The Trump Anomaly

For years, right wing and far right news media – and I’m thinking of Fox News, Breitbart, The Blaze, The Drudge Report, Worldnetdaily, and the like – have shouted from the rooftops, “The country is on fire! The country is burning down!” They did this to motivate their viewers and readers to vote for candidates favored by those media. For a while it worked. A substantial number of voters bought into the story that the country is on fire. Right wing and far right candidates were sent to Congress. But now, a tipping point has been reached. Rather than voting for another mainstream candidate, those voters have chosen another path. Those voters believe America’s problems are too dire to be put into the hands of another mainstream politician. Those voters have decided that only radical change can solve America’s problems. And Donald Trump is their radical.

Trump is clearly a loose cannon. But that is precisely why his followers love him. He speaks his mind, even when his mind changes 180 degrees from one day to the next. He’s politically-incorrect-on-steroids, which gives his followers permission to also be politically incorrect – as well as racist, xenophobic, and misogynistic. If America is a house on fire, Trump won’t try to put out the fire; Trump will fan the flames. Trump’s followers are convinced that America’s problems are too complex and too entrenched for ordinary solutions. They believe that the only way forward is to burn the house to the ground and build a new house.

Trump is not the man to honor inconvenient treaties nor tread lightly on the world stage. Being responsible hasn’t worked so let’s be irresponsible. Trump will be a man of action; he will build giant walls, use nuclear weapons on our enemies, and throw millions of people out of the country. He’s going to do all these horribly expensive things and more, while simultaneously giving the wealthiest Americans another tax cut and balancing the budget. He’s going to do things that clearly can’t be done – by an “ordinary” politician. But the Trump faithful are convinced that somehow he’ll pull it off. They know what the rest of us cannot fathom: that Trump must destroy America in order to save America.

There is a Chinese curse that goes, “May you live in interesting times.” If Trump is elected, Americans will learn what that means.