Second Amendment button with the green assault weapon and a defiant “Come and take it” written across it) were selling twice as fast as Trump-for-president buttons. But it is striking how heavily independents and Democrats were represented, and the wide variety of reasons they gave for being there. The very first people in the door when it opened just before 5 were Judy Teal, 70, and her husband Tom, 71, of Dubuque. They’re retired from Nordstrom’s and the nearby John Deere factory, respectively. They were Hillary backers in 2008, but they’re Trump backers now, Judy out of a respect for Trump’s independence (“Mr. Trump is his own man. . . . He’s not in anybody’s back pocket”), Tom out of a sense of national humiliation (“China is just laughing at us”).
The crowd skews old, but Republicans skew old, and Iowa skews old. It has the fifth-heaviest concentration of senior citizens in the country. Relative to other Republican rallies here, this group is fairly young. Burt Ford, a 47-year-old on active-duty military service who is also keen on Scott Walker and Ben Carson, likes the way there’s “no bulls—t to the guy.” Brett Morris, 26, dislikes Trump’s statements on immigration but is tired of political correctness, and so is the 56-year-old conservative Jake Speed of Onalaska, Wisconsin, who thinks we’ve been “steered away from the First Amendment by intimidation.” Democrat Sandy Wilgenbusch, 48, wants to “put America first,” and she says we haven’t done that for the past four years. People are looking at Trump for solutions to a wide variety of problems.
Very few of those I interviewed were motivated by Trump’s views on immigration—the only issue on which he has laid out a clear policy position. Trump’s position seems vindictive and impractical—calling for Mexico to pay for a wall between the two countries, floating the idea of deporting most or all of the country’s 11 million immigrants here illegally—but it may help him all the same, by laying down a marker. It defies a party taboo to highlight Trump’s independence. It shows a forcefulness that can be drawn on should Trump face other problems. For instance, Trump argues, not very plausibly, that the street gangs that have contributed to unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore include a lot of illegal immigrants. In Dubuque, the immigration issue allowed him to pick a 10-minute-long fight with Univisión telejournalist Jorge Ramos, a sort of Spanish-language Sam Donaldson (“No human being is illegal!”), a foil whom the Trump campaign clearly hopes will help cast its candidate in a reasonable light.
Trump is often iffy on the facts. For a moment in Dubuque it was unclear whether he knew the difference between North and South Korea. But he has addressed areas no one else has dared to, and in these he is more often right than wrong. There are Mexican government publications that counsel illegal immigrants on how to avoid getting deported. There are maternity hotels in Los Angeles where illegal immigrants come to have “anchor babies” who are automatically accorded birthright citizenship. A plausible constitutional argument can be made that “birthright citizenship” could be revoked without a constitutional amendment. (It would involve teasing out the meaning, under the Fourteenth Amendment, of which babies born in the United States are “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.”)
Schrute from the hip
Trump is proving to be an extraordinarily powerful orator. The power is not in the arguments he makes, but in the feelings he evokes and the power relations he implies. “What went wrong formerly,” wrote Bertrand Russell in 1952, “was that people had read in books that man is a rational animal, and framed their arguments on this hypothesis. We now know that limelight and a brass band do more to persuade than can be done by the most elegant train of syllogisms.”
Trump brags. At the Iowa State Fair in August, he took lots of little kids for rides in his helicopter, and, he says: “Those kids loved me.” The buildings he owns in San Francisco and New York are beautiful. “Vets like me a lot.” That record-setting Fox debate got 24 million viewers, instead of the usual 2, and “100 percent of that is me.” Most important to Trump is that Businessweek once called him “the best negotiator”—in what context he did not make clear. In order to understand the effectiveness of his campaign appeal, we must understand that Trump operates under a very different oratorical principle from his rivals.
A negotiation can be an appeal to reason. But it can also be an appeal to force or to power. The power can be real or bluffed. It can be shown out of love (to buck up a friend) or out of hatred (to cow an enemy). We who don’t much read Cicero anymore can forget that contumely, not logic, is the weapon of choice in classical oratory. Trump never mentions Jeb Bush without describing him as “low-energy” (“a very low-energy person,” he said in Dubuque). The adjective never varies. Trump does not ever say Bush “lacks oomph” or “has no get-up-and-go” because his goal is not to be smart or varied or interesting—it is to plaster “low-energy” onto Bush as an epithet.
Trump, not just through his words but through his attitude, wants to render his adversaries pitiable, weak, and disgusting. He did it with Secretary of State John Kerry in Dubuque in the context of the Iran nuclear deal. (“What a schmuck.”) He did it to Rand Paul in the first Republican debate. (“You’re having a hard time tonight.”) His oratory often takes a turn for the nonrational, creepy, Gothic, and grotesque. He deals in subliminal images and in strange rules of thumb of dominance and submission, in a way that will remind viewers of Dwight Schrute in The Office. In Dubuque, Trump didn’t explain what Republican sell-outs had done wrong, he painted a picture of them as sexual failures:
So when Trump complained after the August debate about the line of questioning Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly had taken—saying, “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever”—was it a carelessly chosen word? Or did he really intend to suggest (or, to be more precise, depict) that she had been tough on him because she was menstruating? Well, none of us is inside Trump’s head, but put those two together.
Immanentize the etymon
Trump’s speeches are sometimes vivid, sometimes vague. The ability to inflect, decline, conjugate, or otherwise modify words appears to hold no interest for him. He deals in etyma, in deep roots. When he talks about wanting a strong military, he says, “I’m the most militaristic person,” although he could just as easily have said militant or military. He wants to “spiritize” America, which seems to be some neologistic mix of spiritualize and inspire.
Trump’s great gift is comedic. He is informal. He is wry. “The insurance companies are making a fortune because they have control of the politicians,” he said during the August debate, “of course, with the exception of the politicians on this stage.” He is a good narrator. His sense of timing is devastating. He noted that presidential candidate Marco Rubio was a protégé of presidential candidate Jeb Bush, and dismissed the latter as milquetoast for not using the August debate to attack Rubio for disloyalty:
He sounded like Jackie Gleason at his fall-down funniest. People would have been rolling in the aisles if the aisles had not been full. This came just a few minutes after Trump had hollered out to this audience of Republicans, Democrats, and independents, “Who would you rather have negotiating against China: Jeb, Hillary, or Trump?”
And they hollered back, “Trump!”
Trump on the stump
Probably the first rule of negotiating is that you don’t immediately show the thing you most want. We probably have not yet seen the heart of Trump’s pitch to the public. He is beginning to say nice things about the Bible (“the greatest book of all time . . . it’s not even close”) and about the sermons of Norman Vincent Peale that he attended at his Presbyterian church when young (“You hated to leave church”), which may appeal to the evangelicals who play a big role in Iowa caucuses.
But his stump speech is improving with every passing week, and the most obvious improvements are those that will appeal to general-election voters, not Republican ones. The core of his campaign pitch starts about 15 minutes in. It is really, really good. It is flexible and eclectic, in a way that neither party’s establishment would tolerate. Trump is beginning to demonize corporations that have moved factories abroad, and to talk about ways to get them to reverse the outsourcing of jobs. (Earlier this year, the Dubuque office of IBM, which got $50 million in incentives from the city and the state to relocate there, laid off 200.) “You can get Ford, believe me, to stay in this country,” he says, adding: “I would say to them at Ford, ‘You’re gonna pay a tax—for every car, and every truck, and every part that comes across that border, you’re going to pay a 35 percent tax!’ ” This is Trump’s biggest applause line of the night. It sends the crowd into a delirium.
Trump is in the early stages of deploying a powerful and popular protectionist platform. He does not use the word “protectionism,” preferring to call it free trade managed by people who know how to negotiate deals. But his voice takes a vengeful tone when he describes his trade policy. He has promised to enlist some of the toughest negotiators in New York to lay down the law. (“I know people who are so nasty, so mean, so horrible,” he says, “nobody in Iowa would want to have dinner with them.”) About the parent company of Nabisco, which is closing a plant in Chicago and moving production to Mexico, he says, “I’m never eating Oreos again—ever!” It sounds like an implicit threat to mobilize voters around boycotts and other forms of economic pressure, a tactic that has been limited in recent years to progressives’ agitating on gay marriage and other social issues.
Paradoxically, his own braggadocio puts him in a good position to attack the information-age plutocracy. Talking about how filthy rich the filthy rich are is one of Trump’s favorite subjects, much as beautiful women like to deplore the role beauty plays in human relations. At a press availability before the speech in Dubuque, Trump made a shocking allusion (in ways that few but the initiated will have understood) to the carried-interest deduction that enables rich investors to limit their tax liability. “I know a lot about hedge funds,” he said. “I know a lot about how they’re taxed.”
This economic critique fits into a sophisticated attack on the present state of presidential campaign finance. It is not a call for reform. It is a boast of his own unbuyability in a world where all politicians can be bought. A Washington Post article about the consternation of top Republicans took the boast at face value: “Donors feel powerless. Republican officials have little leverage. Candidates are skittish. Super-PAC operatives say attack ads against him could backfire.” Most voters will read of such big-donor consternation and think: What’s not to like? On the trail, Trump has of late been telling the story of a lobbyist who came to him offering the campaign $5 million, only to be sent away. Otherwise, Trump says, “he’ll be coming in two years, representing some foreign government.” Trump alleges that Jeb Bush has secretly raised either $114 million or $135 million this way. Whether this lobbyist is an actual person or a composite, the story is plausible, and Trump uses it for a beautiful piece of oratorical pedagogy. He talks about how even the noblest politicians with the best intentions will give in to lobbyists once they get behind closed doors:
“Nooooo!” the crowd bellows.
This kind of campaign-finance talk could broaden Trump’s appeal far beyond the Republican party. This week, a Quinnipiac poll found his support strongest among liberal and moderate Republicans. Progressive campaign-finance activist Lawrence Lessig of Harvard Law School told Politico he would consider running with Trump on a third-party ticket.
But the campaign-finance talk does something else. It allows Trump to play the game of alpha male and beta male with his fellow candidates. Attacked during the early August Fox debate for giving lots of money to Democrats, he replied:
One of the other candidates asked, So what did you get?
“Well, I’ll tell you what, with Hillary Clinton, I said, be at my wedding, and she came to my wedding. You know why? She didn’t have a choice because I gave.”
At the pre-speech press conference in Dubuque, he ran down Scott Walker’s record in Wisconsin and described him in the same terms. “I supported him, gave him money,” Trump said. “He came to my office and gave me a nice trophy.”
This is the core of Trump’s vision of the American presidential system. In the plutocracy that America has become, the rich are people who say “Jump,” and politicians are people who say “How high?” Trump wants your vote because he’s the only person running who has spent his life as a real leader: a Jump-sayer, not a How-high?-sayer.
Kilroy was here
One might compare Trump’s rise to the anti-immigrant populisms on the rise in Europe, but the parallel is deceptive. European immigration, unlike American, appears to be turning into an outright military threat. The parties that focus on it often are suspicious of the European Union and have ideological affinities with old right-wing movements. Whatever one thinks of Trump, he is not an ideologue. (“I’m fine with affirmative action,” he recently told the Los Angeles Times.) The European radicals he most resembles are those freelances who combined (or combine) truth-telling and piss-taking: the Dutch firebrand Pim Fortuyn, assassinated on the eve of the 2002 elections, the radio host and UKIP leader Robert Kilroy-Silk, who rose and quickly fell two years later, the Italian comedian Beppe Grillo, who still leads the Five-Star Movement.
Two factors produced Trump. First, the governing style of Barack Obama, which, by insulating presidential action from constitutional checks and balances, drove up the value of “deal-making.” Second, the corruption of the Republican party. If the Republican Senate permits the president to pass off his Iran nuclear weapons treaty as a “deal,” abdicating its prerogative to ratify or block, then a better “deal”-maker is all it can offer the country the next time around.
Candidates Jeb Bush and Rand Paul have fallen into this misunderstanding, treating Trump as a “fake conservative,” as if he were running for chairman of the Republican party. So have George Will and virtually everyone who writes for National Review. “Trump,” writes Daniel Foster, “is sucking the most talented GOP presidential field in a generation down the gaping event horizon that is his huge mouth.” This is dubious. The GOP may have talent, but it has squandered the trust that might win it the country’s permission to do anything with it. For almost two decades Republican leaders have been asking a country with which they have lost touch to be content with words. Since the Tea Party rebellion of 2010, they’ve succeeded, with empty promises, in getting their own dissidents to lay down their arms. For now, there appears to be little that any member of the party establishment can say to hale voters back.
Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
