Whatever the outcome on 8th November, this year’s presidential election has already been a major event in the life of the United States—an electoral crisis, as the candidacy of Donald Trump has lurched from the anomalous to the anarchic. Every presidential election is a test of “the system” by which a very large nation, now numbering some 320m people, with 130m likely to vote, decides who will fulfil the multiple roles of head of state, top administrator of the executive branch of government, commander-in-chief of the military, along with all-purpose television star and home entertainer. Trump, the Republican nominee, has spent most of his adult life perfecting the last requirement. It’s the rest of the job for which he seems historically ill-suited, “woefully unprepared” and “unfit to serve,” as President Barack Obama pronounced him on 2nd August, in one of the campaign’s many surreal moments. It’s not just Obama and the Democrats: 50 Republican national security experts, including Michael Hayden, former Director of the CIA, recently signed a letter stating that Trump “would be the most reckless President in US history.”
The strongest case against Trump has been made by the candidate himself in a dizzying cascade of tweets, intemperate outbursts, insults and defamations. In one 24-hour-span in early August, Trump perpetuated his attack on the Muslim parents of a decorated war hero, Humayun Khan, who was killed in Iraq in 2004; suggested Americans might withdraw their retirement accounts from the stock market; and declined to endorse several top Republicans up for re-election in November because they had not shown him proper deference. He capped this, on 9th August, with a speech in North Carolina in which he said that “Second Amendment people”—that is, advocates of gun rights—might be the last line of defence against his opponent, Hillary Clinton. This was read by the Clinton campaign and a good deal of the “mainstream media” as a threat of violence against Clinton, though one tinged with desperation since polls showed her steadily increasing her lead.
Meanwhile, establishment Republicans have been bracing themselves for a battering. Elections for the Senate and House of Representatives will take place on the same day as the presidential vote. “If we fail to protect our majority in Congress, we could be handing President Hillary Clinton a blank cheque,” House Speaker Paul Ryan warned Republicans in a fund-raising email sent 96 days before the election. This might have seemed premature. But the handful of campaign professionals on Trump’s staff had all but given up, and Ryan and other party officials seem to have decided that defeat is preferable to victory: President Trump might permanently wreck the Republican Party and perhaps the Republic too. In a chilling entry in the growing anti-Trump literature, the former journalist Tony Schwartz unburdened himself in an interview with the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer in which he described the hundreds of hours he spent with Trump in an intense 18-month collaboration that resulted in Trump’s 1987 bestseller The Art of the Deal. A better title for the memoir, Schwartz told Mayer, would have been The Sociopath. “If Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes,” he said, “there is an excellent possibility it will lead to the end of civilisation.” Two weeks later a report surfaced that in a meeting with foreign policy specialists, Trump had asked three times about nuclear weapons, “if we have them, why can’t we use them?”
It is easy to forget, as the comedy grows bleaker, that little more than a year ago observers were settling for a mind-numbing, here-we-go-again contest between Clinton and her twin legacy candidate, Jeb Bush. Both electoral machines—money, connections, expertise, all meshing like gears—seemed unstoppable. But then 10 weeks later, Trump and his wife Melania, clad in Vestal white, shimmered down the marble-sided staircase of Trump Tower in New York to launch the most unusual presidential campaign in American history. As Leslie Moonves, the chairman of CBS, said in February: “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.” And for other news networks too. The left-leaning cable giant MSNBC has profited from the Trump reality show, and so has right-leaning Fox News. He’s also good for newspapers and magazines. Outlier though he seems, Trump channels the confusions of the moment more vividly, by far, than any other politician. This is why, despite his four bankruptcies, the 3,500 lawsuits in which he has been involved (he was the defendant in 1,300), and despite his adamant refusal to release his tax returns, Trump seems untouchable on “the character issue.” His admirers cite his honesty and candour, but what they respond to is unfiltered authenticity, something only anti-politicians can achieve in this hyper-politicised climate. Trump isn’t just Clinton’s adversary, he is her antithesis, and while it probably won’t get him elected it may well transform American politics into an arena not for expertise but for the exhibition of self, of stimulus and sensation—of hot temper rather than measured temperament. He has been indulged because he permits us to indulge ourselves.
Now remorse has set in, along with genuine fear. Politicians in both parties are worried. So are America’s allies. It is impossible to read the nation’s great dailies, the New York Times and Washington Post and not sense a shudder, the sign of a new, if fleeting, unity. What for a quarter of a century had seemed an unbridgeable division between “blue” and “red” America, between Democrats and Republicans, between the leftward editors of The Nation and the rightward editors of National Review, seems to have been set aside in the collective effort to quarantine Trump.
But what about the 13m primary voters who nominated him for president and the 40 per cent or more of the broader population—from secular New England to the evangelical deep south, from east coast to west, Democrats, Republicans and independents of all descriptions—who seem likely to vote for him in November? What are these voters to think?
Their view of the 2016 election is very different. Unique in some respects, Trump is recognisable in others. In the 1950s, the crusading anti-Communist Joe McCarthy terrified elites but was adored by the Republican faithful. “He addresses vast crowds, gets enthusiastic ovations, but leaves his people as he found them,” one astute observer wrote at the time, “all for McCarthy… but not involved in any movement or organisation, and certainly not stirred up to insurgency and disaffection.” McCarthy never ran for president—or even seriously considered doing so. That was left to a later populist, George Wallace, the Alabama segregationist who broke away from the Democratic Party to mount a third-party campaign in 1968. Garry Wills, the US political thinker, remarked at the time that Wallace “was not the cause but an effect; he was one way of measuring the growth of resentment,” an assessment that also fits Trump. Wallace, too, prefiguring Trump, “lacked platform, personnel, history, future, or programme,” as Wills wrote, and “was a one-man phenomenon.” And like Trump, Wallace exploited racial hatreds but was not principally a racist. He was, more profoundly, a nihilist, who “offered neither palliative nor real cure; just a chance to scream into the darkness. It was a kind of perverse exercise in honesty—a proclamation that the darkness is there.” Most important, Wills suspected, Wallace-ism wasn’t the dead end many assumed, but a portent:
A nihilist vote is something new in America. In a land of ‘uplift’ it was depressing to realise that Wallace nonetheless captured over 13 per cent of the national vote. The Wallace voter felt that ‘the system is breaking down’—that it could no longer protect the citizen (perhaps did not want to), that the citizen was alone and vulnerable, of no concern to the courts, the pointy-heads, the diplomats. So throw them out.
Much of America was closed to Wallace, a local creature of the rural south. The screams of the media star city-slicker Trump reach further, and have given him control of a major party. But, like his demagogic predecessors, he seems to have no idea of what he means to do. A purely instinctual politician, altogether unreflective, he is less the tribune of “his” people than their temporary surrogate, at a time when the party has no trusted leaders. The Republican national convention in Cleveland was remarkable for many reasons, but above all for the near total absence of its few respected national figures. The two living Republican ex-presidents (Bush “41” and “43”) stayed at home, as did the party’s two previous presidential nominees, John McCain and Mitt Romney. The only visible eminence was Bob Dole, the 1996 nominee. From start to finish, the event seemed an exercise in Brechtian alienation—meant to unsettle, not beguile. Instead of making peace with Ted Cruz, the Texas senator and his vanquished rival for the presidential nomination, Trump continued to tangle with him, and in the most public way. When Cruz spoke at an outdoor rally, Trump buzzed overhead in his plane. When Cruz spoke on the penultimate night, delivering a speech that stopped short of the traditional endorsement, Trump, who had approved the text in advance, materialised in the back of the hall to lead the hoots and jeers that sent Cruz slinking from the teleprompter. Trump’s own speech the next day, watched by some 32m people on television, was a bellow into the darkness, a catalogue of ills: “terrorism in our cities… violence in our streets… chaos in our communities.”
Sunny uplift would be left to the Democrats, if only they could seize the moment. But they couldn’t. When I arrived at their convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, protests had already begun—a thousand or more supporters of Bernie Sanders, Clinton’s rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, marching and chanting. Some of his supporters were convinced “Bernie” still could win, either through a popular uprising or a televised floor flight. Their hopes rested on a burgeoning scandal: a cache of 20,000 emails, published by Wikileaks, which showed the Democratic National Committee, under its leader, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a Florida Congresswoman, blatantly favouring Clinton during their battle for the nomination when she was supposed to be a neutral referee. The Sanders camp had been complaining about “DWS” for months and now claimed vindication. In fact, the emails disclosed no wrongdoing, only embarrassing confirmation of the obvious: the Democratic Party wanted Clinton to win and had done what it legally could to help her.
Still, it left a bitter taste. Clinton already enjoyed every advantage. Did the establishment need to tilt the playing field too? It also implied a broader complicity of the haves in their war from above against the have nots and this in turn equalised Trump and Clinton. Though now bitter opponents, the two have more in common than either will admit. Born a year apart—he in 1946, she in 1947—they combine the lifestyle freedoms of the 1960s and 1970s with the sharp-elbowed careerism of the 1980s and 1990s. And they have travelled in overlapping circles. The Clintons attended Trump’s wedding, to Melania, in 1995. Bill Clinton has been a golfing buddy of Trump’s. There has been a persistent rumour that Bill Clinton encouraged Trump to run for president. All this damages Hillary. She is, by almost any measure, the most accomplished woman in US politics, with a record of idealistic service dating back almost 50 years. Yet for many voters, including some Sanders loyalists, her long trail of iniquities—using her private email server when she was Secretary of State, condoning (and covering up) irregular practices at the Clinton Foundation (the global charity run by her husband), many investigations during the couple’s White House years, and more besides—equal or even surpass Trump’s own history of bankruptcies and business malfeasances. That he has no compensating history of good works like Clinton’s—in civil rights and human rights, family law, women and children’s health—scarcely matters. This is the paradox of politics in 2016: it obsesses the nation, yet has ceased to be the domain of honourable action.
All of this lay behind the pro-Sanders protests in Philadelphia, and the chants of “Hell no DNC, we won’t vote for Hillary.” Even after Wasserman Schultz resigned and limped away, feelings were hard. On Monday, when I rode the shuttle bus from central Philadelphia to the Wells Fargo Centre, the sports arena where the proceedings were held, with its surrounding acres of car parks, its legions of police and a helicopter or two circling overhead, protestors were pressed up against the chain-link fence, shouting their allegiance to “Bernie” and encouraging journalists to photograph them. “No way I’m voting Hillary,” a young Sanders delegate told me later. “I was okay with her until they condescended toward Bernie people.” He meant during the New Hampshire primary, Sanders’s sweeping first victory built on a coalition of the very young, including young women—a deep shock to Clinton and her generation of feminist allies. “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other,” said Madeleine Albright, the former Secretary of State and one of Clinton’s staunchest allies, as she introduced the candidate at a New Hampshire campaign event. “She’s been saying that as long as I’ve known her, which is about 25 years,” Clinton explained, trying to calm the furore, not realising those 25 years were part of the problem. To the new generation, Clinton is less pioneer than privileged elder.
"Two types of progressivism had got tangled: Sanders's, based on class solidarity, and Clinton's, based on civil rights and feminism"Nevertheless, for all their differences, Democrats had the advantage of being divided more coherently than the Republicans. While Trump and Cruz were waging a war of egos, the Democrats were sifting through a conflict of ideas. Two strains of progressivism had got tangled: Sanders’s, based on the socialist dream of class solidarity, and Clinton’s, rooted in civil rights and feminism. Many of the Democratic convention’s spokespeople, in state after state, were non-white—including those from states in the deep south which half a century ago were strongholds of segregationist Democrats. Republicans work hard in their conventions to populate the stage with as many non-white politicians and celebrities as they can find, in a show of diversity. But at the Republican Convention in Cleveland the party’s composition was clear from the delegates seated in the hall, who formed a lily-white sea. During the last half century, with the rise of “movement conservatism,” the Republican Party, “the party of Lincoln,” has remade itself into the rusted chalice of the Old Confederacy, while Democrats have embraced multiculturalism. But in doing so, the Democrats have given something up: the party’s rural heartland identity. That older, rougher-hewn idea still persists in some of the pockets, once pro-Democrat, where Trump’s scream is being heard. Its echo goes back a long way. “The left had not yet learned to talk across the rugged individualism of the more rugged in America,” Norman Mailer, himself a proud member of that same left, wrote in 1968, the year of George Wallace’s insurgency.
It says something about human nature, or perhaps American democracy, that Trump, for all his shortcomings, should be so adept at presidential politics. On policy, he may not know what he is talking about, but unlike the sometimes tin-eared Clinton, he always knows exactly whom he is speaking to and what they want to hear. And he is an experienced salesman. Back in January, researchers at the Rand Corporation reported the results of a survey. “Among people likely to vote in the Republican primary,” they found that 86.5 per cent “are more likely to prefer Donald Trump as the first-choice nominee relative to all the others if they ‘somewhat’ or ‘strongly agree’ that ‘people like me don’t have any say about what the government does.’” The report found that “This increased preference for Trump is over and beyond any preferences based on respondent gender, age, race/ethnicity, employment status, educational attainment, household income, attitudes towards Muslims, attitudes towards illegal immigrants, or attitudes towards Hispanics.”
This finding has a corollary in the emerging literature on America’s class divisions, books with titles such as White Trash and The End of White Christian America. “There is a heavy contingent of people who seem to draw a sense of superiority from looking down on the poor,” JD Vance, the author of the new bestselling memoir Hillbilly Elegy, recently told the New York Times Book Review. Vance had a modest upbringing in Ohio but is now with a San Francisco investment firm. “The problem, as I see it, is that these groups just don’t occupy the same worlds. They’re segregated into different neighbourhoods, different cities and even different states.” Across that divide, the Donald speaks.
Pennsylvania is important because it’s several states in one—urban, suburban, rural, rustbelt and it figures in calculations for presidential candidates. One of 11 “swing states”—Colorado, Virginia, Iowa, North Carolina and Wisconsin are others—it is a populous barometer of the imponderable American “middle” so crucial to each party’s idea of itself. Republicans last won Pennsylvania in 1988—which is also the last election in which the party proved itself to be truly national (it has since won the popular vote in only one presidential election, George W Bush’s win in 2004). Obama got 52 per cent in Pennsylvania in 2012, a trace better than he did nationally, and down from the 55 per cent he got in 2008. The thinking, as experts explained on the radio as I drove to a Trump rally in Harrisburg, the state capital, is that if the candidate has in fact unearthed a new base of support among the white working class, then Pennsylvania, with its worn-out industrial economy, should be a rich vein of votes.
At the moment, national employment is increasing—255,000 jobs added in July—and the jobless rate has dipped below 5 per cent. But in Pennsylvania the needle is stuck at 5.6 per cent, and such jobs as there are pay poorly: the state’s minimum wage, $7.25 an hour, hasn’t risen since 2008 and is one of the lowest in the northeast. Trump, like most Republicans, opposes raising the minimum wage. He also excites crowds with nostalgic promises of a revitalised coal-mining industry, though he and his listeners know that this won’t happen. The “clean economy” is a fact of 21st century life. But Trump doesn’t deal in facts. He deals in emotions. And every time he talks about reviving coal he sinks another blade in the unfeeling elite, who seem indifferent to the fate of what used to be called “Old Stock” Americans. Thanks to Trump—and also to Sanders—Clinton has come around on this subject too. During her visit to Harrisburg, she promised $275bn on infrastructure over five years (Congress has to approve the money). Trump has tossed out even bigger numbers, as much as $500bn or even $1 trillion, “depending on what day it is,” as the columnist Jonathan Chait remarked in early August.
Trump was in Harrisburg three days after Clinton, and I went to hear him. The event was in a suburb, Mechanicsburg, which sounds working class, but is quite prosperous. The car dealerships included Alfa Romeo, Maserati and Mercedes. “There’s a reason they chose this location,” John Micek, who runs the editorial page on the Harrisburg Patriot-News, told me. “Cumberland County is Republican. I went back and checked the numbers in 2008 and 2012. McCain and Romney both won by a lot. Romney got almost 60 per cent.” The venue was Cumberland Valley High School, a sprawling campus with a football stadium and a big car park. It was 3pm. Trump wasn’t due till 7pm, and was likely to be late since he was flying in from an afternoon event in Ohio. The food stalls set up inside were selling sausages, hot dogs and barbecued meat. The money would go to the school wrestling team. One Trump supporter told me he’d taken his kids to see him in April at the Farm Show Complex & Expo Centre. It had been fun: the music, the chants (“Trump! Trump! Trump!”), the T-shirts (“Hillary in Jail 2016).”
One of the many oversimplifications in Trump coverage is that the great majority of his fans consists of the “working poor” and the unemployed or unemployable. Trump’s much-ridiculed comment, “I love the poorly educated,” has been interpreted as a cynical appeal to those left behind in the globalised rat race. This is misleading. During the primaries he did well with most of the party’s blocs, including well-to-do voters in my state, Connecticut. And while the overall median income of Trump voters ($72,000) falls below typical levels for Republicans, it comfortably exceeds the national average ($56,000). Trump is very much a candidate of the broad American middle.
Harrisburg itself resembles many other American cities in its ethnic and racial makeup: 52 per cent African American, 18 per cent Latino, and 30 per cent white. Mechanicsburg, with a population just under 9,000, was 92 per cent white, according to the 2010 census. In 2000, it was 97 per cent. That 5-point jump speaks volumes. Trump’s appeal is strongest among those who feel the ground shifting under them. And so it was with the audience that poured into the high school gym that night. The lawful limit was 3,200. The press were told we had to stay behind the platform mounted with Fox News cameras. But the security detail was friendly, and we roamed freely. By 6pm, the main area was packed tight, with the overflow crowded into a second auditorium where fans watched on a big screen. A further 1,000 were gathered outside. What was striking was not only the absence of black people, but of almost anyone who wasn’t white. The atmosphere was festive, friendly, good natured. A DJ played hits of the 1960s and 1970s.
At 7pm, Trump’s own music loop was switched on (his playlist includes the Rolling Stones and Elton John). All around were ageing boomers, men and women, many in Trump T-shirts and hats. In one packed row a woman stood and danced with abandon. She looked old enough to have heard the songs first time round. There were some young people, but of school age, and in the company of parents or grandparents. A teenager wore a T-shirt with a picture of Obama and the legend, “You’re Fired!” Trump’s signature phrase on his reality show The Apprentice. There was the usual roster of warm-up speakers, most of them local politicians. One lustily promised that under President Trump there will no longer be “One set of rules for Hillary, and another for the rest of us.” The crowd repeated the chant made famous in Cleveland: “Lock her up!”
It was after 8pm—still no sign of Trump. A groan went up when “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” came on again. The dancer was seated, looking a bit worn out. A shout grew. “We Want Trump! We Want Trump! We Want Trump!” A member of the campaign was now at the microphone, Stephen Miller, a policy adviser, brought over from the staff of Senator Jeff Sessions, the anti-immigration hawk who was the first influential legislator to declare for Trump. Miller touched on some of Trump’s themes—protecting borders (“Build the Wall!”), creating jobs. Very little else. Then, at last, Trump came out on stage, and stood at the podium, composed for the news cameras and live-streaming. He smiled wearily through the stomping and cheers, the placards and iPhones held aloft for pictures. He apologised for being late. He was delighted with the turnout. “They had to turn away, like, 5,000,” he said. (A better estimate was 1,000). “So that’s a total of about 12,000.” It was probably half that (and the campaign had been giving tickets away.) “Hillary was here last week, and had like 800,” Trump said. The papers reported it as more than 2,000. But that’s Trump. Holding him to facts on these matters offends him and his supporters too. The media are liars, he says at almost every stop. He repeated his charge in Mechanicsburg, too. Pointing to us, gathered on the far side of the gym, typing and scribbling, he urged, “Tell them what you think.” The people around me smiled sheepishly.
Within 20 minutes, the excitement had evaporated. Trump’s multiplying missteps in recent days may be the result of exhaustion—he turned 70 in June. But he is an entertainer and must give the audience what it has come for. He roused himself a couple of times. He called Clinton “the devil” and promised, in a single line, to get rid of Obamacare, without saying how he’d replace it or cover the 20m who would lose their insurance. He promised that coal would come back (cheers and shouts), while reminding us Clinton wanted to replace it with green energy—not that he opposed green energy, but the timing isn’t right, he said. After 30 minutes of this some of the older people, the ones with children, began to file out. It was almost nine, and staying to the end meant manoeuvring through the crowded car park.
It has become a sport to wonder what bygone era Trump has in mind when he vows to turn back the clock and “Make America Great Again.” Does he mean the 1950s? The 1960s? The answer, when you’re in the presence of Trump and his followers, seems simpler. He has in mind no fixed moment. And why should he? America was great whenever it was that one last felt young. The next day, campaigning in Virginia, Trump told the audience he had just come from Harrisburg, and when he’d flown over its abandoned plants, the city “looked like a war zone.” By the week’s end more polling results were in. The pundits said Pennsylvania was lost.
