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The Trump Possibility
By Roger Cohen | October 3,
2016
Donald Trump is a thug. He’s
a thug who talks gibberish, and lies, and cheats, and has issues, to put it
mildly, with women. He’s lazy and limited and he has an attention span of a
nanosecond. He’s a “gene believer” who thinks he has “great genes” and considers
the German blood, of which he is proud, “great stuff.” Mexicans and Muslims, by
contrast, don’t make the cut.
He’s managed to bring penis
size and menstrual cycles and the eating habits of a former Miss Universe into
the debate for the highest office in the land. He’s mocked and mimicked the
handicapped and the pneumonia-induced malaise of Hillary Clinton. His
intellectual interests would not fill a safe-deposit box at Trump Tower.
There’s more ingenuity to his hairstyle than any of his rambling pronouncements.
His political hero is Vladimir Putin, who has perfected what John le Carré once
called the “classic, timeless, all-Russian, bare-faced whopping lie.”
This is a man who likes to
strut and gloat. He’s such a great businessman he declared a loss of $916
million on his 1995 tax return, a loss so huge the tax software program used by
his accountant choked at the amount, which had to be added manually. His
cohorts, including the former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, reckon this makes
Trump a “genius” because he could offset the loss against many millions of
dollars of income for years afterward and perhaps pay not a dime in taxes. All
of which did a lot of good for the United States of America and all the working
stiffs who did not know that losing about a billion dollars is a financial
masterstroke.
And this man, with the
support of tens of millions of Americans, is a hairbreadth from the Oval
Office.
I am shocked — yes, shocked!
— Trump’s burbling about the Iran nuclear deal in the first presidential debate
has received little attention. He called it “the worst deal I think I’ve ever
seen negotiated,” before suggesting “Iran has power over North Korea” and
should use it, before saying Iran had been given $400 million and then $1.7
billion and then $150 billion, as well as saying, “this is one of the worst
deals ever made by any country in history!”
Of course, Trump has no idea
what is in the agreement, since that would require reading it, and so he would
not have an inkling that it has slashed and ring-fenced Iran’s nuclear capacity
until 2030, reversing the Islamic Republic’s steady accumulation of
centrifuges, and has also opened the way for Boeing to sell Iran 80 commercial
passenger aircraft — just the sort of job-creating deal Trump professes to like.
And this man, whose meanness
and petulance and childlike inadequacies have been on display for more than a
year now, may become president next month.
How is this possible? It is
possible because spectacle and politics have merged and people no longer know
fact from fiction or care about the distinction. It is possible because fear
has entered people’s lives and that fear is easily manipulated. It is possible
because technology has created anxiety-multipliers such as have never been
known before. It is possible because America is a country living with the dim
dissatisfaction of two wars without victory and the untold trillions spent on
them. It is possible because a very large number of people want to give the
finger to the elites who brought the crash of 2008 and rigged the global system
and granted themselves impunity. It is possible because of growing inequality
and existential dread, especially among the white losers from globalization who
know minorities will be the majority in the United States by midcentury. It is
possible because both major parties have abandoned the working class. It is
possible because a lot of Americans feel the incumbent in the White House has
undersold the United States, diminished its distinctive and exceptional nature,
talked down its power, and so diluted its greatness and abdicated its
responsibility for the well-being of the free world. It is possible because the
identity politics embraced by urban, cosmopolitan liberals have provoked an
inevitable backlash among those who think white lives matter, too. It is
possible because Trump speaks to the basest but also some of the most
ineradicable traits of human beings — their capacity for mob anger, their
racist resentments, their cruelty, their lust, their search for scapegoats,
their insecurities — and promises a miraculous makeover. It is possible because
the Clinton family has been in the White House and cozy with the rich and close
to the summit of a discredited political establishment for a quarter-century
now and, to people who want change or bridle at dynastic privilege, that makes
Hillary Clinton an unattractive candidate. It is possible because history
demonstrates there is no limit to human folly or the dimensions of the
disasters humanity can bring on itself.
Yes, it is possible. There is
still time to stop a man who keeps stooping lower. That time is now.
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