There are no Trump signs in my neighborhood.
At least there are none along the dog trots we follow; there might be some sprinkled south of Lee Street and north of Markham. But we cover a pretty big section of Hillcrest, and I can't remember encountering a Trump sign. Karen's daily runs take her through the Heights; she reports seeing very few of them up there. A friend who recently moved to that neighborhood reports knowing of a single sign near his house.
Why is this? First of all, Donald Trump isn't running a conventional campaign, he's not relying on a boots-on-the-ground retail politics approach where he (or his surrogates) shake a lot of hands and kiss a lot of babies. He's relying largely on social media and the free publicity he gets from the 24-hour news cycle, for all the talking heads who have all that time to fill.
So no one is likely to personally ask you to put a Trump sign in your lawn. If you want one, your best bet is to order online from the Spalding Group's trumpstore2016.com website. (Most of the yard signs are $9.50 each; if you want something spiffier there's a three-foot by five-foot "Team Trump" flag made of "died [sic] 200 weight nylon" for $65.)
There are very few Hillary signs in our neighborhood as well; a few have popped up here and there and one neighbor, who lives on a conspicuous corner, seems to be having trouble keeping his upright. He's replaced them at least once, and moved them back from the street. (One of the chief reasons not to have a political sign in one's yard is that they always invite mischief; often from an apolitical element.)
For most of the year there were more signs pledging allegiance to Bernie Sanders than to HRC; they were the earliest to appear and there may still be a few remaining. This made sense because Sanders supporters tend to be more energized, and both aware and proud of their underdog status. They understood that if their candidate was to have any chance to upset an established favorite who was the presumptive nominee before a single primary vote was cast they'd have to grind.
I understand my neighborhood is not a fair sample of the wider world, and that within Arkansas it's an anomaly. Maybe there's an enclave in Fayetteville as progressive as Hillcrest, but our state is solidly red, and that means Trump now. Like the conservatives of Weimar Germany, our Republican "leaders" seem to have convinced themselves that character and principle don't matter, and that a preening bully with attention deficit disorder and a penchant for engaging in self-aggrandizing nationalistic rhetoric is a better choice to hold the most powerful office in the world than an unimaginative career bureaucrat who, when viewed from a historical perspective, is slightly more conservative than Richard Nixon.
At least that's one way to look at it.
Many of our state's leading Republicans are as aghast at Trump's temperament and bomb-throwing as everybody else, and they feel trapped. I don't think for one second that Asa Hutchinson or Tom Cotton is happy with the top of the GOP ticket; they've just made their calculations and figure that it's better to get in line and play nice than it would be to take a principled stand against Trump's un-Americanism.
Which is disappointing, but not shocking. They probably don't believe Trump can win; in their hearts, they probably don't want Trump to win. And there's a path forward for a Republican who remains loyal, even if--as is possible--Trump goes down to a historic defeat in November. If that happens, Cotton would be on the short list of potential candidates in 2020.
And if Trump wins--which is also possible and probably not as unlikely as traditional bellwethers indicate because Trump's campaign defies both logic and the conventional wisdom--then you better have been on his side. You better have been loyal. Because if Trump wins, he's going to at least try to purge the government of all those who opposed him. He's going to try to be the maximum leader.
So the back-of-the-envelope calculus for a mainstream Republican who wants an ongoing career in politics is to give Trump at least some cursory support. To at least suggest that he's a better alternative than the uninspiring Democrat (who we have to say really horrible things about because our candidate's worldview is that the world is terrible), even though she'd probably be a better steward for a lot of the GOP's client corporations.
Because if they don't support even the most disastrous Republican nominee, the whole party could break apart. If, say, Paul Ryan had withheld his endorsement and offered himself as a potential third-party, more authentically Republican, candidate, plenty of traditional GOP voters would have followed him. And he would have stopped Trump.
But at the cost of electing Hillary Clinton.
Which would have been good for the country. But maybe not good for their careers. So let's risk giving Trump the office, trusting that our Constitution, courts and Congress can control him. After all, how much havoc could a mad president wreak?
But here's the thing: Americans didn't vote for Donald Trump because he ran as a Republican. He ran as a Republican because it was the path of least resistance. His supporters don't care about the party, they've opportunistically infected the GOP in order to make use of its apparatus, of its brand. Trump doesn't have any core principles, and neither do a lot of his supporters. They have simply bought into his cult of personality.
And they have latched onto Trump because they're desperate and aggrieved. Some of them are poor, and some of their grievances are genuine and have long been ignored by politicians who took their votes (or their non-votes) for granted. They have been beat down so long they are willing to take a flyer on a self-promoting celebrity who promises, in plain and unequivocal words, to redress the wrongs they feel they've have suffered, to return to them a nostalgic vision of an America that's whiter, richer and more powerful than the attenuated vision of the present country their candidate promotes.
They don't know much about history, and they couldn't care less about the ways things are usually done. They don't live in Hillcrest or the Heights. They're wounded and hurt. And some of them vote.
They can make their own signs.
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Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.
Editorial on 07/26/2016