The elites are nervous. America has not had a populist and a nationalist this close to the presidency in at least a century.
If I were still in a mood to make jokes about the Trump campaign I’d say the makers of “Allegiance” and “The Man in the High Castle” both owe Donald Trump money for free publicity.
The Philadelphia Daily News hailed Trump’s plan to ban all Muslim immigration–which would bring us back to the era of the openly racist Chinese Exclusion Act–with the barely-even-a-pun headline “The New Furor.” The New York Daily News, not to be outdone, showed Trump beheading the Statue of Liberty.
Prominent Republicans have been coming out of the woodwork to bash Trump for escalating Republican discourse about immigration from veiled bigotry to open bigotry. The First Amendment-defying concept of applying a religious test to immigration is apparently a bridge too far even for the Dick Cheneys and Lindsey Grahams of the world.
Twitter, of course, has been a-twittering nonstop. Jeff Bezos threatened to shoot him into space. J.K. Rowling weighed in, calling him a worse villain than Lord Voldemort. (A stretch, considering Donald Trump has not yet assassinated anyone nor created an army of mind-controlled slaves nor fused his soul to that of a giant man-eating serpent, though I guess we’ll see in 2016.)
All of this naturally leads to the question: If everyone hates him so much, why are we so worried about him? Ross Douthat points out we haven’t even held our first primaries yet; Trump has yet to win a single actual election. Nate Silver, our nation’s election oracle, recently implored the media to “stop freaking out” about Trump’s position in opinion polls as the “Republican frontrunner.” Trump gets a lot of attention, but not that much support–his overwhelmingly “high unfavorables” basically mean the nation is split between a minority that backs Trump and a majority that hates him but hasn’t decided whom they’d prefer as president instead.
As Silver says, “Nobody remotely like Trump has won a major-party nomination in the modern era”; for Trump to succeed, he’d have to beat the entire Republican Party apparatus lined up against him and thus prove that the party itself is ineffectual against a determined enough wealthy individual. People who’d like to think that the two parties are obsolete lick their chops at Trump’s headline-grabbing status for this reason, but for better or for worse that’s probably wishful thinking.
To put it bluntly, Trump isn’t Hitler, not because Trump’s views aren’t as personally odious as Hitler’s were but because Trump doesn’t live in Hitler’s Germany and, to be blunt about it, he doesn’t have Hitler’s balls. The Adolf Hitler who took power in 1933 was a man who’d previously taken politics seriously enough to lead an armed revolution against the state and be imprisoned for it. His party already had a paramilitary wing (the SA) of organized, uniformed thugs who seriously thought of themselves as a rival to the existing military. He rose to power in a country that saw itself as a desperate underdog, having lost a major war and been forced to make massive reparation payments that crippled the economy.
None of this describes Donald Trump. It’s impossible to imagine the effete reality-show billionaire at the head of a Beer Hall Putsch or going to prison as a martyr for his cause. His supporters are violent, frightening, boorish mobs but they’re nothing at all like an army, not even the ersatz army the SA were. And despite how ugly things have gotten in the United States during the War on Terror we are still comfortably the world’s wealthiest superpower; Weimar Germany would be lucky to have our problems.
No, as disgusted as I am that a leading candidate for president can mouth fascist slogans and trumpet fascist ideals in 2015, I don’t seriously believe the America is Germany in 1933 or Trump is Adolf Hitler.
That doesn’t mean I’m not scared.
Because there is an example of a country a lot like America in 2015 that had a candidate in mind much like Trump–an ultra-rich dilettante who seemed to treat politics like a show and shoot his mouth off without any concern for actually winning, who did indeed “freak out” the chattering classes by skyrocketing in popularity against all common sense.
That country is America in 1924, and that would-be candidate was Henry Ford.
Like Trump, Ford vacillated about which party he even belonged to but seemed none the worse for wear for his shifting allegiances–his personal brand outshining the brand of whatever party he belonged to. Like Trump, Ford’s popularity was blamed on mass media–in 1924 that was the “movie mind” overstimulated by Hollywood features; in 2015 it’s apparently the fault of the “social media mind” of self-sustaining Internet outrage.
Like Trump, Ford surged to national attention in 1924 because of the country’s deep disenchantment with the “serious” candidates, a sense that party politics was just a corrupt elite trading favors with each other–Trump, like Ford, somehow managed to be an “outsider” and to represent the “common man” despite being incredibly wealthy.
And, like Trump, Ford was beloved by his fans because he was perceived as a straight-talker, a truth-teller, someone insulated enough by his wealth he didn’t have to recite polite fictions. Among serious pundits of the chattering classes, an eccentric billionaire who goes on rants about the Protocols of the Elders of Zion or Barack Obama’s forged birth certificate has disqualified himself from being taken seriously for office. Among voters who hate and resent the serious pundits of the chattering classes, those “fringe” views only underscore the billionaire’s “outsider” credentials.
It may well be the case that Ford, had he not bowed out of running for the Republican nomination in 1924, would never have won a general election once enough people blasted the contents of his raving anti-Semitic newspaper the Dearborn Independent to a national stage–indeed, the Anti-Defamation League successfully shut down that newspaper with a boycott in 1927. It may be that historians are correct that Ford would never have made it that far into the election because, like most people who storm into presidential elections with no past political experience, he simply didn’t have the taste for politics.
