After Donald Trump was declared the winner of Indiana, one of my friends said, “As a Democrat, you should be thrilled by this development.” In terms of strict partisan strategy, yes, any Democrat should be thrilled today about the upcoming general election campaign, which will feature a sober, experienced, and thoughtful female progressive running against a misogynist, xenophobic, idiotic former reality TV star. But, while I am thrilled as a Democrat, I am profoundly sad as an American. Donald Trump represents the absolute worst of our culture, political or popular, and it has truly shaken my core belief in the inherent goodness of the American people. Please join me below for some of my thoughts regarding Trump and what his nomination says about our people.
Donald Trump’s nomination, and support from what appears to be a near-majority of Republican primary voters, has led me to form the following conclusions regarding our political and popular culture.
1. Physical Confrontation & Insults Are Now Acceptable Forms of Political Discourse.
Trump inspires in his followers a desire to exact violence on political opponents. In rallies, he has instructed attendees to “knock the crap out of” any protesters and he has even indicated that he would like to personally get into the action by “punching [the protesters] in the face.” This rhetoric has truly filtered down into his supporters, who have themselves initiated violent confrontations at his rallies and who have decided to hurl racist, sexist, and anti-Semitic comments to their opponents. Indeed, at Trump’s rally here in Cleveland, one of the attendees left the event telling protestors to "go to Auschwitz."
While this is truly awful and there is no proper excuse for it, I can accept the explanation for this behavior at rallies as simply Americans being in the heat of the moment. But, the even bigger problem is that this type of behavior occurs far away from the rally hall. A couple of nights ago I was enjoying the Cleveland Cavaliers' basketball game at a westside Cleveland bar. I went outside at halftime to get something from my car when I saw a man standing at my bumper. He was ripping my Hillary Clinton bumper sticker off. When I asked him what he was doing, he decided against apologizing and instead went into a profanity-laced rant that was essentially a garbled combination of F-bombs, Benghazi, and Trump. During this rant, he got into my face, clearly itching for a fight. I refuse to be that person - I will not fight someone over a bumper sticker. American political discourse is not supposed to be so depraved, yet that is where we are today.
2. Facts and Policy Positions Aren’t Important.
Trump is running a fact-free campaign. And, by fact-free, I mean one that is based on lies. Nothing can be a better reflection of this than his decision to tie Ted Cruz’s father to the JFK assassination. This past weekend, when I was at the grocery store, I saw a National Enquirer headline about this Cruz link to the assassination. I laughed it off and said to my wife, look, Donald Trump will bring this up this week. It was shocking though that Donald Trump actually did this. We have a presidential candidate, the presumptive nominee of his party, that is actually going to a fake grocery store tabloid for his attacks on the campaign trail. Such a candidate would have been laughed off the stage in the past; now he gets 53% of the vote in the Indiana GOP primary.
Trump's campaign isn't just fact-free, it's also position-free, which allows him to have it both ways on any issue. He can say he supports punishing women for obtaining abortions while at the same time saying he wants to change the GOP platform on reproductive choice. He can say he hates trade agreements while personally taking advantage of them to the detriment of American workers. He can say that he opposed the war in Iraq (which isn’t clear) while at the same time saying that we should "bomb the shit out of ISIS." This way every American can insert their own views and ascribe them to Trump. That isn’t how things should work. As voters, we should demand that our candidates state their views in clear fashion and then we evaluate them. Yet, in this election, too many voters have simply asked that their candidate yell and then they can go home and say that guy agrees with them.
3. The News Media Is Entirely Incapable of Countering Candidates’ Falsehoods.
This morning on Morning Joe, the panel of “elite” media pundits pointed out that Donald Trump has made a multitude of false statements. This is has been shown by a variety of “fact-checking" organizations, including PolitiFact, which has determined that 76% of Trump’s statements are some sort of false. Although everyone in the news media seems to recognize that Trump’s shtick is to lie incessantly, that same media has shown itself utterly incapable of pointing it out to its audience. One of the Morning Joe panel members said that it would be too difficult to point out all the lies, so the media has stopped trying to do it and that ultimately it doesn’t matter to his supporters. I call “horseshit" on that one.
The news media has 24 hours to fill now and instead of serving as scribe to further perpetuate Trump’s words or those of his surrogates, it could easily dedicate at least 15 minutes to how false his statements are. The evening network news could dump the 10 minutes of coverage for local weather and the newest prescription drug and instead discuss Trump’s biggest whopper from that day. By focusing on the lies, which is the media's role, the message would get out to most Americans (except for the hardcore rural poor white Trump devotee).
But, instead of doing its job, the media has now shown that it cares about one thing above all else: ratings. And, boy, Donald Trump gets ratings. Pointing out the lies, the deficiencies of his plans, or the paucity and contradictions of his policy positions will just bore people, according to them. I used to think that our American democracy was better than such crass thinking by the news media; but this campaign proves demonstrably that that was wrong.
I understand that the Trump nomination is merely the result of decades of Republicans, and the overall conservative movement, stoking the fears of working-class whites with dog whistles of racism and xenophobia. I also get that the “A Current Affair"-type entertainment coverage of American politics started in many respects with the GOP's use of Gennifer Flowers in 1992 and the Clinton impeachment. And, Mitt Romney’s hyperbole and fact-free campaign in 2012 should have desensitized us to Donald Trump’s even worse 2016 version of such campaigning.
But, until this point, we as a nation have overcome this. We elected and reelected President Clinton. We rejected Mitt Romney. In the end, the good guys won. But, yesterday, the bad guy won and his shtick has infiltrated our whole political system. I am confident that we can rise up to beat Trump down in the general, but today I am sad that we even have to do so. He should have been rejected by voters long ago, even if those voters were Republicans. The fact that he wasn't should really concern all of us as Americans.