The last time a billionaire ran for president, he warned about the “crazy aunt in the basement.” That was Ross Perot’s favorite euphemism for a problem the country refused to face. Donald Trump is challenging the Republican Party to confront its crazy uncle.
Everyone has a family member or longtime acquaintance who is loud, crass and opinionated. This person has some good ideas, mixed with arguments that would be perfectly defensible if expressed more tactfully plus some views that are prejudiced or just downright crazy.
You know the type. They send you emails about Barack Obama’s birth certificate and share Facebook posts about the antichrist coming for your guns. Yet this same person has also managed to start a successful business, so he’s clearly no dummy. And while you may find him annoying, others like and respect him.
Trump is that uncle on a much larger scale. His celebrity status, and now his campaign for president of the United States, gives him a bigger platform than a chain-email sender. Whether he’s still a billionaire or not — we’ll know how serious he is about his presidential ambitions when he discloses his finances — he has been phenomenally successful.
Trump should be easy to dismiss. This is at least the third time he has threatened to run for president. In 2000, he was unwilling even to challenge Pat Buchanan for the nomination of Perot’s Reform Party.
Many of Trump’s ideas are half-baked. Others contradict past positions he’s taken. He left the Republican Party in October 1999 and pledged to run to Buchanan’s left on economic and social issues 15 years ago. Now he is running as a true Tea Party conservative, to the right of most Republicans seeking the White House.
Jeb Bush once gave Hillary Clinton an award, something that will make great fodder for ads both in the primaries and in the fall election if he is the nominee. But Trump actually gave Hillary money, including $1,000 for her Senate campaign and at least $100,000 to the Clinton Foundation.
But Trump won’t be dismissed. For one thing, there are a lot of so-called crazy uncles out there and some of them vote. Sincerely or not, Trump is stoking fears and resentments genuinely felt by a nontrivial segment of the GOP rank-and-file.
As Trump’s would-be opponent for the Reform Party nomination once put it, these visceral conservatives “don’t read Adam Smith or Edmund Burke, but they came from the same schoolyards and playgrounds and towns as we did.” Tip O’Neill said all politics are local, but today all politics are identity politics. Trump reflects this as surely as Sarah Palin does.
Many conservatives are looking for someone who will fight for them, a trait some evaluate not on the basis of preferred marginal tax rates or five-point policy agendas but by ability to spark liberal outrage. That’s where Trump has a proven track record.
Consider the analysis of Iowa conservative commentator Steve Deace. “[Trump] may or may not be presidential material, but he’s made a lifetime out of defying the limp-wristed and the know-it-alls,” Deace writes, chastising “case-studies in passive-aggressiveness mocking him now couldn’t hold his jock strap, and would probably urinate themselves if you took them outside their beltway spider holes and placed them in the high-pressure world he lives in each day.”
Deace is no yahoo. He speaks for a constituency and has made a number of accurate Iowa political predictions. Leaving aside whether even paid actors want to hold Trump’s jock straps, much less highbrow political analysts, it is true few of his detractors could replicate his business feats. By the same token, not many of Ben Carson’s critics could separate conjoined twins or perform a successful hemispherectomy. But expertise in one field doesn’t necessarily translate even to competence in another.
Let’s not overstate how representative Trump is of his party or conservatives. He has the worst favorability numbers among Republicans of any candidate in the GOP field. Barring a massive breakdown in the process, he has no chance of becoming the nominee.
Only a large field fragmenting the vote and giving outsized personality a chance to stand out in the debates give Trump any opportunity to influence the primaries at all. But Trump isn’t an anomaly either. He represents something serious conservatives must address, not simply sneer at.
This uncle won’t stay locked in the basement.
