The 2015 Frank Rich article about the Trump Phenomenon in America's political life continues here today, & concludes tomorrow. (Phew! That was a two-week-long article! When Frank Rich writes -- he writes!)
I wanted to mention also, first, last Saturday's royal wedding. I found myself getting interested, in spite of not being interested.
I was working at a stockbroker company in Boston
when Lady Diana Spencer married Prince Charles in 1981. A stockbroker in the office was named (I think) Jim Brady -- or something like that -- and he brought to the office that day a small television set so he could have it on his desk, and watch the royal wedding.
He said he really enjoyed all that tradition and formality.
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----------------------- [excerpt, Frank Rich NYMagazine article, continuing] --------------------
Having no Citizens United-enabled political-action committee frees him to remind voters daily that his Republican adversaries are bought and paid for by anonymous wealthy donors.
The notion of a billionaire playing this populist card may seem counterintuitive, but paradoxically Trump's populism is enhanced by the source of his own billions.
His signature business, real-estate development, is concrete, literally so: He builds big things, thus visibly creating jobs, and stamps his name on them in uppercase gold lest anyone forget (even when he hasn't actually built them and doesn't actually own them). This instantly separates him from the
"hedge-fund guys" and all the other unpopular one percenters who trade in intangible and suspect financial "products," facilitate the outsourcing of American jobs, and underwrite much of the Republican presidential field and party infrastructure, to some of the Republican-primary electorate's dismay.
The simplicity and transparency of Trump's campaign funding are going to make it harder for his rivals -- and perhaps future presidential candidates -- to defend their dependence on shadowy, plutocratic, and politically toxic PAC donors.
The best news about Trump is that he is wreaking this havoc on the status quo while having no chance of ascending to the presidency.
You can't win the Electoral College in 2016 by driving away women, Hispanics, blacks, and Asian-Americans, no matter how large the margins you pile up in deep-red states.
Republicans who have started fretting that he might perform as Barry Goldwater did on Election Day in 1964 have good reason to worry.
But Goldwater won the nomination in the first place by rallying a disaffected hard-right base that caught the GOP Establishment by surprise, much as the remnants of that Establishment were blindsided by Ronald Reagan's insurgency that almost denied the nomination to Gerald Ford in 1976.
Trump's ascent, like the Goldwater and Reagan rebellions, makes it less likely that the divide between the GOP's angriest grassroots and the party elites who write the checks will be papered over in 2016, as it was by the time the 2008 and 2012 Republican conventions came to order.
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Probable as it may be that Trump's poll numbers will fade and that he will flame out before the Republicans convene in Cleveland in July, it's not a sure thing.
---------------------------- [end, excerpt] ------------- which leads us to
IRONS and
THINGS MADE OUT OF IRON
to represent the
IRONY
...of that last sentence.
-30-
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