Great piece: Trump — The Incoherent Demagogue
Trump has nothing of substance to say
Rock Hill, South Carolina
Ok, this reminds me a little of Woodstock. (Yes, I’m that old.) I’m stuck in traffic—I mean, stopped dead—about a mile away from the Winthrop University Coliseum, where Donald Trump will be performing in about an hour. The Clash come to mind: Should I stay or should I go? A neat little u-turn and I will be released from this flood tide of alienation, surging in no-motion toward its source—but hey, I’ve never been to a Trump rally and entertainment, of a Roman sort, is promised. I nose my rent-a-car into a side street and walk.
The Coliseum is not full, but close. The crowd is white, of course. The vast majority, I would guess, are lottery-players; they see Trump as a free ticket. “He’s going to get me a better job,” says the guy who checks me in at the door. “That’s what he does in his business.” PT Barnum, to whom Trump has been compared, once said something about suckers being born every minute. That was in the 19th century; the population is much larger now. The Trump pre-game music playlist is eclectic: from serious shlock (Phantom of the Opera) to Pavarotti to the Stones (but why, “You can’t always get what you want?” Isn’t his message the opposite?). His imminent arrival is announced by the strains of Springsteen’s Born in the USA (Note to Bruce: populism usually doesn’t end well). His actual arrival is announced by Eye of the Tiger. The first thing you see is his hair, which is as metallic gold and gleaming as Notre Dame football helmets. The crowd expresses immoderate enthusiasm.
So it’s all teed up. Everyone ready to be wowed; I’m ready to be entertained and appalled. But something strange happens: the headliner is just incoherent. He does not finish stories he starts—he starts his riff about forcing Ford, which has built a plant in Mexico, to pay 35% tariffs, but something else grabs his attention…not once, not twice, maybe three or four times before he sees it to the end, and the end, when it comes, is clumsily delivered, he steps on his punchline, darting off in some other direction. It occurs to me that the Tweet is the extent of this man’s attention span. He is the ADHD candidate. It occurs to me that being a “low-energy” candidate, in Trump’s mind, means a candidate who requires actual thinking on the part of his or her supporters to be comprehended. Thought moves slower than tweet. It needs to be explained. How boring.
Am I being too hard on the guy? Well, I’ve known some brilliant demagogues in my time—starting with George Wallace—and they could take you for a ride; it was thrilling to watch Wallace or Pat Buchanan or Al Sharpton in full flight. The arguments were repulsive, but well-assembled and brilliantly delivered. Trump is shambolic. He splutters about, unattached pronouns flying off into the rafters—who is the “they” who got the great deal? The Obama negotiators? Most certainly not, but that’s who he was talking about. No, now I get—he’s switched over and “they” are the Iranians. Then he says the Mexican government is brilliant, much smarter than ours….I look around, certain these thousands of angry sheep can’t believe that (much easier to believe Obama is a secret Muslim conspirator than a thorough-going idiot) and just at the moment when I suspect he’s going to lose them, he retweets some of his best material. “I’m gonna build a wall…and who’s gonna pay for it?” Mexico, the crowd yells, three times.
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http://time.com/4174328/donald-trump-thoughts-politician/
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