Elites don’t understand most Americans, either
By Joe Scarborough
Special To The Washington Post
Donald Trump’s sweeping victories Tuesday night move the Manhattan billionaire a step closer to winning the Republican nomination for president and to pulling off the most improbable political feat in modern American history. But Trump’s story is about more than a first-time candidate’s stunning rise. It is also about the humiliating defeat suffered by an increasingly isolated political and media class who still do not understand the causes and scope of Trump’s populist revolt.
In his book “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010,” Charles Murray wrote about the rise of a new American upper class and the “narrow elites” who shape America’s economy, culture and government. The number of players who dominate the direction of media, politics and finance is surprisingly concentrated for a country as sprawling and diverse as the United States. And yet almost all of these “influencers” across Manhattan and Washington were incapable of blunting Trump’s meteoric rise. Time and again over the past year, Washington insiders and media moguls misread the mood of working-class voters and their attraction to the populist message championed by Trump.
On Tuesday, that message which undermines Republican orthodoxy on trade, taxes and immigration resonated with GOP primary voters so strongly that Trump cruised to lopsided victories in Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Delaware and Maryland.
So why did these “narrow elites” miss the mark so badly when the topic turned to Trump? Because most of them are hopelessly isolated from the other 300 million or so Americans who inconveniently share their country.
Murray writes that most members of the narrow elite don’t watch much television. If they watch any news programs, it is probably the PBS “NewsHour” (or “Morning Joe”!). Powerful influencers have also watched other television shows over the past decade like “Mad Men,” “House of Cards,” “Breaking Bad,” “Game of Thrones” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” While such critically acclaimed shows are often consumed by narrow elites in frantic fits of binge watching, the other 300 million Americans view television a bit differently.
Murray reports that the average American watches about 35 hours of television a week. Since 2004, Trump has starred in 14 seasons of “The Apprentice.” And if you’re a member of the narrow elite that holds sway over media coverage or government policy, chances are good that you saw few episodes of “The Apprentice” or “Survivor.”
But millions of Americans did, and perhaps that kind of mass consumption is why Trump will beat Don Draper at the polls every time.
History may not repeat itself, but it does rhyme when the topic turns to TV careers and Republican politicians. From 1956 to 1962, Ronald Reagan hosted General Electric Theater and had his image beamed into more than 20 million homes every week. The successful run on TV gave Reagan a connection with American voters that his movie career never could. By the time Reagan ran for governor of California in 1966, the GE host was a household name. Reagan’s landslide victory shocked elites in and out of the political class and launched a conservative revolution that would last a generation.
50 years later, that revolution is being undone by another TV star who has been underestimated by elites while being elevated by working-class voters. The question now is whether Trump can prove his critics wrong again by winning the nomination and then defeating Hillary Clinton in the fall. The odds may be long for the New York developer and reality star, but no longer than the ones he faced last June when he first sought the GOP nomination.
Joe Scarborough, a former Republican congressman from Florida, hosts the MSNBC show “Morning Joe.”
He’s an authentic phony, and entertaining, too
By Michael Kinsley
Special to The Washington Post
The chances of Donald Trump becoming the Republican nominee for president have gone from impossible to probable, while Hillary Clinton’s chances of being the Democrat have moved from likely to virtually certain. So, barring more surprises, it’s probably going to be Hillary vs. The Donald in the fall.
There is no mystery about Clinton. Those who support her as well as those who oppose her have little trouble explaining why. Trump is another matter. No one I know would even consider voting for Trump. So who are all these millions who support him? Why, they are working-class white men, we are told, who feel betrayed by the failure of both parties to deal with stagnant incomes, growing debts and shrinking possibilities for their retirements and their children’s futures.
It’s a plausible theory. And it may help to explain Bernie Sanders. But no one has ever associated Trump with these blue-collar issues. How has he become the tribune of the people in this election? Is he just the one who got there first?
The explanation is not so difficult. In the opening paragraph of his novel “Ravelstein,” Saul Bellow writes, “Anyone who wants to govern the country has to entertain it.”Clinton has been called many things, but “entertaining” is not one of them. This is not the case with Trump, who is an authentic American character like something out of Mark Twain. All the other candidates except Sanders had the character squeezed out of them when they decided they wanted to be president. Trump’s a phony of course (not to mention a racist), but his phoniness is authentic. He’s self-made — not in the financial sense, but characterologically.
And what a character! You always want to know what he will say or do next. To be sure, it’s not really the president’s job to keep the citizenry entertained, although voting on the basis of entertainment value is not entirely irrational, given that entertainment is the main benefit you’re likely to get from our political system. Anyway, not knowing what he’ll do next does have its charms, and they go beyond entertainment.
During the nuclear standoff of the 1960s and 1970s, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger took advantage of a doctrine out of the branch of economics known as game theory, which holds that sometimes it pays to be — or at least to be perceived to be — crazy. No rational person would ever start a nuclear war. So the one who can get the other side to back down in any future nuclear standoff is the one who convinces the world that he or she is more irrational. Vladimir Putin has done a pretty good job here, you have to admit. Imagine Putin and any of the American presidential candidates facing each other across the nuclear divide, each threatening to push the button unless their demands are met. Which of the Americans is crazy enough to actually do it?
When Barack Obama proposes something, you know it’s been analyzed and balanced and weighed against the alternatives, tested in the laboratory and found to be a reasonable solution given the limitations and under the circumstances. When Trump faces some similar challenge, you don’t know what he’s going to say or do. And if he says he’s going to do something crazy, like get the Mexicans to pay for a wall across their own country to keep themselves out of ours, you can’t be sure he won’t actually try to do it.
It’s clear now that the title of Trump’s book “The Art of the Deal” actually reflects a philosophy of life: Trump believes that everything in life is a negotiation, a deal, and he believes that making deals uses skills that he has and his rivals lack. This is why he may even have been sincere in his puzzlement about why the media has been so insistent that he should reveal his tax returns. Paying taxes, like so much else in life, is a negotiation — at least at Trump’s level. And why would you give your opponent a major document, whether it reveals misbehavior or not? What is misbehavior, for that matter? It’s all up for negotiation.
People (read: liberals) are afraid of what Trump might do as president. All this silly talk about moving to Canada. But the thing to really worry about in a Trump presidency is what happens a couple of years from now, when people who have invested their hopes in Trump and his magic tricks discover that he is not the Wizard of Oz but rather the man behind the curtain.
Kinsley is a columnist for Vanity Fair magazine and a contributing columnist for The Washington Post.
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