The GOP richly deserves Donald Trump
Rather than an outlier,
Trump is the perfect front man for the “values” Republicans have been pursuing for well over a decade
Stephen Richter
The blue-blooded Republican Party establishment is shocked very shocked about the emergence of the brash New York billionaire Donald Trump as the partys current frontrunner for the 2016 presidential nomination.
It is so shocked indeed that many of them stayed away from this years Republican convention in Cleveland, Ohio.
And yet, despite all the embarrassment and hand wringing, having Donald Trump as its standard bearer is the logical consequence of the Republican Partys path over the past decade.
Trumps readily flaunts his wealth. Gone is any sense of serving the common good. Selfishness is not just in it is cast as a fundamental good.
What else did the Republicans, with their ever more direct embrace of the base instincts of the American people, expect?
The Donald is the immediate echo chamber of the callousness of all those Republican politicians who played dangerously on the baser instincts of the American people.
In many ways, all those that express their support for Donald Trump in the Republican Party nominating race demonstrate that they have understood the partys broader message.
It all comes back to that famous line from the iconic 1987 movie Wall Street about greed being good.
To savor the profound irony of it all, it indeed recalls verbatim the entire passage expressed by Michael Douglas (alias Gordon Gekko):
The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind.
He also speaks these words that, almost three decades later, appear to be very prescient:
The richest one percent of this country owns half our countrys wealth, five trillion dollars. One third of that comes from hard work, two thirds comes from inheritance, interest on interest accumulating to widows and idiot sons and what I do, stock and real estate speculation. Its bullshit. You got ninety percent of the American public out there with little or no net worth. I create nothing. I own. We make the rules, pal.
To the Democratic Party establishments great relief, this is not the result of any of Hillary Clintons missteps, of which there have been some. Rather, the problem emerged from the inside of the tent of the Republican Party. It is commonly called the Donald Trump problem.
The worst part for the Republicans is that Trump has the same effect as a Trojan horse. (Beware of the Greeks bearing gifts, Republicans of the United States!)
Trumps emergence in the polls in Iowa and New Hampshire gives the Democrats a secret weapon to frame the race and the entire Republican field well before a Republican nominee emerges.
Trumps troublesome personality characteristics and policies are essentially also true of nearly all the other Republican candidates, but nobody knows who they are and there are twenty of them. He jumped from 3% to 12% in CNNs polling of Republican voters nationwide from May 31 to June 28. That puts him within striking distance of Jeb Bush, whose campaign is floundering.
It would be one thing if Trumps downer effect were only that he embodies ostentatious even offensive wealth, far more so than Mitt Romney, the partys 2012 candidate, ever did. Romney came to symbolize the 1 pc class with just $250 million. Forbes values the flamboyant Trump at a minimum of $4.1 billion.
That also means that Trump outperforms the previous wealthiest candidate ever to seek the U.S. presidency Ross Perot by a factor of two. (Perot ran in 1992 as an independent against President George H.W. Bush and then-Governor Bill Clinton.)
So, he paints Republicans firmly into the corner of the money worshippers (which inoculates Hillary Clinton against similar charges).
But an ocean of money is not Trumps only similarity to Mr. Perot. Trump represents a similar brand of nativist economic populism that is popular with a sizable chunk of American voters.
In an era where Democrats are publicly debating the economic values of their party, Trump helps divert the (rightly or wrongly) feared label of economic populist.
That alone would not cause Republicans a problem, were it not for the unfortunate fact that nearly all their major candidates this cycle are promoting similarly ridiculous and nativist platforms on economics, immigration and beyond.
Where Trump does Hillarys (and the Democrats) bidding is that he is a very loud magnet for media attention. Without the Democrats trying (and leaving fingerprints), Trump highlights how not-ready-for-primetime the rest of the Republican field is. His outrageous views on racial minorities are doubly politically problematic: First, he profits off employing illegal workers at construction sites. And second, the silence of the Republican field to stand up to Trumps race-baiting is as deafening as it is electorally deadly.
It is a well-known fact that, in order to win the White House, Republicans must get more than 40 pc of the Hispanic vote. After Donald Trump spewing his mouth so loudly and so blatantly, that is a very hard target to reach.
The rest of the field is somewhat less loud or more restrained on the race-baiting issue. But there is little daylight between him and them on this topic.
These two remarks can be seen as perfect expressions of the operating mantra of the Republican Party. In that sense, Donald Trump is Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko running for president in 2016.
In other words, the emergence of Donald Trump has been a long time coming. It is, in fact, the perfect reversal of the emergence of Ronald Reagan in 1980.
Back then, a B movie actor ultimately managed to get elected as president of the United States. Trump is already very successful but given the shadiness of many of his deals still a B level entrepreneur.
He lives the Reagan dream in reverse: A run for the White House is not the path to Trumps career capstone, as it was for Reagan. Rather, it is something that is left to do for the man who already has everything else.
Under any circumstances, the Republican Party establishment should stop feeling shocked by the emergence of Donald Trump. He personifies down to the t exactly what they and their highly elitist and utterly materialist philosophy stand for.
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