Fever Swamp: A Journey Through the Strange Neverland of the 2016 Presidential Race

by Richard North Patterson

  So it is distressing, but unsurprising, that the Republican Lieutenant Governor of Texas blamed the Dallas shootings not just on the shooter, but on the peaceful protesters the police were protecting, and on Black Lives Matter protesters in general. By doing so, he deepened the tragedy of the murders, and of racial division writ large, by further subtracting from our well of common humanity and understanding.

  Donald Trump did not start any of this—far from it. His perverse genius was to see what the Republican Party had become, and to exploit this among the party’s base without ambiguity or shame.

  If he had any doubt, it was resolved by the GOP’s response to the blatant nativism and racism of his birther attack on Barack Obama—the muted demurrals, the cringing silence, the odious evasions, the crafty exploitation. Trump simply built on this by stressing attacks on Muslims, proffering another scapegoat to an all-too-willing audience of Republican primary voters.

  This, too, was hardly novel within the GOP. Even before his rise, Republicans in Congress blocked administration efforts to take in more refugees from Syria. And in the wake of Orlando, House Republicans proposed to ban all refugee resettlement absent congressional approval, echoing Trump’s call for a ban on Muslim immigration. A party that had lost its political and moral core was, at last, ripe for a man like Donald Trump.

  And so he has summoned the whirlwind. Where before the party spoke of race in whispers, Trump embraced racism with a full-throated roar. It is the Republican nominee—not Latinos nor immigrants nor Muslims nor aggrieved black protesters—who threatens American values.

  But among too many Republicans, his offense is against decorum. The GOP had already become the home of bigots and bigotry, all dressed up for a garden party. Only now they are fearful of the help.

  It is time for the GOP to face the truth, or face extinction.237

  Leading the Lemmings

  The GOP’s Idiot King Marches on Cleveland

  JULY 19, 2016

  On the eve of their convention, the erstwhile chief counselors of the GOP had, at last, comprehended the horror that is Donald Trump.

  There is comedy in this. One imagines the ministers of some obscure Ruritanian monarchy, awakening to discover that their new king is the idiot former crown prince, who combines congenital feeblemindedness with preposterous vanity, irrational willfulness, unpredictable outbursts of rage, the attention span of an infant, and a frightening ignorance of statecraft. In short, the not-so-good King Drumpf.

  If only Peter Sellers still lived.

  Regrettably, this is not a movie set in Moldavia. It is an American presidential campaign, and the idiot king is the Republican nominee—which is way too serious to serve as farce.

  Still, one must grant its farcical aspects—not least in the two weeks prior to his coronation in Cleveland.

  A chief source of drollery is what happens when his counselors cannot control him, which is pretty much all the time. The pluperfect example of which is his meanderings in the wake of a political gift from God—FBI director James Comey’s root and branch critique of Hillary Clinton’s email practices.

  Leaving nothing to chance, his aides gave him a script dedicated to Clinton’s demolition. He read it for a while before, abruptly bored, throwing it away. What followed was that which his handlers most feared—lint plucked from His Donald’s all-too-woolly mind.238

  Never good. Even less good when, as often, Trump begins reciting his grievances. He attacked Chuck Todd and savaged CNN. He complained that the media had (accurately) reported his baroque praise of Saddam Hussein for supposedly killing terrorists—which Saddam never did—and then repeated it, cementing Saddam’s place along with Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un as the despots Trump admires for being “strong.” But even worse was his irrationally perverse revival of an incident that raised the specter of anti-Semitism.

  The controversy began with yet another tweet—this passing on material from a white supremacist website. Small wonder, then, that the site made its point about Clinton’s supposed venality by imposing a Star of David over a pile of money. Not subtle. So when the media pointed this out, Trump’s tweet patrol covered up the star before deleting the image altogether.

  To the normal mind, mere damage control, and high time to move on. Not Trump. He was outraged—at the media for reporting the origins of the tweet and, remarkably, at his campaign for taking it down. For Trump, this was a matter of principle—and his chief principle is that “Trump” is never wrong. And so, bizarrely, he complained that the whole thing amounted to “racial profiling” by the media—directed at Donald Trump.

  In itself, this performance was nothing new. His entire primary campaign was one rally after another stuffed with ignorance, insults, lies, boasting, inflated poll numbers, and moronic bits of apocrypha snatched from God knows where. His policy statements were less positions than attitudes—a certain mindless machismo supplemented by an alarming obliviousness to known reality, and cemented by constant complaints that the media, his opponents, the GOP, and pretty much the entire world were being grossly and inexplicably unfair to Donald Trump.

  But somehow the panjandrums of the GOP told themselves this was all okay. It was only the primaries, after all, and the party had been selling a milder version of this bilge for years. Surely, sobered by his anointment, Trump would listen to their advice.

  And so, for them, his latest burst of mania was a bit like looking up from a belated reading of the DSM, scales falling from their eyes, to discover that their leader was not the unpredictable but canny operator they imagined, but flat-out nuts.

  Which, given that he is in the grips of a profound personality disorder, is true enough. Trump’s entire life has been a self-centered exercise in self-branding that blinds him to all else. Thus his campaign has been a hall of mirrors in which he sees nothing but himself. And he brings nothing to the quest—not self-discipline, self-knowledge, or any interest in learning.

  His egotism and inattention repel the advisers he needs most.239 He shows no appreciation, or even awareness, of the awesome responsibilities imposed on America’s president. In sum, his quest for power is a rolling disaster that but augurs the disasters that would follow should he attain it.

  Potentially disastrous, as well, for Senate Republicans battling to maintain their majority. Trump’s gift for repelling Latinos, women, and millennials is potentially lethal—for Republicans in swing states, he is the political equivalent of the Zika virus.240

  One would think, then, that he would approach this endangered species with at least a trace of faux humility, as behooves a man with an exceptionally impressive 70 percent disapproval rating.

  Not our Donald. In a calamitous meeting with Republican senators, he began by asking a prominent dissenter, Ben Sasse, if he preferred Hillary Clinton. This provoked Jeff Flake to introduce himself as “the other senator from Arizona—the one who didn’t get captured,” adding that, to date, things like Trump’s remarks about Latinos had kept him from being supportive.

  A lesser man might have attempted to mollify a senator concerned about an important voting bloc. Instead, Trump retorted that absent an attitude adjustment he would make sure that Flake lost his seat in November. This menacing threat was reduced to the merely astonishing by the fact that, apparently unknown to Trump, Flake is not up for reelection.241

  But the idiot king did not reserve his bile for those present. In a particularly gratuitous attack, His Petulance labeled Mark Kirk of Illinois “dishonest” and “a loser.” This did not go over well: if Kirk, indeed, turns out to be a loser, a principal reason will be Trump himself. Not that the man cares all that much. Asked by a reporter whether retaining a Senate majority meant anything to him, he answered, “Well, I’d like them to do that. But I don’t mind being a free agent, either.”

  Having treated senators to a glimpse of a brave new era in congressional relations, Trump breezed on to a meeting with House Republicans. This, mercifully, was more pacific, if not altogether
reassuring. Asked for his understanding of the powers of Congress under Article I, King Drumpf assured his minions that, as a “constitutionalist,” “I want to protect Article I, Article II, Article XII”—adding, with a monarch’s grandeur, five nonexistent articles to the current seven.

  Afterwards, His Superbity pronounced the meeting a howling success. But just to ensure that his new subjects expressed the appropriate appreciation, Trump gave them a script for the press: “It would be great if you could say we had an unbelievable meeting. ‘Trump loves us. We love Trump.’ It’s going to be so good. Okay? You gotta say great things.”

  As an expression of Trump’s worldview, if not reality, it was perfect.

  Of course, the essence of Trump is a vast internal emptiness, a void of curiosity, a penchant for lying, a lust for attention, an infinitesimal attention span, a stunning deficit of self-awareness, and yet, paradoxically, a monomaniacal absorption with self. Combine this with the need to dominate, an indifference to consequence, the complete absence of conscience, and an awe-inspiring lack of empathy for other human beings, and you have a would-be satrap who stiffs small contractors, stints on charity, treats women like serfs, and scams the credulous; whose business career is larded with fraud, bullying, and mendacity; and whose mode of inspiration is to talk about himself.

  This is the man with no soul against whom journalists have begun to warn us. Depicting his internal wasteland—not parsing tactics or handicapping horse races—is political journalism as it should be. Over time such portraits take their toll, as truth often does.

  Granted, the bar for Trump remains astoundingly low—all too often, the media still treats his stray scripted moments of simulated sanity as revelatory of the statesman within.242 But as more reporters capture the real man, more voters take notice, including a cadre he desperately needs: the college-educated whites who boosted Romney within shouting distance of Obama. For every blue-collar white entranced by his persona, there is a more prosperous Caucasoid Trump repels. Instead of redrawing the electoral map, he may well be sticking the pencil in his own ear.243

  But this demographic divide also reflects a fault line within the GOP itself. To appeal to blue-collar workers, Trump rejects the free-market dogma of the party with an imperious flick of his hand. Not for him the “financial elite,” “powerful corporations,” and “Wall Street funders,” who have “rigged the system for their benefit.” Not for him the politicians—and that means you, Paul Ryan—who practice “economic surrender” to the forces of free trade.

  Not for Trump, indeed, is the global economy as we have come to know it.

  No, the new King promises a very old deal—a call for protective tariffs that harks back to the eighteenth century. Like any satrap without sense, Trump proposes to repeal reality, throwing the engines of globalism into reverse. How? Simple—he will magically restore manufacturing jobs that began vanishing years ago by exhuming the protectionism of centuries ago. Let lesser men—or women—propose job retraining for workers dislocated by the new economy. King Donald will simply abolish the new economy.244

  Never mind that automation has transformed manufacturing: it’s not American products that it disappeared—it’s American jobs. And so Trump’s promises are the economic equivalent of bread and circuses.

  The sans-culottes he has awakened are a restive bunch. Trump’s blandishments may be fantastical, but their suffering is real. And the one thing they know for sure is that the apostles of “limited government” and “economic freedom” don’t give a damn about them. Indeed these privileged grandees, in Trump’s telling, are the very mustache-twirlers who “are moving our jobs, our wealth, and our factories to Mexico and overseas.”

  Which, for the GOP, is a problem. For what Trump is proposing is to swap the politics of distraction for an outright fraud. When the bread is eaten and the circus disappears, his subjects will still be starving.

  So what are party traditionalists to do? Some schemers fantasized about a coup. Others imagined that, in time, their dimwitted leader would revert to looking in the mirror while they replaced his “policies” with their own. One might call this Ryan’s Hope.

  Given His Vacancy’s vacancy, this is always possible. But he may well have gelded Ryan and his honor guard, the free marketeers. For one thing, the blue-collar base has routed their program. And Ryan’s own principality, the House of Representatives, is so riven by GOP factionalism that the speaker can’t even pass a budget. One looks at Ryan and, in moments of sympathy, imagines Prince Charles.245

  Trump rolls merrily on, racial animus bubbling in his wake. Compelled at last by the murders in Dallas to issue a limpid statement of sympathy, Trump shortly reverted to type, declaring himself the “law-and-order candidate” and, with his keen historical and sociological insight, blaming America’s racial divide on Clinton and our first black president. And so the GOP arrived in Cleveland as the party of bigots and bigotry.

  Not to mention fundamentalism. Here, yet again, Trump’s regal inattention to detail had consequences: a platform that sprang straight from the heads of the furious fundamentalists who—rejected again and again by our society writ large—came to Cleveland to stake their claim to the party’s soul.

  Left unsupervised by the Trump campaign, the GOP’s cretinous creationists doubled down on denunciations of abortion, same-sex marriage, and gay rights in general. The Bible, we discovered, is not merely a text for Christians but should be taught in public schools. Particularly ironic then, is the party’s large-spirited definition of “religious freedom”: the freedom to refuse service to gays.

  One can but admire its principled stand against tolerance and diversity—social or religious—and its firm rejection of those enemies of society: women, minorities, and the young.246 If only in the way one admires a herd of lemmings headed for Lake Erie.

  In the meanwhile, tragedy struck again: the slaughter in Nice—in Trump’s world, a marketing opportunity. He responded with his usual gaseous bluster, calling for a congressional “declaration of war” against ISIS while offering no actual solutions to the multi-faceted problem of transnational terrorism. And so one was grateful for a moment of comic relief—the King’s audition of crown princes or, before she fled in horror, a princess.

  The most prominent possibilities regarded this prospect less as a glass slipper than a political cement shoe, rooting them to the bottom of the lake as they expelled their last air bubble. They sought dry land in droves: John Kasich, Rob Portman, Scott Walker, Kelly Ayotte, Nikki Haley, Brian Sandoval, Susanna Martinez, and pretty much anyone else with hopes of a better life.

  Lesser lights endured the seriocomic, compelled to audition for the king by praising him to gatherings of subjects and, as a reward, to seek the blessing of his kids. Fresh from his ordeal, the erstwhile establishment choice, Bob Corker, declared that he was otherwise employed. Joni Ernst too declared her fondness for the Senate, though her prior experience as an Iowa farm girl—spent neutering pigs—seemed ideal for any woman forced to work under Donald Trump. The four stragglers who remained were a perfect reflection of the party’s plight—second-tier white guys with nothing to lose.

  The two most gifted were, politically, extinct volcanoes: Newt Gingrich and Chris Christie. The third, Jeff Sessions, was qualified only by that which was utterly disqualifying—the actual belief that Trump should be president. And the fourth, Mike Pence—faced with a potentially career-ending loss for reelection as governor of Indiana—seemed to view becoming Trump’s lackey as the political equivalent of the witness protection program.

  True to character, Trump treated his quartet of bobbleheads with the whimsy of a monarch and the empathy of a puppeteer. Invoking the slaughter in Nice as a pretext, he kept his prospects dangling by canceling his stated announcement date of 11:00 a.m. on Friday, as the rumored selection, Pence, flew to New York in anticipation of a joint press conference, only to be left twisting in the ever-shifting winds of King Donald’s public musings. In this messy inter
regnum, conflicting rumors issued from inside the campaign; Gingrich and Christie publicly angled for the slot; and Pence faced a legal deadline of noon on Friday to withdraw his candidacy for governor.

  As hours passed, decorum dissolved, replaced by a dispiriting glimpse of palace intrigue in the court of an idiot king. Trump took to the airwaves to deny choosing anyone; Gingrich launched a scene-stealing denunciation of Muslims; and Pence silently suffered the stature-shrinking role of puppet-in-waiting. Angry at the leaks from within naming Pence as his choice, Trump began looking for a way out.

  Filled with hope and desperation, both Gingrich and Christie pleaded with the monarch for his favor. Reports buzzed that Trump regarded Pence as a drag on his “brand,” another tired iteration of the also-rans he had kicked around in the primaries. But Pence was the choice of party regulars because he was precisely that—just like they are. And so the professionals surrounding Trump were reduced to begging for Pence’s life as if it were their own.

  Then, abruptly, Trump popped his announcement—in a tweet. Bypassing the risky personae of Gingrich and Christie, he at last anointed the humdrum but compliant Pence, a standard-issue evangelical conservative with all the fascination of a tire leak.

  Pence’s principal distinction is his stalwart opposition to abortion and gay rights in any form, most recently as champion of Indiana’s anti-gay “religious freedom” statute. But while Pence buys Trump nothing outside the airless antechamber of the right—save, of course, the potential for further alienating young people, women, and social moderates—the Sun King can be confident in the infinity of his gratitude. Not to mention his capacity for enduring all the humiliations to come.

  Their strained and tepid debut as a ticket augured their relationship. There was zero electricity in the room or chemistry between the candidates, and Trump looked like he had just committed an unnatural act—taking advice.