In Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, the epic tale of the battle of good vs. evil, one character looks like a perfect respondent for the today’s election tracking polls. It’s Barliman Butterbur, one of the “Big Folk” in Bree, where hobbits and men interact. He owns and operates a small business (The Prancing Pony), seems to lack any college education, and worries about emerging threats from abroad. His memory even for important details from the recent past is spotty at best. He seems not to be the quickest or most critical thinker. So, is he a natural Trump voter? Not necessarily.
Guess who respects Butterbur. It’s Gandalf, the pipe-smoker who will lead us to reason. He warns against making the mistake of thinking Butterbur is stupid. “He can see through a brick wall in time (as they say in Bree),” the wizard informs us.
The real purpose and measure of human intelligence is not reading speed, or mathematics, or chess, or music, or memorization, where facility varies a lot from person to person. It’s figuring out, over time, whom we dare not trust in critical matters, because the stage presence is a lie and the person underneath is a bum. For most of us, this can take a while. We don’t marry someone we’ve known only six weeks. In too short an election cycle, Butterbur might not yet have enough information under his belt. But give him time.
Trump has finally worn out his welcome. He is going to lose in November for the same reason he won in May and June. He took the nomination because, at long last, the GOP-leaning Butterbur voter has grown sick of broken Republican promises to make the beer-drinking everyman rich by first making billionaires richer. GOP voters joined together to reject the anti-gay, anti-choice, anti-science, anti-minority, anti-worker, anti-poor, anti-secular, pro-billionaire, pro-shutdown, pro-gun show loophole, pro-voucher, pro-voter suppression, pro-corporate raider GOP regulars that have tried so hard for the last 20 years to loot the little hope and security they have left. Two Trump issues did resonate with voters’ unease when the rest of the GOP platform did not – trade and border security. And so they picked the Donald an outsider, a non-Republican, as they roundly rejected the rest of the GOP field.
But now, Donald’s party is over. Butterbur is seeing through the brick wall. With the primary over, voters realize Trump and the new GOP are one. Even if their suspicions of free trade, immigrants, and minorities persist (which is a good bet), they will dump Trump in the general election because by then they will know him. They’ll have had twenty years to wake up to the moral bankruptcy of the new GOP, plus a year get to know the corrupt, empty deceptions of Donald Trump.