There's not much reason to be worried about the possibility of Donald Trump winning the presidency in November.
He could. The race obviously isn't over. But as bad a candidate as Hillary Clinton can be, it appears that at this point all she has to do to win is to continue to demonstrate that she's not Trump. All she has to be is a game manager. No fumbles, no interceptions, just hand the ball off and let the clock run. And whatever her faults as a campaigner, she can do that. She can talk policy and specifics and have surrogates point out how nutty her opposition sounds.
Trump will keep feeding his partisans red meat. He'll keep going off message and saying outrageous things to capture the attention of the cable news shouters. He'll keep his performance art campaign going, playing to the thwarted and the desperate, but he's peaked as a real factor. Republicans will continue to bail and those who don't--like our governor and attorney general and assorted other ambitious down-balloters--will have to own the stigma of having supported a reckless, substance-less con artist whose ego obviously outpaces his patriotism.
They will have to live with having supported this guy, though it's likely that in 10 or 15 or 20 years no one will want to admit it. Just as no one wants to admit to having supported George Wallace or Orval Faubus' cynical actions during the Little Rock school crisis. History makes no allowances for nuanced, tactical plays. You either stand up to the bully or you acquiesce.
You either act like an American or you don't.
Trump will lose because that's what he is, ultimately, a loser. A loser who believes the vulgar myth that money is the ultimate measure of a person's worth. A loser willing to joke about the possible assassination of his opponent; unwilling to do what every viable presidential candidate since Richard Nixon has done and release his tax returns. A loser who despite his success at turning the Republican debates into something like professional wrestling kayfabe probably shouldn't attempt to debate his opponent--it's possible that she'd bait him into a head-exploding paroxysm.
That said, Trump will probably win Arkansas and a few other of the reddest states. But these victories will come not because he's regarded by most voters as a good candidate, but because 30-plus years of GOP operatives working to smear the Clintons have convinced a good many people that Hillary is an even worse option.
That's not to suggest the Clintons haven't suffered some self-inflicted injuries, only that a lot of the lies spun about the Clintons have taken on something of a mythic power here. If Bill and Hillary Clinton's actual errors in judgment and lapses in taste aren't enough to justify the white-hot hate it feels so good to express, then you can fall back on the small industry that exists to manufacture stories about their supposed mendacity and will to power.
My email is full of references to the infamous "The Clinton Body Count: Coincidence or the Kiss of Death?" list produced by American Justice Federation's Linda Thompson in 1994 and Patrick Matrisciana's film The Clinton Chronicles: An Investigation into the Alleged Criminal Activities of Bill Clinton. While the allegations in these artifacts have been re-investigated and debunked (see Harry Thomason's 2004 documentary The Hunting of the President as well as the Gene Lyons/Joe Conanson book it was based on as a corrective), they feed the need some of us have for political melodrama.
Hillary is better on policy than politics, and she and her husband too often give up too much in the name of pragmatism. She's not always reliable on some issues. But she's not Trump, and that--if you're the sort of person who acknowledges that governance at its highest level is a difficult endeavor that requires the serious application of one's intellect and a certain equanimity--is enough. If one of your musts for the next president be that they function as an adult, Trump has disqualified himself a dozen times over.
And while we ought to be concerned by the gullibility (and genuine, not unfounded, desperation) of some of us, it seems unlikely that Americans will vote for a man whose answer to everything seems to be that we should trust him and his personal mojo to make us great again. We aren't going to go for the con--probably because, despite his poor-mouthing rhetoric, most of us realize that America is better in many ways today than she was in the mid-1950s. While we have many problems to face, we still represent the world's great hope. Our experiment is not failing. We don't need some Big Daddy to bail us out.
That's what the polls are saying now, and what the people who are smart with numbers are saying. While it's in the best interest of media organizations to pretend that the race is close and that anything can happen, the truth is most people have probably decided how they will vote. And while Trump will hold on to a lot of his people, his market share is unlikely to grow.
Trump is hardly the first megalomaniac conspiracy theorist to run for president; Lyndon LaRouche ran eight times, seven times as a Democrat.
(This election cycle the 93-year-old LaRouche supported Martin O'Malley, in part because Barack Obama "generally orders the killing of people on Tuesdays, and these are people who are certified to be innocent of any crime" and "Hillary is supporting Obama's dedication to kills." O'Malley was not exactly thrilled. "It goes without saying that we reject this reprehensible individual's endorsement," he said through a spokesman.)
But Trump didn't just run; he captured a major party's nomination. (Though he may have destroyed that party in the process.) He struck a note a lot of people--even some who ended up rejecting him as a potential president--responded to.
Don't worry about Loser Trump. Worry about Demagogue 2.0, the smarter, slicker and better modulated version of this candidate. The version that combines appeals to our darker nature with a civilized, ready-for-prime-time veneer. The one that's coming, the inevitable result of the polarization of American fortunes.
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
www.blooddirtangels.com
Editorial on 08/14/2016