Even for a supporter of his strength on illegal immigration, the man's sadistic grandiosity is too much to take
Donald Trump is right about one very important thing: We cannot continue to be a country, much less a successful one, if we fail to enforce our immigration laws.
For years, Republican elites have silenced dissent from their open borders ideology; Americans who protested the costs of unchecked low-skilled immigration were told to shut up and ignore the evidence of social deterioration right before their eyes. Now those same Americans are in open revolt against the Republican elites — understandably and justifiably so — and backing the establishment’s worst nightmare.
However delightful it may be to see the Republican establishment sidelined, Trump is a fatally flawed vessel for that voter revolt.
Unfortunately, however valid Trump’s immigration message and however deserved the thrashing of the GOP establishment, Trump would do far more harm than good as President. The problem is not with his inchoate policy positions but rather with his repellent mean-spiritedness and all-consuming narcissism. Trump would set a model of behavior, especially for boys, that would drag American civility into the gutter. Conservatives should preserve the fragile legacy of civilized culture. Trump would demolish it.
Instead of engaging with his opponents’ ideas, Trump invariably sneers at his rivals’ appearance and launches ad hominem insults. Mocking the alleged size of Marco Rubio’s ears may be uproariously funny to a 7-year-old boy, but such sandbox tactics should be inconceivable for someone who aspires to the office once occupied by George Washington, James Madison and Abraham Lincoln. (That Rubio finally responded in kind simply illustrates Trump’s corrosive effect on public discourse.)
Trump is the consummate bully, delighting in kicking people when they are down. Long after Rick Perry and George Pataki were lifeless political corpses and of no possible threat to his own candidacy, Trump continued to entertain audiences by gratuitously mocking Perry’s eyeglasses and intelligence, belittling Pataki’s political appeal, and gloating about how he had routed both from the race.
Such behavior is not just beneath the dignity of the office, it should be beneath the public’s dignity as well. Yet with Trump as President, children will constantly have before them a model of sadistic grandiosity.
While Trump loves to dish out juvenile insults, he is visibly thin-skinned about receiving them. During the penultimate Republican debate, when Rubio cheerfully tried to match Trump’s locker-room sniping, Trump was hunkered down and beleaguered. Expect such a defensive, cornered stance against any leader, domestic or foreign, who opposes him. That is not strength, it is petulant weakness.
By inflaming his audiences’ meanest cage-match instincts, Trump distracts attention from his vacuum of substantive content. When not focused on his rivals’ looks and intelligence, his rallies consist overwhelmingly of recitals of poll numbers in a bizarre self-referential ritual.
Trump’s establishment critics give him too much credit in treating him as representative of a populist ideology. His attention span is too fleeting to have absorbed any coherent narrative about the world. And the chance that once in office he would try to master the nuances of policy is slim, if for no other reason than that his ego would prevent him from acknowledging his profound ignorance.
Trump’s scant understanding of policy means he will likely be at the mercy of every half-baked big government scheme that sounds like an easy solution to a problem — such as increasing welfare payments to alleviate poverty or pouring more federal money into urban revitalization schemes. He does not even understand the immigration policy papers that have been written for him.
Indeed, Trump’s ego makes it likely that he would lie about any matter of state that puts his presidency in a bad light.
The Republican establishment, led by Mitt Romney, has lately seized on a doomed strategy for halting Trump’s rise: accusing him of bigotry. Trump’s foes are not going to win a hearing from his supporters by mimicking the left.
Trump may be a boor, but he is not a bigot. His proposal for a temporary halt to Muslim immigration was not the result of Islamophobia; it was a good-faith reaction to the San Bernardino massacre. That the proposal may be unworkable does not make it the product of bigotry. His bizarre stalling on the irrelevant question about repudiating David Duke and the KKK shows simply his political inexperience.
Trump’s indifference to kneejerk claims of discrimination is in fact his strongest selling point, after immigration enforcement.
But there is a difference between refusing to kowtow to political correctness and reflexively being nasty to critics who are no threat to you or even to those who are.
However delightful it may be to see the Republican establishment sidelined, Trump is a fatally flawed vessel for that voter revolt. Some things are even more important than getting control of our borders. The preservation of national character and civility is one of them.
This piece originally appeared in New York Daily News
