"After
Donald Trump’s bombastic performance in last week’s debate, it’s clear that the
key to his appeal is not his policy positions, which are all over the map. No,
it’s all about his personality, and the paradox is that the more unpleasant his
personality is revealed to be,
the greater his appeal to his core group of supporters.
For
example, one of my readers responded to my article criticizing the new
EPA rules on power plants by touting Trump as the only candidate with “the
balls” to dismantle the EPA. In reality, there is no basis in Trump’s background,
his ideology (if he had one), or his public statements to think he would do
anything in particular with the EPA. But that’s how Trump is regarded: as a
cure for what ails you, as an all-purpose tonic for whatever somebody thinks is
wrong with our current system.
People are projecting onto Trump what they want to see.
People
are projecting onto Trump what they want to see. They are pouring into him
their fantasies about what could be accomplished by a strong leader who doesn’t
care about making people angry. But that’s a dangerous fantasy to indulge.
To
be sure, every presidential election is about personality. We are electing a
leader who is going to make important decisions and will have to stick to them
in the face of opposition. So when we look at a candidate, we’re not just
looking at the values he endorses, the ideas he claims to believe, or the
specific platform he has announced. We’re also asking whether he’s the sort of
person who really means what he says, whether he has the guts to stand up to
opposition, whether he has the charisma to rally other people to his cause, and
whether he has the negotiating skills to broker deals without getting taken for
a ride.
But there’s a difference between this kind of
judgment about character and a cult of personality. The cult of personality is
a general faith in the leader—whereas a considered judgment about a candidate
is based on specific facts about the candidate’s record and past performance. So we might look to a candidate’s record in
the Senate. Did he stand up against legislative cave-ins? Has he shown a
willingness to buck the establishment? Or we might look to his term as
governor. Did he accomplish something important? Has he faced down opposition
without folding?
The
GOP has plenty of people with pretty good records on this. Ted Cruz and Rand
Paul have shown they’re not afraid to lock horns with the GOP establishment.
Scott Walker and Chris Christie have pushed through state-level reforms against
vicious opposition. You may not like the specific positions of some of these
candidates—the overlaps between Chris Christie supporters and Rand Paul
sympathizers has got to be pretty much nil. But there’s almost certainly
someone other than Trump in this race who has a longer, more consistent track
record for promoting any particular policy preferences.
Support for Trump is about how loudly and recklessly he’s
willing to break things
That’s
not what support for Trump is about. Support for Trump is not about what a
candidate has actually done. It’s about how loudly and recklessly he’s willing
to break things. Support for Trump is a protest vote, but not a rationally
considered protest vote in favor of a specific cause. It’s an expression of
general, unfocused rage. Trump supporters just want someone who’s willing to
turn over the tables and call people names and burn the place down. And that’s
why the more unpleasant Trump is—the more he insults lady reporters and boasts about how rich he is, the more he thumps his chest about how sexy he is
and calls everybody else a loser—the more they love him.
The result is a disturbing kind of cult of
personality. I asked earlier about precedents for unpleasant personalities as
the basis of a cult. Well, consider the original editions of the “cult of
personality,” the ones built up around
Stalin and Mao. Or more recently, the one built around Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez.
All of these men had a
certain blustering charisma, much like The Donald, but they could be even more
abrasive, boastful, thoughtless, insulting, and crude. And each benefited from
the same paradox: the less he adhered to any standards of responsible behavior
the more he thrilled his true believers with what a tough guy he was, with how
much he was supposedly a strong leader who would face down the capitalist
running dog imperialist fascists and deliver for “the people.”"
