The Republican establishment dismissed Donald Trump as a joke, then reacted to initial victories with confident predictions his salad days would wilt and fade. What didn’t resonate in Washington’s hermetically sealed echo chamber was disgust, not with the tycoon but with the elites.
The sentiment is familiar: ‘I hope the Republican Party nominates Donald Trump because it will be a bloodbath for them’, or words to that effect, is a social-media staple among non-Republicans. The seductive notion is that Trump is so unpalatable he will lose November’s presidential election in a landslide to Hillary Clinton. Therefore, or so the logic goes, Republicans would do better with someone less divisive. As a prevailing meme it serves not only as a reminder of the folly in taking advice from political enemies, but also of the punditocracy’s abysmal record of what are, quite frankly, delusional prognostications.
When the primaries season began, the conventional wisdom was ‘Republicans will never nominate Trump’. When the tycoon began to gain traction, it was ‘Trump will crash and burn’ and ‘he’s a temporary fad’. As he continued to gather delegates, wishful thinking coloured the prophecies, as in ‘they’ll wise up and pick Jeb Bush’. Each and every reading of the auguries proved untrue, a reminder that few things can equal the inertial mass of a political elite confronting a contrary reality. Whatever else Trump has achieved, he has certainly eroded the credibility of numerous political commentators.
The pundits’ mistake was to apply the rules of 2012 four years too late. When Trump denounced illegal aliens and the crimes many commit, the media establishment painted him as a racist and, tellingly, neglected to mention that his pledge to build a wall along the Rio Grande was prompted by, to cite but one example, the Mexican thug who had been deported five times before slipping over the border yet again to kill a young woman in San Francisco. Those who voted for Trump knew better. They grasped that there is already a border “wall” of sorts — armed patrols, cyclone wire, movement detectors – it’s just that it doesn’t work very well. In 2012, the racist tag worked just fine as a handy smear. Today, though, non-pundit Americans have watched the invasion of Europe, seen the erosion of borders and national sovereignty, made note of crimes committed by those with no legal right to be on US soil. In the world they inhabit, the world the elites refuse to acknowledge, what Trump says makes perfect sense.
Likewise, Trump’s pronouncements on Islamic immigration. After every latest Islamist massacre the elites grab the nearest photogenic imam, summon the media and proclaim Islam as the Religion of Peace™. Voters, however, recall 9/11 and, more recently, the San Bernadino massacre by a Muslim husband and wife who killed the very same workmates who organised a baby shower for them. Once again, Trump emerges as the candidate who best grasps reality.
Likewise, previous orthodoxies also have been called into question. Obama campaigned in 2008 on the implicit pledge that he would restore the world’s love for America by renouncing what he evidently regarded as its arrogant and imperialist hubris. The result? A shrunken global presence, a shameful deal with Iran’s religious fascists and a vacuum where once Pax Americana prevailed. These factors, compounded and manifested in the rise of the Tea Party, contributed to an overall feeling of disconnect between Main Street and its Washington betters.
