Donald Trump has broken every rule in the US political playbook and is still winning. The polls now put him neck and neck with Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in the race for the White House.
As a UK newspaper put it this week, The Donald is insulting his way to victory. He calls Clinton a crook and accused his former Republican rival Ted Cruz of being a brazen liar. And along the way on his triumphal progress to the nomination, he has traduced Muslims, Latinos and women. Now he has turned on the media, accusing them of mostly being “bad people” and launching personal attacks on individual journalists.
According to political wisdom, these outrageous outbursts ought to have caused the bombastic property developer’s unlikely campaign for the White House to have crashed and burned long ago. The fact that it has not must prompt a close analysis of the US electoral mood into which he has tapped so spectacularly.
At its very simplest, calling people in the US political establishment, including his own Republican party, liars and cheats chimes brilliantly with what many Americans have come to believe. The partisan standoffs between Congress and the Obama White House which have repeatedly brought the world’s most powerful nation to the brink of financial catastrophe have caused the Washington political establishment to be viewed with contempt and derision. Trump is not part of this machine. His boast is that he does business not politics, and he claims that if the US were run on business lines, it would escape its present political quagmire.
Of course, if Trump becomes president, he will have no magic wand with which to make an entrenched Congress disappear along with the legions of lobbyists whose megabucks drive the political agenda, easily overwhelming the interests of ordinary voters. It is not just the implacable opposition of the Democrats that President Trump would face. He would also have an angry and humiliated Republican party leadership behind him concealing newly-sharpened daggers in their togas.
And the reason that Trump could make it to the Oval Office is that Hillary Clinton represents everything that Trump has condemned. She is the archetypical establishment politician, who adjusts her policies according to her audience and shamelessly embroiders her record. Trump hardly has to accuse her. There is plenty of TV footage of her contradictory pronouncements. Her feisty claim, when Secretary of State, to have landed in Kosovo under sniper fire has been exposed by video showing her being greeted on the tarmac by a guard of honor and being given a bouquet by a little girl.
Her trust rating among electors is startlingly low, particularly among women voters. She epitomizes the mealy-mouthed political machine which looks after its own interests while pretending to serve the American people. By contrast, Trump can be trusted to go off message, to raise hackles, to trample perceived political wisdom and to offer Americans an apparently refreshing and simple new politics. Suddenly he is an attractive proposition.
Unfortunately, the harsh truth about Trump, as his wild Islamophobic diatribes have demonstrated, is that, save in one respect, he is not actually different from the time-serving politicians he excoriates. He, too, will say whatever it takes to grasp power. The big and most alarming difference is that it is very possible that Trump really means what he says.
