13 Jun Trump’s Secret Weapon
My American Greatness column tomorrow is about the foolishness of the argument – advanced by partisans and the media – that Donald Trump killed Pride Month. Not to step on my own toes, but the evidence shows that Trump didn’t kill Pride Month. A shift in cultural forces did. Trump, as it turns out, benefited from that same shift in the culture – as successful politicians do.
That’s just the way American politics works. Politics, as Andrew Breitbart used to say, is downstream from culture.
This is, I think, a point that bears repeating in discussions about all sorts of other issues, matters, and policies, most notably immigration.
The picture below is a screenshot of a Washington Post poll showing that a majority of Americans favor the deportation of all (estimated) 11 million illegal immigrants in the country. Obviously, that is the most extreme position one can take in this debate. While that’s not to say that the position is “extreme” in an absolute sense (It is, after all, the majority position.), it is as far to one side of the issue as one can get. There is no position more completely anti-illegal-immigration than deporting everyone. That’s as conclusive/definitive a position as there is.
What’s most interesting about the poll, however, isn’t that it shows majority support for the deport-them-all policy. It’s the growth in support for that policy over the last eight years. The change is dramatic – and telling.
Based on these survey results, we can draw at least two tentative conclusions. First, we can conclude that the immigration issue helped Donald Trump win the presidency last fall. Second, we can conclude that the immigration issue did not help Trump in 2016.
Let’s tackle these two in reverse order.
As I have repeatedly argued (in these pages and elsewhere), the last twenty years in American politics have been most accurately defined by the rise of populism, by the theme defined 15 years ago by the late, great Angelo Codevilla as the clash between the ruling class and the country class. Believe it or not, the first manifestation of that clash was found in the person of Barack Obama, who promised that he would, if elected, break dramatically from the George W. Bush administration on financial regulation and, especially, foreign policy. And then he didn’t. Obviously, there are significant differences between Bush and Obama, but on those two key policies, they were nearly indistinguishable. In many ways, the Obama presidency can be seen as George W. Bush’s third and fourth terms.
On foreign policy especially, Obama was a disappointment to almost everyone. Whereas he promised “hope and change,” he delivered more of the same. He pledged to bring our boys and girls home, but then sent even more of them even further afield. He failed – or lied or “evolved” or whatever. In any case, by 2016, people were still looking for change, and only one candidate in either party credibly offered it, Donald Trump.
The following, from an op-ed published by The New York Times, gives a taste of the impact Trump and his approach to the Bush-Obama “forever wars” had on the 2016 presidential campaign:
I remember the exact moment I realized a reality TV star might become president. It was Sept. 16, the twilight of the Summer of Trump. Until then, I saw Donald Trump as little more than the fling of the white working class. And just as Republicans grew out of their Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann phases in 2011, so too would they come to their senses in 2015.
The presidential debate that evening pitted Trump against nearly a dozen would-be nominees, with donor favorite Jeb Bush taking a prominent position on stage. Though I hadn’t chosen a candidate, I liked Bush: a conservative problem solver, a good governor and a man of first-class intellect. I had even briefly considered working for the former Florida governor. But during an exchange about former president George W. Bush, Jeb said something that made me want to scream: “As it relates to my brother, there’s one thing I know for sure: He kept us safe.”
My anger sprang, not from a difference over policy, but from somewhere more primal. I wanted, as Walt Whitman might say, to sound my “barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.” Whatever I thought about Jeb’s education plan or record as governor, he had touched a raw cultural nerve. His defense of his brother ignored and insulted the experiences of people like me, and he was proud of it.
In an instant, I became Trump’s biggest fan. I wanted him to go for the jugular. I wanted him to inquire whom, precisely, George W. Bush had kept safe. Was it the veterans lingering in a bureaucratic quagmire at the Department of Veterans Affairs or the victims of 9/11? Was it the enlistees from my block back home, who signed their lives on the dotted line while Jeb’s brother told the country to “go shopping” — something kids like me couldn’t afford to do?
Though Trump held his fire in the debate, he lit into George W. Bush on social media and in interviews afterwards. Other candidates defended the former president. They, too, failed to understand Trump’s appeal, how something so offensive to their political palate could be cathartic for millions of their own voters.
As you may or may not have guessed, the author of those words is now the Vice President of the United States. He expressed his opposition to Trump back then (and for years afterward), but the frustration he felt was real, was potent, and was shared by tens of millions of Americans. While it’s inarguable that immigration was also a part of the Trump aura in 2016, it was not front and center. His campaign was based, more than anything else, on opposition to the Washington Establishment™ and its affinity for foreign adventurism.
And he won.
The excesses of the Bush and Obama years made Trump the culturally inevitable candidate.
The same is true about 2024, although the cultural issues are/were different. The Biden administration turned out to be far more radical than anyone could possibly have expected on social policy and illegal immigration. Biden’s overreach on “woke,” LGBT policy, and the border was so profound that it sparked a dramatic pushback – a pushback that, once again, preceded and is independent from Trump but which aided his election effort profoundly.
Trump didn’t kill Pride Month, and he didn’t make illegal immigration a key cultural issue for most Americans – a majority of whom are as radicalized on the issue as is possible. As it turns out, the allegedly out-of-touch billionaire is more culturally in tune with the country class than almost any American politician in the last four decades, and his sense of what does and does not matter to his fellow Americans is and always has been his secret weapon.
