and put the blame for his popularity squarely where it belongs . . . on the shoulders of the people who support him. You’ll get no argument from me that he’s an offensive blowhard, a congenital liar and an inarticulate buffoon. There isn’t enough Valium in the world to get me through two sentences of one of his speeches. However, he’s balanced on the edge of a total victory to win the Republican party’s nomination for president because the people who are flocking to his rallies and voting for him in primaries and caucuses eat the misogynist, racist, hate-filled, intolerance he’s dishing out with a spoon.
He’s dangerous, not because he is personally capable of stirring up people to behave in a way that is foreign to their nature, but because he is the instrument they are using to vent their ugliest biases and deepest sense of victimization. The press has got to stop whitewashing, if you’ll pardon the expression, his appeal by attributing it vaguely to “voter anger” without identifying exactly what that anger is. These people are angry there’s a black president, they’re angry that black and brown people are becoming a larger segment of the population than whites, they’re angry that Christianity cannot become the national religion, they’re angry at women who want control over their bodies and equal pay for equal work, they’re sure the government is coming for their guns and they’re angry that homosexuals are destroying America. In short, these people are royally pissed off because it’s no longer 1955 when white men ruled, people knew their place and life had order and simplicity.
Without this dark, angry underbelly of America whose fear and ignorance Republicans and their talk-radio surrogates have stoked and fueled for votes, there would be no Donald Trump. Or knowing Donald Trump, he would still be on the scene but saying very different things.
Because the biggest joke of all is that Donald Trump is a huckster, a carnival showman who doesn’t believe a word of what comes out of his own mouth. He never doubted where Obama was born, he doesn’t think a wall between Mexico and America should be built, unless he can get the contract for building it, he doesn’t believe Muslims should be denied entry to our country or American Muslims should be rounded up in detention camps. He doesn’t believe anything. When it comes to Donald Trump, there is no there there.
But there is something there when it comes to who our country is just below the surface. The media has got to stop reporting on the Trump phenomena as an entertaining sideshow, and start reporting on the ugly reality of who is supporting him and why. There’s a reason that nothing he says or does, no matter how outrageous or repellent, affects his popularity. He is simply the cipher by which his followers can express their nastiest, basest, meanest beliefs free of the judgments such sentiments usually engender. Donald Trump is not dangerous because he’s leading a movement. He’s dangerous because his candidacy allows that movement free reign.