The real reason for Trump's rise

Lennart Gabel

Jonathan Chait in May, 2016:

Why did almost everybody fail to predict Donald Trump’s victory in the Republican primaries? Nate Silver blames the news media, disorganized Republican elites, and the surprising appeal of cultural grievance. Nate Cohn lists a number of factors, from the unusually large candidate field to the friendly calendar. Jim Rutenberg thinks journalism strayed too far from good old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting. Justin Wolfers zeroes in on Condorcet’s paradox. 

Here’s the factor I think everybody missed: The Republican Party turns out to be filled with idiots. Far more of them than anybody expected...

...While it’s impolite and politically counterproductive, if we want to accurately identify the analytic error that caused so many of us to dismiss Trump, we must return to the idiocy question. The particular idiocy involves both the party’s elites and its voters. (emphasis added)

The failures of the elites have been the source of analysis for months now. Republican insiders and donors failed to grasp the severity of the threat Trump posed to their party, many of them rallied behind obviously doomed legacy candidate Jeb Bush, or they used ineffectual messages when they did attack Trump. 

Or, most of all, they simply deluded themselves about the dangers he posed rather than face up to them. I never believed party insiders could fully dictate the outcome of the nomination, but I did expect them to be able to block a wildly unacceptable candidate, and they proved surprisingly inept even in the face of extreme peril to their collective self-interest.

Rob's comment:

Chait gives Republican Party "insiders" too much moral credit. Sure, they worried that a clownish Trump would lead the party to disaster in the 2016 election. But their party is heir to the racist Southern Democrats who left the Democratic Party after President Johnson signed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights legislation. 

The Republican candidates have relied on the Southern Strategy---that is, racism---politically ever since, beginning with Richard Nixon in 1968.

Chait:

Then there are the voters, whose behavior provided the largest surprise. It was simply impossible for me to believe that Republican voters would nominate an obvious buffoon. Everything about Trump is a joke. His orange makeup and ridiculous hair, his reality-television persona, his insult comedy and overt bragging — they are neon-bright signs that he is not (to use a widely employed term) “presidential.”

...Trump had an even weaker grasp on intro-level Republican dogma, instead ranting like a drunk on a bar stool (“Bomb the shit out of ISIS!”). In debates, rather than use the standard tactic of mouthing pabulum that sounded vaguely like a substantive response before pivoting to his preferred message, he dispensed with the pabulum altogether, relying instead on vague, repetitive bragging and grade-school-level personal insults of his opponents. He puts down his opponents’ beauty or their height, or simply smirks at them. His appeal operates not at a low intellectual level but at a sub-intellectual level.

Rob's comment:

His Republican support is explained, first of all, by the "idiocy" factor in both Republican voters and "insiders." For the latter, in spite of their fears, they had no choice after the Republican base expressed its enthusiastic support for Trump by giving him the nomination in 2016.

Chait:

Trump University is a business venture that seems to have relied on a business model of fraud — exploiting an asymmetry of information between the operators of the business and its customers, allowing the former to take advantage of the latter. The Trump candidacy, though its fraud is more transparent, operates along roughly similar lines. Its premise is a customer base that lacks sophistication and can be manipulated with gut-level appeals. In their hearts, I think most anti-Trump Republicans agree with me on this.

Rob's comment:

We know now that "anti-Trump Republicans" are a small minority in the party with little real influence. Trump has always been a fraud who cheats on his wives, cheats on his taxes, cheats in his business practices. The Republican Party's base hates liberals like Chait and me so much it easily ignores his manifest moral flaws, if they ever learned about them in the first place.

Long-time Republican operative, Stuart Stevens, recently published a book with an astonishing title: It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump. Stevens is 67 years old and spent most of his adult life helping Republicans get elected. Hard to believe that he only realized the nature of that party in 2016.

But how many Republicans read New York magazine---or any publication that provides an account of Trump's long New York career of lies and fraud? When I was a young man, I learned about Trump by reading the Village Voice, where he was accurately portrayed as a clown and a fraud.

Chait:

Most voters don’t follow politics and policy for a living, and it’s understandable that they would often fall for arguments based on faulty numbers or a misreading of history. But a figure like Trump is of a completely different cast than the usual political slickster. He is several orders of magnitude more clownish and uninformed than the dumbest major-party nominee I’ve ever seen before. (That would be George W. Bush.)

As low as my estimation of the intelligence of the Republican electorate may be, I did not think enough of them would be dumb enough to buy his act. And, yes, I do believe that to watch Donald Trump and see a qualified and plausible president, you probably have some kind of mental shortcoming. 

As many fellow Republicans have pointed out, Donald Trump is a con man. What I failed to realize — and, I believe, what so many others failed to realize, though they have reasons not to say so — is just how easily so many Republicans are duped.

Rob's comment:

The notion that Republican voters care much about "arguments" or understanding "history" is remarkably naive. But they got Trump's racist message, which was important both in 2016 and 2020.

And don't forget that an important part of the Republican Party's base is composed of Christian crackpots who think a human being with an immortal soul is created at the moment of conception, which is why they want to force all pregnant women to have babies. That's not biology. It's theology, aka bullshit.

Mitt Romney is a good example of Republican hypocrisy. He nicely critiqued Trump in 2016, but he doesn't mind the benefit Trump is providing him and his party's base by approving another religious fanatic on the Supreme Court.

The rest of the Republican base consists of semi-literates like Trump himself: technically literate people who don't read anything challenging and are unable to understand what science means. Trump doesn't care, since he uses language as a bludgeon to advance his interests, not as a tool to understand the world. 

His voters are just literate enough to read conspiracy theories on the internet but not literate enough to evaluate them.