One of the things I hate most about Trumpworld is its tendency toward apocalyptic fits of panic.
The idea, as it was put in the headline of an Oct. 14 column that a friend emailed me Sunday, is that “Trump stands between America and tyranny.” Or, as so often expressed in social media, that President Trump and only Trump can save us from ruin.
That column’s author, Fletch Daniels, extravagantly put it thus, referring at the end to the supposedly transgendered child brought forward to speak at a CNN town hall:
Some of us beg to differ. Some of us think the United States is both a better and stronger nation than this. Some of us think our constitutional system is sturdier than this. We believe the American people aren’t so weak and meek as to require a single man, much less a volatile vulgarian, to save us from disaster.
We believe in American resilience, resourcefulness, righteousness. And we do not believe that the U.S. needs a savior. More than that, we believe it is crazy to believe Trump could come close to filling such a role. Trump is no deliverer; he’s a despoiler.
Even if it were possible to think more highly of Trump, his fans dramatically overestimate his political potency. They are mistaken that Trump has a unique ability to defeat the Left. Granted, there’s no way to test the hypothesis, but Trump’s 2016 victory was probably a fluke, thanks entirely to Hillary Clinton’s uniquely unattractive candidacy. Probably 10 out of the 17 Republican primary candidates could have defeated her, and more easily than Trump did, with a clear popular vote victory.
And consider that, even with her as his opponent, Trump probably would have lost if James Comey hadn’t come forward at the last minute to perform that weird public kabuki dance about reopening the investigation into Clinton’s emails.
It seems even more absurd to think that only Trump can beat a different Democrat in 2020. If Trump resigned of his own volition tomorrow and Mike Pence became president, Pence would have the advantage of an apparently strong economy, and on top of that his demeanor would be far more reassuring to the soccer moms, highly educated Americans, and Generation Y (older than millennials) voters who swung heavily against Republicans in the 2018 midterm elections.
Similarly, if a politically astute and talented campaigner like former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley or former New Hampshire Sen. Kelly Ayotte (who outpolled Trump in her state in 2016) could wrest the Republican nomination from Trump, they might build a broader coalition for 2020 than Trump would, with more paths to victory than Trump’s reliance on razor-thin margins in former Rust Belt states.
In sum, even if the U.S. does stand on the brink of epochal catastrophe — a hypothesis we reject — it is far from obvious that Trump is the best, much less the only, champion who can defeat a leftist menace.
This isn’t the apocalypse; it’s politics. In American politics, there are many ways to win campaigns. More importantly, Americans have many ways to transcend campaigns, because the strength of our nation lies not in our politics but in our people.
