In their raw anger and their nativism and their comfort with the fringe, they seemed like people who, in the currents of social change, thought they were being left behind. Their politics seemed expressive they wanted a party whose identity reflected theirs. The voters whose ferocity powered the insurgency, however, never seemed interested in building a conservative coalition that would win a national majority. So the Tea Party, for all of the hype and interest surrounding it, has matured into a factional force, which is now consumed by a campaign to radicalize the leadership of the Republican Party. They have turned to a nationalist populism that we intuitively understand, that explicitly rejects traditional political leadership, that emphasizes philosophical clarity rather than winning, and is proudly nostalgic for a national past.īecause third parties are functionally forbidden but primaries are open to all comers, that same pairing of rejectionism and nationalism, and the same tilt toward politics as expression, has been compelled to fight for the leadership of the G.O.P. Looking back, it is possible to sense a common cause: a loss of social status and stability for working-class white people. Independence Party, Marine Le Pen’s National Front, the Danish People’s Party, the Freedom Party in Austria. Nationalist third parties across Europe grew in support over the past half-decade: the U.K. Politics grew more radically populist after the global financial crash, not just here but across the West. Trump’s complaint with Washington is that it sends “ political hacks” to negotiate with foreign countries, rather than the best negotiators in the world, “the smartest guys on Wall Street.” Trump’s version of the Oval Office is one in which Carl Icahn will appear from behind a door to solve any crisis. In many ways, his argument is that government should be run more directly by élites. He doesn’t share its ideological rigidity-on tax-and-spend policies, he is arguably more moderate than Cruz or Rubio-or its systematic anti-élitism. It’s true that Trump has little in common with the Tea Party, the dominant Republican populist faction. “They say I’m plainspoken-I’m not plainspoken!” he said at a rally on Monday, and then said just about exactly the same thing at another rally the next day. He has often been called a populist, and lately he’s taken pains to deny the label, although he also tries to avoid speaking it aloud.
Trump seems to resent the idea that he belongs to any political tradition. Trump keeps harping on Jeb Bush’s lack of energy and Hillary Clinton’s absent stamina, perhaps because youthfulness is his only real criterion when it comes to, for instance, Marco Rubio, he’s struggled to offer a lasting insult. “Perhaps if she weren’t my daughter I’d be dating her.”) There is the whole situation with his hair. (“She does have a very nice figure,” Trump once told the ladies of “The View,” with Ivanka sitting next to him. He sometimes begins his campaign events by projecting a photo in which he and his thirty-four-year old daughter, Ivanka, pose together, as though they were a couple. Trump, who will turn seventy in June, seems to believe he will never die, and his emphasis on his own youth and vitality is constantly jarring. Other Republicans offer dire talk about the long-term prospects for Social Security, about the necessity that benefits be limited or the retirement age be raised, but Trump’s approach is just to insist that all that concern is ridiculous, that the checks will continue to come. Trump mentions no political tradition that he belongs to and no monuments of the past, just the ones he is preparing to build: the beautiful wall across the southern border, the great infrastructure projects that will come in on time and under budget. “Did you see this?” he asks his audience, again and again. The candidate, leaning against his podium, pulls paper copies of that day’s polls from his breast pocket and reads them he wades into debate by running down the morning’s news. The slogan is “Make America Great Again,” but there is hardly ever any talk of the past. Time has a different scope in the Trump campaign it has been radically compressed, so that the past and the distant future are dimmed and the present moves into sharper relief. Nostalgia often plays a large role in Presidential races, but in Donald Trump’s campaign time has a different scope.
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