After Trump’s inept attempt to extort Ukraine’s help in assisting him to destroy Joe Biden and therefore aid his chances to win the 2020 election, the Democrats have moved on impeachment. Ugly facts about this episode are tumbling out into the public domain every day. Those facts look to grow much, much worse. However, this is no time to become sanguine about Trump’s survival. It seems beyond imagining that 22 Republican Senators would ever vote to convict him of high crimes and misdemeanors no matter what he is shown to have done. That will leave it up to the 2020 electorate to render a decision and that brings me to this image of Donald Trump as Wyatt Earp/Kurt Russell from the movie Tombstone, a picture shared with me by a Trump follower. It is a striking, layered metaphor for much of his appeal to his most loyal supporters.
This is Trump as righteous avenger of wrongs, as a marshal prepared to unleash violence on whomever opposes him, one in full rage at all that has been done to those who align with him. It is Trump as a western hero, the lone man confronting many villains, the leader of America. America, in this incarnation, is presented as a unitary force. Americans are those who are coming with him to make the country right again, to re-establish its true nature which has been taken from it by criminal others who remain unnamed. In this configuration, those Americans who oppose Trump simply do not exist as human, the implication being that only true Americans support Trump. This is a Manichean Trump, the sheriff of only those who count, of the patriotic, real America of ‘us’ versus the outlaws of ‘them’. They believe that Trump’s enemies are theirs and their enemies are Trump’s. There is not a slip of distance between them. The identification of Trumpists with Trump is complete and, I think, impervious to reason and facts.*
There is no rational defense of Trump. Logic and reason cannot build a case for him. He is the perfect example of politics as the purest encapsulation of emotion. They are aware of Trump’s corruption and brutality, his daily ugliness, but they do not care. They love his howling, his insults … his feeling of being Trump, his complete rebellion against anyone telling him what to do. He is the great, continuous, “Fuck You” to any measure of authority or norm of behavior other than his own.
The flip side to this is that many of his supporters have good reason to feel screwed. They have been. By and large, beginning with Vietnam, they have fought its wars and been discarded afterwards with faint thanks. They have watched the deindustrialization of the American economy take their jobs and move them to China and third world countries. They have watched their health insurance costs rise, and their communities made sicker by the opioid epidemic. The Republican Party has callously used them and the Democratic Party has ignored them.
However, Trump also speaks to their resentment of anyone of color. Trump’s people are white people, as homogeneous as milk. His attacks on Mexicans, refugees, immigrants, African-American communities in Baltimore and Chicago, his joking about shooting migrants in the legs, his use of the word savages to describe women in Congress — all of these resonate with the most committed of his supporters. There is nothing new here. In a conversation with his aide Bill Moyers, President Lyndon B. Johnson once said, “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”
Trump understands the power of hatred. Give your people someone to blame and they will never point their fingers at you. Men and women who believe they are victims do not need to reflect upon or analyze history or political policies. They do not need to articulate ideas or principles. When a politician like Trump emerges, like George Wallace, like Huey Long, like Father Charles Coughlin, they always have, ready made, a good part of the electorate that will rally to them — maybe as high as 25 or 30%, the number who still pledged loyalty to Nixon when he resigned from office. America has always possessed large numbers of determined fanatics, but thankfully, relatively few politicians able to activate them to their greatest zeal.
I suspect that many Republican office holders understand that he is a fraud, but cynically, they will stick with him to protect their own ambitions (they fear being primaried) and because he follows the standard Republican playbook of declaring that Democrats are going to take their guns, destroy religion, continue killing babies, raise their taxes to give their money away to the lazy and embrace criminals at the risk of the law abiding. They have helped him feed the rich and try to build a reliable, reactionary judicial wall against the time when Democrats return to power.
Whatever happens with impeachment, most likely Trump’s fate will be settled by the 2020 election. Who knows how many Democratic votes will be suppressed by machinery already in place in Republican states, or how foreign powers will attempt to rig or influence voters. The Electoral College already gives Republicans a built in advantage. Will Democratic turnout be high enough to defeat him? What other efforts will Trump himself make to subvert democratic norms? He is capable of anything.
But one area he can probably rest easy about is his core base of disciples. They will ride anywhere with him, their own Wyatt Earp, their own officer of the law of retribution against all enemies.
*Trump does not identify with them. He identifies with no one but himself. He sees them as the rubes who will support him even if he ‘shoots someone on 5th avenue’, the adoring crowds at his rallies, the background applause he must have to sustain his mythic stature in his own mind.
