Do We Have A Center?

2016, 2020, and the Challenge of the Trump Presidency

Walter Frank

• Publisher: walter frank
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781087803524
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Campaigns & Elections
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Politics was once described as the art of the possible. It no longer feels that way. Today, it seems more like a battle between two feudal armies.Part of this book is aimed at showing it doesn’t have to be that way. Polarization didn’t start with Trump and it won’t end with him unless we can somehow rescue the country from the political ditch into which it has fallen.SoAnother purpose of this book is to examine just how we got here and how the Democrats, with the right kind of message and an appealing candidate, can lead the way to a more sensible politics. In 2016, however, Hillary Clinton made a terrible mistake: she thought she could win if she simply replicated the Obama coalition. She was wrong and examining why she was wrong, how she misunderstood the electorate, and how and why an outsider like Donald Trump turned out to be the more effective candidate, is also a key purpose of this effort.

Part I: 2016

Chapter 1

The Story

In mid-November 2018, President Trump referred to Congressman Adam Schiff, the soon to be chair of the House Intelligence Committee, as Adam Schitt. At virtually the same time, he attacked the Navy Seal Commander who led the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, the architect of the attacks of September 11, 2001, accusing him of being a Clinton supporter and asserting that bin Laden should have been killed sooner. It was just a typical day in the Trump White House.

Two years into his presidency at the time, neither comment surprised anyone. In his nomination fight, Trump turned Ronald Reagan’s rule — I shall speak ill of no fellow Republican — on its head, speaking well of no one and asking, for example, whether anyone with a television in their house could ever vote for Carly Fiorina (“Look at that face. Would anyone vote for that?”). No target was too respected (He belittled Senator John McCain’s years of captivity in Hanoi.) nor any claim too outrageous (He suggested that Senator Ted Cruz of Texas’ father was involved in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy).

And yet he is the President.

A couple of weeks after Trump’s 2016 victory, Peggy Noonan in her weekly column for the Wall Street Journal, offered a moment of hope for those who wanted to wish well of any incoming President. In it, she related how in the middle of the campaign she needed to check a quote with a member of Trump’s staff. The staff member returned her call from Trump Force One. “We spoke,” Noonan relates, “and then suddenly the phone seemed to drop and I heard, ‘Who’s that?’ Then I heard, ‘Peggy, this is Donald.’ Noonan went on:

I won’t quote exactly what was said. No one put it off the record, but it felt off the record, and some of the conversation was personal. But I can describe it. He was dignified, hilarious and modest. He told me that I’d sometimes been unfair to him, sometimes mean, sometimes really, really mean but that when I was he usually deserved it, always appreciated it, and keep it up. He spoke of other things; he characterized for me my career.

I’d heard of his charm offensive, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say how charming, funny and frank he was – and, as I say, how modest. How actually humble.

It moved me. And it hurt a few weeks later when I wrote in this space that ‘Sane Donald Trump’ would win in a landslide but that the one we had long seen, the crazed, shallow one, wouldn’t and didn’t deserve to.

Is it possible there are deeper reserves of humility, modesty and good intent lurking around in there than we know? And maybe a tool box, too, that can screw those things together and produce something good. (PN)

A charming, funny, humble Trump? Even the most ardent Trump supporter would admit it hasn’t turned out that way.

On July 10, 2015, just a few weeks after he entered the race, Trump met with the families of Americans who had been killed by “illegal aliens.” It was a staged event. Joel Pollack, a senior editor at Breitbart News, sees it as the moment Trump took control of the 2016 race. Trump first met privately with the families of the victims. Then some family members told their stories at a press conference. Trump refused to back down from his previous comments about race. “By July 19,” records Pollack, “just nine days later, Trump had surged to first place [in the nomination battle] and never looked back.” In his book, Pollack, a Trump supporter, acknowledges that the number of victims “is very small” but for him the victims and their families “stood for all of the Americans who had been ignored by government for so many years (JP xix-xx).” The border visit symbolized everything that many in his base would cherish about him.

Both Trump and Clinton announced their candidacies in June 2015, a year and a half before the general election. Most Clinton people at this time were hoping Trump would get the nomination. They thought him the weakest candidate and many even doubted that Trump really wanted to win. The conventional wisdom was that he thought a respectable run would enhance his name and be a windfall for his many businesses. They might have thought otherwise if they realized that in November 2012, immediately following Romney’s loss, Trump trademarked the slogan “Make America Great Again,” or that in January 2015 Trump asked Newt Gingrich to meet him in Iowa for lunch and grilled him for nearly an hour on Gingrich’s own experience running for President. Gingrich and others who realized the extent of Trump’s presidential ambitions concluded that he was very serious about running.

In his announcement speech, Trump charged that Mexico was exporting its rapists over our borders and promised to build a wall that Mexico would pay for, claimed a net worth of well-over $10 billion, and asserted that “our nuclear arsenal doesn’t work.” He also predicted “I will be the greatest jobs President God ever created” and “our country needs a truly great leader now. We need a leader that wrote The Art of the Deal.” And if anyone still doubted his self-confidence there was this: “the American dream is dead – but if I win, I will bring it back bigger and better and stronger than ever.”

Hillary Clinton’s announcement speech was quintessentially Hillary: cautious, logical, well-organized, and not very exciting. It already sounded her major theme of inclusiveness (“I’m not running for some Americans but for all Americans.”) She was at her best when she simply talked about herself and her growing up, how she would help her father in his small business, and how the kindness of others saved her abused and neglected mother. It was clearly an attempt to humanize her. As expected, Clinton made sure that everyone knew her big tent included the women the Republicans “blame and shame” and gays whom the G.O.P. has “turned its back on.”

There was a reason that the speech was so bland. It was essentially written by a committee with drafts hurtling back and forth as the deadline approached. Everyone wanted to set just the right tone, say just the right thing — but everyone had slightly different ideas as to how to do it. One speechwriter became so frustrated with the process that he quit a week before the announcement speech but not before delivering a “frank assessment of the shortcomings of the operation and the speech.” (JA 16).

In contrast, the Trump people, including Trump himself, were much more focused on how he would look than what he would say. After all, nobody could tell what he was going to say anyway. According to his then campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s announcement speech might have seemed rambling and disjointed — and it was — but the timing and visuals had been carefully thought out:

We planned that announcement six weeks ahead of time. We knew what the announcement was going to look like. It’s going to look like he was the President of the United States, just flags behind him and a blue carpet, with him in a blue suit and white shirt and a red tie. Everything was very specific. Donald Trump was very specific about the music he would walk into. All of those factors, particularly the look, are very important to Donald Trump (Institute 43).

In June 2015, most everyone expected that Hillary would be the Democratic nominee while the press treated Trump’s early announcement almost as an embarrassment. He was given little chance for success. Yet why not Trump? He was the quintessential outsider at a time when gridlock in Washington cast a pall over most politicians and polls showed that voters increasingly regarded long experience in Washington as a negative thing. Trump understood that being outrageous in a celebrity culture is not necessarily a losing formula. Then there was the way he addressed his rallies. He invited his supporters into his world, a world of winners and losers where it was time for America to win again. His tone was part conversational/part rap. The connection between Trump and his supporters was palpable.

Trump was not far off when he said at a January 2016 rally that he “could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” In the end, it seemed that Trump and the other sixteen Republican aspirants were simply not playing the same game. Bush, Kasich, Christie, Cruz, and all the rest addressed their rallies. These rallies were traditional campaign events. Trump’s rallies were different. He didn’t need to convince his supporters of anything. He was one of them, someone from the other side, the business side, a rich man who talked like no rich man they had ever heard, who shared their anger, their deepest fears, their insecurities and prejudices — and was willing to voice them.

His opponents were tone deaf when it came to what was happening in the Republican Party. Jeb Bush, in an attempt to discredit Trump, called him “the chaos candidate” not realizing that Trump’s strongest supporters treated it as a deep compliment. In retrospect, it is fascinating how so few seemed to have taken Trump seriously even among the most conservative Republican voters. Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson, interviewed grass roots Tea Party voters before the Republican primary season began and reported:

Grassroots tea party involvement in the GOP presidential primaries may also be intense, but may not add up to a united effort for a winning candidate….When Donald Trump was blustering about Obama’s birth certificate, he got a chuckle and an “Atta Boy” from some Tea Partiers but no one seemed to take him seriously as a candidate. (TS 194).

Tea Party activists may not have been ideologically in tune with Trump given that free trade and hostility to most social programs were key tenets for them. Nevertheless, Trump’s populist rhetoric would certainly have resonated with the anger and outsider status Tea Partiers relished about themselves. The vigor with which Trump attacked both Obamacare and Obama made it easy for even those Tea Partiers initially skeptical about Trump to eventually come over to his side.

A key unrecognized strength for Trump was the breadth of his appeal within the Republican Party. Exit polls showed him winning 39% of those Republicans classifying themselves as very conservative, 46% of the somewhat conservative and 42% of those describing themselves as moderate. (WS 33).

There was something else. Nobody has ever accused Trump of being other than himself. And he insisted on staying that way from the very start of his campaign. He made it a point, for example, to tell his staffers that there should be no effort to hide or downplay his wealth, as Romney had done. “It was,” said Lewandowski, “a strategic decision that we made early on.” “I’m going to pull up in my 757,” Lewandowski recalls Trump saying, “I’m going to make sure everyone sees the giant Trump plane… and we’re going to have the most expensive cars, and we’re going to do it so everyone understands what this country is all about” (Institute 28), an interesting window into Trump’s view of what makes America great..

But now, Trump faced one opponent, not sixteen — and she would no doubt be a formidable adversary.

Until August 2016, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump had inhabited two different worlds for their entire lives. Hers had been the world of law, government, politics, and public service, while his was one of real estate deals and public celebrity. Each had been deeply shaped by their experiences. For Trump, real estate is a zero-sum game. There are winners and losers. It is fiercely competitive and you have to take risks just to survive and to be a player. In real estate, there is only so much land and only so many development projects to go around. Trump was once asked what money meant to him after his first billion. He said it was important, but only as a way of keeping score.

As for Hillary, we should never forget that in 1988 and again in 1991 the National Law Journal ranked her as one of the country’s most influential lawyers and for years she was one of only a handful of women litigating cases in Arkansas. Her legal instincts promised to be both a blessing and a curse. On the positive side, she was (and still is) incredibly smart and a world-class listener. On the negative side, at least as a candidate, the one thing all lawyers learn early on is that you never ask a question in cross-examining a witness unless you already know the answer. Lawyers stick to the script but candidates have to improvise. Even take risks. But that did not seem to be in her nature.

The ultimate world-view of the two candidates could not have been more different. Trump once said, “Man is the most vicious of all animals and life is a series of battles ending in victory or defeat. You just can’t let people make a sucker out of you.” (DA). Hillary had written It Takes a Village.

Though both candidates had wrapped up their nominations by June, nobody knew what to expect of the conventions. This was, after all, going to be a general election fight between two presidential candidates with the highest negative ratings in the history of modern American politics.

How had such candidates snatched the great prize for their own? There is no denying that each had enjoyed a bit of luck. The fact that at the outset no one took Trump seriously was undoubtedly an advantage. Most of the time when candidates aren’t regarded as viable, they are ignored. In Trump’s case, however, given his celebrity status, the media, in the colorful words of journalist Tish Durkin, “spent the first three quarters of the primary process being treated as a fireworks display — “Ooh! Aah! Look what he’s done now!.” (TD).

One event might have served to warn the Republican establishment of what was about to happen, for in June 2014, an obscure college professor by the name of David Brat defeated Eric Cantor, the Republican Majority Leader in the House of Representatives. With the help of the Tea Party movement. Brat ran a campaign excoriating Cantor for being a tool of Wall Street and soft on illegal immigration. Trump, of course, would use the same kind of attacks against Hillary Clinton in the general election campaign in 2016.

Still, had Trump run against one attractive moderate conservative who could have united the anti-Trump forces from the beginning, he likely would never have won the nomination. In the vast majority of his primary victories, until very late, he amassed only roughly a third to forty percent of the vote, sometimes even less. The problem was that the remaining Republican primary field included at least five serious candidates, each of whom at the outset had legitimate aspirations.

Senator Marco Rubio of Florida presented himself as the attractive young face of the party, a conservative with Hispanic roots from a critical swing state; Chris Christie was the bulldog Governor of a blue state — no one doubted his fire or intelligence; Ted Cruz was the darling of conservative white evangelicals who had forced a government shutdown and gained many supporters as well as enemies for his trouble. John Kasich, the popular, fiscally conservative Governor of Ohio had a good story to tell, particularly for centrists who might be drawn to his established willingness to work across party lines. And then there was Jeb Bush, the heir apparent, also from Florida, who seemed the perfect candidate to appeal to independents and even moderate Democrats who distrusted Hillary.

The Republicans had had so many candidates (17) that, for their first debate in August 2015, they had to stage two events. The warm-up featured the seven candidates whose chances were viewed favorably only by themselves and close family members. The major debate was for the more serious candidates and there were ten of them.

If Donald was lucky to face so many serious candidates, Hillary seemed not to be facing any serious opposition at all. In the first Democratic debate, only four hopefuls showed up. Three of them could have walked down the streets of most major cities without turning a single head. There was Jim Webb of Virginia, certainly the most conservative hopeful. He would drop out shortly after the first debate when nobody seemed the slightest bit interested in what he had to say, including the other candidates. He would eventually announce that he did not plan to vote for Hillary, though he never specifically endorsed Trump and may not have voted for him. Then there was Martin O’Malley, the Governor of Maryland: competent, centrist, and having as much charisma as the back of a spoon.

Finally, there was Bernie Sanders. He wasn’t even a Democrat caucusing with them mainly to have people to talk to. Of course, as it turned out, he did become a serious threat to the Clinton candidacy, a tribute to three things: first, he represented the growing progressive base of the party without competition from others, like Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who might have posed an even greater threat to Hillary; second, he became the only real alternative to the many in the party who simply disliked and distrusted Hillary; and third, he proved a formidable campaigner: his white hair and gravelly voice suggesting a biblical seriousness young people found hard to resist. Nobody could doubt his sincerity or that he was a man of genuine conviction, which came across in stark contrast to a candidate whose perceived lack of authenticity would prove perhaps her greatest weakness.

The Republicans, the first to hold their national convention, gathered in Cleveland, Ohio without the presence of President George W. Bush, Governor Mitt Romney, or Senator McCain. The only serious question was whether Trump would begin to execute the pivot to the middle supposedly necessary to secure the vital votes of independents and moderates. Trump did no such thing, instead doubling down in his acceptance speech on all the theme...