[This post was originally published on The Living Room Tumblr.]
Last Friday, I attended the Western Conservative Summit in Denver, armed with a press pass, thus making me a member of the hated elite media for the day, with a front-row seat (okay, actually, back row) for a Donald Trump speech.
It was, let us just say, an experience.
This was my first time seeing Trump in person—and one of the few times I’ve heard him speak uninterrupted for any length of time. I don’t watch much cable news, and my blood pressure literally spikes when I listen to him too much. But, even so, it seemed worth attending #WCS16 to try and get a better understanding of Trump and Trumpism. (Plus, I got some sweet, sweet retweets out of it. Trump = clicks, amiright, Fourth Estate?!?)
Anyway, I wrote up a column / blog post on my observations, which I submitted to a conservative publication that had expressed some interest in potentially publishing it. But, in the end, they elected not to do so—perhaps not too surprisingly, given how anti-Trump my take was. So, with no hard feelings on that score, I’ve decided to go ahead and publish it here.
* * * * *
The Amazing Incoherence Of Donald Trump
As attendees at last Friday’s Western Conservative Summit in Denver eagerly awaited the arrival of headline speaker Donald Trump—whose “Trump Train” was running nearly an hour late—they were treated to various stalling tactics, including a few extra speeches, some lovely a capella music, and a video by Dennis Prager about the Ten Commandments, played on the big screen in the Mile High Ballroom. The video may have been intended mostly to kill time, but it provided an unintentionally poignant warmup to Trump.
Prager warns in the video that, in the absence of universal moral laws, “it’s all too easy … to rationalize that the wrong you’re doing isn’t really wrong.” According to Prager, faith in God and adherence to His laws is the only path to solid, well-grounded truths about right and wrong, which flawed human beings need in order to resist being “swayed by … a demagogue.”
A half-hour later, Trump, a man who imposes religious tests on would-be immigrants and ethnic tests on federal judges, was standing at the podium, declaring that “the evangelicals have been so amazing to me.” He told the audience that Jerry Falwell, Jr.’s endorsement “had such a huge impact” (although he also said endorsements “have never been that important to me”), and recalled his warm reception at Liberty University (or “Liberty College,” as he called it). “The evangelicals have been great,” reiterated the thrice-married serial liar, misogynist, bigot, conspiracy theorist, and presumptive GOP nominee, who last year pledged to order U.S. soldiers to murder the family members of terrorists.
Perhaps faith in God, and adherence to His laws, is less of a shield against demagoguery than Prager thought.
I suppose, at this point, I should introduce myself to this site’s readers, and state my biases in the interest of full disclosure. Hi, I’m Brendan, and I’m a center-left moderate. (“Hi, Brendan.”) It has been nine days since I last voted for a Democrat. (Colorado had state and local primary elections last Tuesday.)
Yet while I may be a card-carrying Dem, I have sometimes been called a “DINO,” and occasionally the “Joe Lieberman of Twitter,” meaning I’m the token Democrat who a lot of Republicans and conservatives seem to think is an okay guy. (Don’t believe me; believe my Twitter friends at, e.g., National Review and RedState.) I agree with conservatives on a number of issues; I have a great deal of respect for my many principled conservative friends (with whom I stand in #NeverTrump solidarity, on principle); and I genuinely believe that conservatives have an important and necessary voice, even on issues where I disagree with them. Without a strong conservative movement, the excesses on “my” side would hold too much sway.
(That includes, by the way, excessive political correctness run amok, in particular the tendency to excessively brand conservatives as “racists” merely for holding views which are outside the left-of-center cultural zeitgeist, but which are not necessarily bigoted on their face. Broadly speaking, I agree with conservatives about that. So when I call Donald Trump a bigot, it’s not because I routinely call conservatives bigots. I don’t. I only use the term “bigot” to describe people who actually engage in outright bigotry. Like Trump.)
In addition to being fairly centrist, I also try to be open-minded and objective, or at least fair, such that I can set aside my personal feelings about a political leader in order to assess and analyze their appeal. I certainly don’t claim to be perfect in this regard, but I think I do a reasonably good job of it. What’s more, I like to see political figures of all stripes, in person. This allows me to hear them out, draw my own conclusions about them, and try to understand them and their appeal. Thus, I have been to events featuring everyone from Bernie Sanders, Barack Obama, Hillary and Bill Clinton, Elizabeth Warren, Jesse Jackson, Martin O’Malley and Al Gore, to Paul Ryan, Marco Rubio, Sarah Palin, Rick Santorum, Mitt Romney, Ron and Rand Paul, John Kasich, Glenn Beck, and the late Antonin Scalia, among many others. And for the most part, even when I strongly disagree with someone, I come away from these events understanding them better, and often finding at least something to admire or appreciate.
For instance, in 2008, I absolutely couldn’t stand Palin, or what I felt she represented about American politics. Yet when I went to her election eve campaign rally in Colorado Springs, I found her to be charismatic, compelling and charming as a speaker. To be clear, I still would never, ever support her—but I could understand, at some level, why many conservatives did. Another example: although I am an ardent supporter of gay marriage and other liberal social causes, I found in 2012 that I was genuinely moved by the way Rick Santorum speaks about his faith (as I told him afterward when I shook his hand), and I was also impressed by his skills as a retail politician. In 2014, I greatly enjoyed and admired the intellectual vigor of Justice Scalia’s address to a conference I attended, even where I disagreed with him. In 2015, when I heard Rand Paul’s stump speech (which was really more like a TED Talk on the Bill of Rights), I came away impressed, and feeling that this was a Republican who I could potentially vote for.
All of which is a long-winded way of saying that I don’t automatically reject or condemn a Republican or a conservative when I listen to them talk. Nor am I a liberal concern-troll. I try my best to listen with an open mind, and I think I usually succeed.
And yet. Donald J. Trump. Yeesh. What have you done, Republicans? Why have you chosen this man?!
I came away from last Friday’s event at the Colorado Convention Center feeling utterly baffled by Trump’s appeal, even moreso than when I walked in. Often, my reaction to a politician I dislike on substance, such as a Palin or a Santorum, is something like: “Okay, not for me, but I get it.“ I understand the appeal, even if I fervently disagree. Not with Trump, though. For the life of me, I do not understand how this person was able to amass so much support that he will almost certainly be a major-party nominee for President of the United States of America.
Trump was off-teleprompter in Denver, so his speech followed his natural off-the-cuff speaking style. In other words, it was a rambling mess. As best as I can tell, he seemed to be relying on a short list of topics, which he would periodically consult to remind himself of what he still needed to discuss—but that was the extent of the speech’s structure. He would meander from topic to topic, sometimes appearing to distract himself with his own words, somewhat like a dog who has spotted a squirrel. It was genuinely quite bizarre, like watching one’s affable but mildly racist uncle, perhaps slightly drunk, hold forth about various topics, struggling to maintain a coherent thread throughout his rolling barside rant.
For instance, at one point Trump was talking about the Supreme Court, recalling how he had gotten recommendations on possible picks from the Federalist Society, which he described as the “gold standard” for conservative jurisprudence. So far, so good. But then suddenly he was reminded, by his own improvised use of the phrase “gold standard,” of a comment Hillary Clinton once made about the Trans Pacific Partnership, and so he abruptly wandered off into a several-minute digression about the TPP and trade. Eventually he returned to discussing the Supreme Court—which he cast in apocalyptic terms, asserting that if multiple vacancies are filled by the next president, those seats on the Court will be the difference between America staying free or “becoming Venezuela"—but he only stayed focused on the Court briefly before veering off again, this time into one of his countless asides about how many votes he got, how many states he won, and how well he is doing in the polls. (He is not doing well in the polls.)
What I find so baffling about Trump is how he has managed overcome numerous manifest political disadvantages—ideological, political, moral—despite being, frankly, so fundamentally unskilled. It may be sacrilege to called him “unskilled,” given that he’s come this far and done so well in the primaries, but it’s the truth. Like lipstick on a pig, Trump’s electoral successes cannot mask the fundamental fact that he is not very good at this. (And also that he’s a pig.)
His speech in Denver began, fittingly, with a factually dishonest condemnation of Colorado’s caucus/convention process, about which Trump professed a false memory of having seen “polls” showing him winning the “vote” in Colorado, only to learn that “all of a sudden” there would not be a vote. Allow me to set the record straight. There was a vote. On March 1, in a legitimate, time-tested process of indirect democracy that has been regularly used by the Colorado GOP in many prior elections (and was agreed upon for this year’s election in the summer of 2015), thousands of voters gathered at GOP precinct caucuses across the state to elect delegates to county and congressional district conventions. The candidates for precinct delegate had every opportunity to declare their allegiance to a presidential contender, so that each voter at the caucus would know whether they were voting for a Trump delegate, a Cruz delegate, a Rubio delegate, a Carson delegate, or what-have-you. Based on what I’ve heard from my Republican friends who voted in the caucuses, it seems that this generally occurred. Through this process, Colorado voters knowingly chose county/district delegates who were, by large majorities, anti-Trump. The county delegates, in turn, elected anti-Trump delegates to the state convention, who, along with the district delegates, elected anti-Trump delegates (which, by the final stage of the process in April, meant Cruz delegates) to the national convention. This traditional multi-stage process is admittedly indirect and convoluted, but it was known in advance, it was fully in keeping with the longstanding rules and norms of the traditional caucus-convention system, and it was most definitely not some sort of last-minute response to "polls” showing Trump ahead. Moreover, in the final analysis, the system reflected the evident will of Colorado’s GOP voters (in those precinct caucuses on Super Tuesday), a substantial majority of whom, as it turns out, were anti-Trump. Those are the facts of the situation.
Facts be damned, though, Trump circled back to this issue repeatedly throughout his speech, at one point drawing audible groans and a few jeers from the otherwise friendly audience when he declared, falsely: “As soon as they saw how well I did in the polls, they went to a delegate system where they appoint the delegates.” Not a single word in that sentence is true.
Still, it doesn’t confuse me that the Republican Party is set to nominate a liar. So is the Democratic Party, many readers are thinking, and fair enough. Many politicians lie. I would argue (strongly) that Trump is manifestly more shameless than most, routinely contradicting himself and telling an endless stream of blatant lies about objectively verifiable facts without even plausible deniability. But still, if you want to argue that his dishonesty, as opposed to other politicians’ dishonesty, is a quantitative rather than qualitative difference – i.e., merely a matter of degree – I’ll grant that point, at least for the sake of argument. So, no, Trump’s dishonesty isn’t what baffles me about him. My bafflement relates more to the Party of Lincoln’s blithe acceptance of fascistic demagoguery—and also, the fact that this man, this potential President of the United States seven months hence, is manifestly psychologically damaged, yet most GOP voters and “leaders” are apparently okay with that.
To be specific about what I mean by “psychologically damaged”: the Republican Party is set to nominate someone who is so transparently narcissistic, so utterly captive to his raging ego, that he endlessly obsesses over every slight, real or perceived, and seems actually unable to move past something like the controversy over Colorado’s delegate allocation (which has no relevance going forward, barring a miraculous Hail Mary on the convention floor in Cleveland by the almost certainly outmanned #FreeTheDelegates movement). It makes no political sense for Trump to keep bringing up this topic—just as it made no political sense for him to keep doubling- and tripling-down on his racist attacks against Judge Curiel, or for him to keep discussing up Saddam Hussein and the Star of David during a week when he should have been laser-focused on Hillary Clinton’s (genuinely troubling) e-mail misdeeds. But when Trump is sufficiently piqued, when his ego is sufficiently upset, he appears to literally lack the capacity to stop himself.
Moreover, much like his bigotry, his transparent phoniness, and his conman hucksterism, Trump’s uncontrolled narcissism and inability to let it go is hardly subtle. In the context of this presidential campaign, those traits have been in plain sight at least since the Megyn Kelly brouhaha last August. Why, then, did GOP voters choose such an emotionally imbalanced, psychologically unfit person to be their nominee—particularly when he has so many other deficiencies as well, from his “yuge” ideological apostasies (which utterly horrify my principled conservative friends) to his frighteningly fascistic tendencies about everything from restrictions on the First Amendment to the open encouragement of political violence?
Normally, the answer to such a question would be “charisma.” It would hardly be a unique circumstance in human history if a charismatic demagogue were to rise to power. And I thought perhaps I would discover by attending WCS that Trump, in person, has a powerful charisma that I had missed on TV. But no! Trump isn’t especially charismatic! On the contrary, he is rambling and meandering, repetitive and unpersuasive, boorish and blatantly ignorant! Hence why I left the Convention Center feeling more baffled than ever about Trump’s appeal.
Admittedly, there were a couple of moments in Trump’s speech when he displayed flashes of a charming sense of humor—namely, when he mocked the claim that Bill Clinton and Loretta Lynch were just talking about “grandchildren and golf” during their recent airport chat, and when he teased John Kerry over his bicycle accident. His riffs on those topics were not shrill or strident, but genuinely funny. Yet those moments were the exception. For the most part, Trump was neither charming nor particularly compelling as a speaker.
Moreover, consistent with what we’ve seen all campaign long, he showed no ability whatsoever to pivot from his humorous asides and scathing attacks into serious discussion of policy. There was never a hint of substance beneath the slogans and the stumbles. Outside of a few reasonably well-delivered canned lines, and those two moments of charming humor, the best adjective to describe Trump’s speech might be “bumbling.” As for the best word to describe my impression of Trump himself, based solely on what I saw last Friday, I vacillate between “ignoramus,” “loon” and “oaf.”
You might think that I would feel comforted by what I observed last Friday regarding Trump’s baffling lack of skill, since it means he will probably lose in November. After all, I’m a Democrat who would never vote for Donald Trump in a million years. (Nor, incidentally, would I ever vote for a Democratic mirror-image of Trump, i.e., a left-wing fascistic demagogue who poses a threat to liberal democracy in the way that I believe Trump does. I would sooner vote for the grating, loathsome Ted Cruz than for such a person.) So I should be happy about anything that suggests Trump’s a likely loser, right? But no. I don’t feel comforted. Instead, I feel disconcerted and troubled.
If an unqualified, bumbling oaf who is transparently a pathological liar, bigot and idiot – but who speaks the language of a fascistic demagogue – can successfully complete a hostile takeover of a major American political party without being particularly skilled at demagoguery, what could a skilled demagogue accomplish? If a politician with the personal charisma of, say, Marco Rubio or Cory Gardner or Bill Clinton or Barack Obama decided to go down the dark demagogic path Trump that has trod, with the same utter shamelessness he’s shown, such a person most likely would not be languishing around 40 percent in the polls, as Trump currently is. Instead, such a person might well be winning, especially against an opponent as weak as Hillary Clinton. And that is a frightening thought.
If the only things stopping Donald Trump from becoming President of the United States are his own manifest personal flaws—rather than a principled rejection of what he represents—then I fear we may have deeper problems as a nation than just deciding between two unpalatable candidates this year.
* * * * *
