You’ve seen it yourself, sometimes in public, perhaps on a subway car. Somebody starts to act strange. He talks to himself, wanders the aisles and mutters.
Bystanders freeze. Their muscles tense, and their eyes become nervous. If they stare at him, will it somehow provoke him? Has he a knife or a gun on his person? Could a gesture or word set him off? If they pretend that he’s normal, might he not just go away?
The subway car this time is the Republican Party, and the disturbed party on it has to be Donald Trump. He boarded it in June, 2015, and never got off. Perhaps at the start they thought he was too strange to be president; perhaps they didn’t want to get down to his level; perhaps they just wanted get on with their real job of destroying each other, especially Marco Rubio, who was tagged early on as the likely front-runner.
But by the time the establishment candidates had finished off one another and let Trump emerge as the unlikely plurality winner, it was too late to do anything. Trump would crush Ted Cruz in the later spring primaries and become the nominee without winning more than half of the votes cast by Republicans.
And those who expected him to exit the train after a presidential loss were to have their hopes dashed as well. He went on to win the presidency by the Electoral College with a large number of very close statewide wins, while losing the popular tally by almost three million votes.
Two years later, the man in the Metro seems to be driving away nearly two voters for each one he attracts, destroying coalitions it took years to assemble. Perhaps the subway car strategy of denying the problem didn’t work out that well after all
What might have stopped him? Something like this: Minutes into debate number one, as Trump launched into his first round of insults, obscenities, and tales of his sex life, the moderator, representing the networks and their national audience, would have declared the debate over, and walked off the stage, saying he would return only after all the participants had agreed to rules of decorum observed by people in politics in ages before. Alternatively, one or all of the candidates might have stepped up and done the same thing. The moderator and the sixteen other people on stage were unable to do this. It is unlikely that Hubert Humphrey or Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, or Gerald Ford, Walter Mondale, or John Kerry could have handled it either, but it is hard to imagine the Roosevelt cousins sitting through a performance like Trump’s without an explosion. Nor Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, or John Kennedy, for that matter, let alone Ronald Reagan or Bobby Kennedy.
Trump has since been blamed for lowering standards, shattering norms, and the like, but the bulk of the damage was not done by him. It was his enablers who accepted his standards and stamped them as valid: by allowing him to go on as if nothing had happened, they shattered their political world into bits.
