Trump�s world resembles a wrestling spectacular
Trump�s appeal
is not in his
adherence to orthodoxy, his
consistency, his clarity, or his
genuineness. Rather it is in his showmanship
James Zogby
Donald Trumps candidacy for the Republican Party presidential nomination is American politics reduced to the absurd. It is theatre in its most stripped-down form a show where the content is not as important as the event and the raw emotion it evokes.
From the earliest days of his candidacy, pundits have failed to understand Trump. His appeal is not issue-based, since, as his critics have correctly observed, he has taken wildly contradictory positions on most core Republican concerns abortion, immigration and president Barack Obamas health care plan, to name a few. Trying, as some attempted, to find the hidden logic in his bizarre mishmash of words is, at best, a fools errand.
And pundits who have compared Trumps appeal among Republicans with Bernie Sanderss appeal with Democrats have missed the point. Young voters find Sanders authentic and believable. Trumps devotees, on the other hand, are more attracted to their candidates defiant bluster and his cavalier bull in the China shop demeanour.
He lies about his personal life, his business dealings, positions he has taken and things hes done. His supporters know it, but they dont care. They are angry, and he feeds their anger.
What they care about is the performance and this is what the pundits have missed, causing them to underestimate Trumps appeal and to repeatedly and mistakenly predict his demise.
During the course of this campaign, Trump has attacked a series of icons many considered taboo for Conservatives, including Fox News and its commentator Megyn Kelly, Senator John McCain, Pope Francis and the Iraq war. After each attack his candidacy was declared fatally wounded, until the next polls came out showing his strength undiminished.
Trumps appeal is not in his adherence to orthodoxy, his consistency, his clarity, or his genuineness. Rather it is in his performance. Seeing Trump at one of his rallies or observing him at a debate is much like watching an episode of WWE Smackdown.
Trump events remind me of this quote that opens a 2014 Forbes Magazine article on Vince McMahon, the billionaire wrestling promoter: Subtlety has no place in professional wrestling. Nuance is for losers. Either you play big to the smallest fan in the last row of the arena, to the millions tuning in each week on television or you go home ... [It is] a spectacle of excess.
The performance is false the bad guys are as phony as the good guys. Even the blows they deliver are fake. But the crowds love it, shaking their fists, whooping and yelling as the drama unfolds.
Like McMahon, Trump knows how to appeal to his crowd. He knows what they want and he delivers.
In the same article, McMahon describes his approach to his audience: I look at it like its a really nice monster. When you feed the monster, the monster is happy. The problem with that is, the monster grows. And as the monster grows, then the monster wants more to eat. And as long as you do that, everything is great. And if you dont provide the food, then bad things start to happen.
What everyone in the entertainment business dreams about is something called earned media, which is the curiously counter-intuitive term for the publicity a project receives from newspapers, websites, magazines and the entertainment press. Movie studios love earned media because its not paid media, or whats otherwise known to normal people, who like to call things what they are, as advertising.
Earned media happens whenever a movie is culturally significant like Star Wars or when one of the stars does something truly appalling like, well, pretty much half of the pictures ever released and suddenly the press swarms around the movie to cover the controversy. Entertainment journalists think theyre reporting the news, but studio executives know better: theyre advertising the movie for free.
This strategy works in politics, too. The current front-runner for the Republican Partys nomination for the office of president of the United States is billionaire loudmouth Donald Trump, who has spent, according to sources, barely $200,000 on advertising. His opponents have spent far more. Trump seems to be executing a clever earned media strategy of saying appalling things often enough to remain at the top of the news every day, all without spending much money.
That little parable is an apt description of the Republican establishments relationship with their Tea Party masses.
They created the monster, fed and nurtured it, but, in the end, they were unable to tame it. They fed its anger. They entertained it with the crude rants of Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann, using that anger against President Obama.
For a while the establishment was able to control this monster, for example by redirecting it to support Mitt Romney in 2012. But by 2016, this same leadership could no longer satisfy the hunger of their creation. And when the monster would no longer play ball with the establishment, it turned on them and looked elsewhere to have its anger entertained and fed.
Enter performance artist Donald Trump. His appeal is as raw as the WWE. Like McMahon, he plays with his audience, with an intuitive sense of what they want to see and hear. He is successful a billionaire, many times over. He has a beautiful wife or better, a series of beautiful wives. Despite his success, he feigns anger at Americas demise, promising his supporters that he will deliver greatness. And he appeals to their basest instincts.
He cruelly demeans his opponents. He paints the world in terms as starkly black and white as the WWE. He is a xenophobe and a bigot who targets Mexicans and Muslims. He is a bully who threatens to punch in the face hecklers who disrupt his events. And he is crude, using obscenities and vulgarities designed to incite to whoops and yells and shaking fists. In this way, the monster is fed and appears, at least for now, to be happy.
To make a decent wage at the celebrity impersonation business requires that the person you can impersonate be popular or notorious or in some other way desirable for audiences the guy who did a dead-on George W Bush really made a solid pile for a solid seven or eight years, Im pretty sure, and then it must have stopped suddenly when the caravan moved on.
Even the minor impersonators those not good enough to get jobs on big television shows still did extremely well appearing at parties and galas and corporate events.
Big cities like New York and Los Angeles have agencies dedicated to representing these performers. You can get a Michael Jackson lookalike to show up at your birthday party (assuming youd enjoy such a thing), or (almost) anyone else. As long as they are or were popular.
I got a call from a friend of mine the other day desperate for some help. Do I know, he asked, of any really good Donald Trump impersonators? He needed one for an event and said the words that everyone in show business, no matter how rich or famous, no matter what sector, motion picture, television, carnival act, always want to hear, which are: we are willing to pay a lot of money.
The danger that Trump poses is not that he is inconsistent or untruthful or that he lacks a coherent philosophy. It is that he is the reductio ad absurdum of our politics. He is the crude reality TV entertainer, turned leader without politics, just anger. He is not a Republican or a Conservative not that it matters to him or his followers. He is a budding fascist using his performance art to mobilise a monster that may devour America.
The writer is the president of the Arab American Institute
