 "Donald Trump")
Donald John Trump defied the sceptics who said he would never run, and the political veterans who scoffed at his slapdash campaign.
He attacked the norms of American politics, singling out groups for derision on the basis of race and religion and attacking the legitimacy of the political process.
He ignored conventions of common decency, employing casual vulgarity and raining personal humiliation on his political opponents and critics in the media.
And in the ultimate act of defiance, Trump emerged victorious, summoning a tidal wave of support from less educated whites displaced by changes in the economy and deeply resistant to the country’s shifting cultural and racial tones.
The son of a wealthy real estate developer in Queens, Trump, 70, spent decades pursuing social acceptance in upscale Manhattan and seeking, at times desperately, to persuade the wider world to see him as a great man of affairs. But Trump was often met with scoffing disdain by wealthy elites and mainstream civic leaders, culminating in a mortifying roast by President Obama at the White House Correspondents Dinner in 2011.
So Trump fashioned himself instead as a proudly garish champion of the common man — a person of unsophisticated tastes but distinctive popular appeal — and acted the part in extravagant fashion, first in the New York tabloids and then on national television. He became a pundit of sorts, fulminating against crime in New York City and international trade and Obama’s legitimacy as president, often in racially incendiary terms. His candidacy unfolded in much the same way: As the rampage of an aggrieved outsider, aligned more with the cultural sensibilities of blue-collar whites than with his peers in society. On the first day of his run — June 16, 2015 — Trump drew a direct parallel between his determined quest for success in New York and his entry into the political arena. Addressing a crowd made up largely of reporters in the atrium of Trump Tower, Trump noted that political seers had predicted, “He’ll never run.” Seconds later, he mused that his father, Fred Trump, had urged him never to compete in “the big leagues” of Manhattan.
“‘We don’t know anything about that. Don’t do it,’” Trump quoted his father as saying. “I said, ‘I’ve got to go into Manhattan. I’ve got to build those big buildings. I’ve got to do it, Dad. I’ve got to do it.’”
Powered by that same grasping ambition, Trump’s candidacy was marked by countless missteps and grievous errors, from the crude and meandering speeches he delivered daily, to the allegations of sexual assault that appeared to cripple him in the final weeks of the race. No other presidential candidate in memory has given offence so freely and been so battered by scandal, and lived to fight on and win.
Amid all his innumerable blunders, however, Trump got one or two things right that mattered more than all the rest. On a visceral level, he grasped dynamics that the political leadership of both parties missed or ignored — most of all, the raw frustration of blue-collar and middle-class white voters who rallied to his candidacy with decisive force.
Trump rallied them less with policy promises than with gut-level pronouncements — against foreign trade, foreign wars and foreign workers. He left his Republican primary opponents agog at his dismissals of mainstream policy, and exposed a yawning breach between the program of tax cuts and fiscal austerity favoured by traditional conservatives, and the preoccupations of the party’s rank and file.
Ridiculed by critics on the right and left, shunned by the most respected figures in American politics, including every living former president, Trump equated his own outcast status with the resentments of the white class.
Even the invective and incivility that appalled the traditional guardians of political discourse seemed only to forge a tighter bond between Trump and his inflamed following. He dismissed American social norms as mere “political correctness,” mocking the physical appearance of an opponent’s wife, savaging Hillary Clinton’s marriage and wielding stereotypes of racial minorities — all to the applause of his base.
© 2016 The New York Times News Service
