South Bend, Ind.
It’s as if Virginia Woolf crawled inside Donald Trump’s head and compelled him to blather about his trade policy.
You’re tired of seeing Carrier leave your state, go to Mexico, build a plant, put their equipment in, sell it like nothing happened, and by the way, the air conditioner is going to cost the same, because they have to compete with Trane and all the other companies, I buy from all of them, I’m not buying from Carrier anymore by the way.
He buys from all of them, but he’s not buying from Carrier anymore by the way.
Is this a campaign speech or a reading of Trump’s To the White House: an interior monologue of all his perspectives on people and politics at a single point in time that’s the most tremendous of its genre? Whatever it is, it’s stupefying. That I can tell you.
It’s a wonder that for a man whose advocates compliment as plainspoken, Donald Trump ought to lose the attention of the average listener somewhere around the eleventh clause of a sentence. He is nothing if not rambling—someone who interrupts himself as he meanders, to tell the crowd that statisticians have boring jobs and the latest Drudge poll said he won the debate and “my whole life is a debate.”
The people, they feel him. When he complains about critics of his behavior and asks, “Who cares about my personality?” When he says, “Nobody respects women more than I do,” they cheer—this the same day that The Daily Beast published old remarks of Trump saying that Bill Clinton was a “victim” of “an unattractive cast of characters”, this a few days after he bragged about the endorsement of “tough guy” Mike Tyson in the same city that Tyson was convicted of raping an 18-year-old girl.
“I’m honored that [Tyson] endorsed me,” Trump said Monday night in South Bend on the eve of the Indiana primary vote that may win him a major party’s nomination for president.
That would be the Republican party: the party that has labored since Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock to rebut Democratic narratives and reassure women that the GOP is, in fact, female-friendly. At least he hasn’t had to backtrack a recommendation that women who receive abortions be punished, or anything. Wouldn’t make much sense for a candidate who once called himself “pro-choice in every respect” and compliments Planned Parenthood in front of conservative audiences.
Indiana is governed by an evangelical Republican who announced he will support the evangelical Republican candidate, Ted Cruz, in the Hoosier primary. According to recent polls, Trump’s lead over Cruz in Indiana has widened to double digits.
Trump’s appeal, then, doesn’t come from the italics of his speech, but from the direct, staccato, relentlessly repeated declarations and guarantees he makes to his committed voters. “We’re gonna build the wall.” “We never win anymore.” “We’re going to make America great again.” These statements evolve—one minute China is beating the U.S., the next minute it’s “raping” the homeland, and then sometime during the 8 o’clock hour Monday night it’s, “If you name any country, they’re beating us.” In Donald Trump’s worldview, America is second to Namibia—except we aren’t and he would never say that, because he doesn’t believe it.
But he tells everyone that we’ve fallen from our perch, and it’s a persuasive message to a group that is unsatisfied with Washington Republicans and a president who it believes has sold the country out with philosophies like “leading from behind”. (That being a phrase from an anonymous Obama adviser to describe the administration’s Libya strategy, which has featured prominently in talk radio and conservative media’s framing of the nation’s emasculated strength.)
You could see it in the unregenerate Trump supporter in Marion, Indiana, who reduced Cruz to a common noun. “You are the problem, politician,” the goateed, besunglassed gentleman with a TRUMP sign told the Texas senator during one of his final campaign stops Monday. The seven-minute interaction between the two men was unusual for the mere fact that it happened. Its product was unsurprising for some of the traits we know about Trump voters.
While the man in Marion is hardly the archetype of Team Trump, its constituents are by-and-large passionate about their candidate, more so than backers of Trump’s rivals are about their choice. The voters who helped boost Trump’s candidacy initially were early-deciding voters, or those who made up their mind at least several days before voting. It follows that a combination of two numbers from the May NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll bodes well for him: Trump leads Cruz in Indiana among likely voters by 15 percentage points, and just 8 percent of those respondents say they might change their minds on Tuesday.
If that’s the case, then Trump convinced his supporters by emboldening their discontent as well as his most succinct talking points. His campaign is high in fat: the uncontrollable impulses to tweet late at night, the narrative distractions, the tortuous rhetoric. But the meat of his pitch is better than any other steak he’s sold.
“This time you folks belong where you belong—it’s called Importantville, right?” he said Monday to the Hoosier voters who could determine the outcome of the Republican presidential primary. Without sparing a breath, he was on to another tangent.
“I have so many friends here!”
