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

by Richard North Patterson

  Thus it is striking that the prospect of President Trump has provoked a broad discussion of the chief executive’s power to go nuclear. The alarming consensus is articulated by nuclear expert Franklin C. Miller: “The president and only the president has the authority to order the use of nuclear weapons.” Perhaps the most effective ad run by the Clinton campaign in August addresses the danger of Trump’s stubby fingers on our nuclear codes. And given his behavior—this month, and every month—more Americans are recoiling from the thought.

  That is lethal. Because August is the month when concern about Trump’s mental state went mainstream. For the first time in recent memory, a candidate’s pattern of behavior—sustained for fourteen months now—made his psychological health the subject of serious and considered public discussion.

  For a good while, those of us who raised this directly were a distinct minority of commentators, running afoul of the understandable journalistic reluctance to speak to a candidate’s emotional stability. For many, this was a matter of ethics. But, at last, Trump’s behavior swept all that away.

  And so in August, in varying ways, some of our most prominent pundits across the ideological spectrum expressed fears about Trump’s mental fitness to be president: David Brooks, Eugene Robinson, Charles Krauthammer, Peggy Noonan, Joe Scarborough, and Robert Kagan. And, with annihilating thoroughness, Keith Olbermann spelled out in Vanity Fair how perfectly Trump’s otherwise inexplicable conduct matches up with the symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder.274

  Americans as a whole do not keep the DSM at their fingertips. But they do have instincts that, unlike Trump’s, stem from their experience in noticing other human beings. August was the month that a critical mass of Americans noticed that Donald Trump notices nothing but himself.

  Trump 3.0

  Pivoting in Quicksand

  SEPTEMBER 6, 2016

  As most Americans enjoyed Labor Day, Donald Trump found himself staring into the political abyss.

  Imagine his surprise and disappointment. The new Donald was pivoting! He had a message—Hillary Clinton is bad. His new campaign manager gave him new words to read from a teleprompter. He was the candidate of change—any change. He was reaching out to black people to impress white people. He might even allow a few undocumented immigrants to linger—though maybe not. And after fourteen months of lying, some polls even said that he was still more “trusted” than Clinton—though not so much.

  Why am I still behind, Trump must wonder, when those emails are sticking to Hillary’s shoes like chewing gum? Sometimes she even stepped in it herself. What did she think Colin Powell was going to say—that he begged her to use a private server? And so what if none of the emails actually show political corruption? Millions of Americans believed him when he called the Clinton Foundation “the most corrupt enterprise in political history”—especially the ones who have never heard of Richard Nixon. And who the hell cares about Caligula—whoever he was.

  Plus, The Donald had a great new team to help him appeal to women—Stephen Bannon, Roger Ailes, and Julian Assange. After all, those domestic violence charges against Steve were twenty years old. No one had actually accused Roger of rape, just being a tough negotiator. And those rape charges against Julian are entirely unproven, just like his connection to those helpful hackers in Russian intelligence who keep siphoning him Hillary’s emails.

  World-class recruits, one imagines Trump thinking. And that Kellyanne Conway is tougher than any man, or even Rachel Maddow . . .

  But enough. Sorry, readers, I just can’t keep this up—trying to think like Donald Trump is too exhausting. So instead I will try to explore why, come November, none of these changes will save him from himself.275

  True, the seemingly infinite supply of emails will dog Hillary Clinton until Election Day, and some of her wounds are self-inflicted. But despite all the media piety about the “appearance of impropriety” with respect to the Clinton Foundation, the substance of these emails contains a paucity of the improper. One strains to find a flyspeck of wrongdoing in the dunghill of reportage.

  And whenever things get bad, Clinton—or Trump himself—has proven adroit at shifting the subject to Trump’s biggest weakness: Trump himself. That is why her linkage of Trump with the bigoted “alt-right” was so devastating and persuasive—Trump himself has seeded the ground with his designation of the head of Breitbart.com, an “alt-right” website awash in racism, as his campaign’s CEO.

  Of little help was his drive-by photo op in an African-American neighborhood in Detroit, accompanied by the extraterrestrial Ben Carson. Its essence was foreshadowed by a comedic prelude: the revelation of a script for a taped interview wherein Trump would be queried by a black pastor. Not only did the Trump campaign provide the questions—it had written out answers to be memorized by their clueless candidate.

  This drove home a devastating truth—without help, Trump has nothing to say to black Americans. Briefly visiting Carson’s childhood home, Trump resembled a tourist entering a foreign country. And when he appeared at a black church, he read a few scripted sentiments so obviously alien to his thinking that every word must have come as a surprise—to Trump himself.

  Nowhere did he acknowledge any words or actions—in this campaign, or ever—that might have offended his audience. But given that he did not know his audience, save as interchangeable props in his dystopian view of black America, perhaps he had no language for this. To imagine Bill Clinton in his place, joyfully immersed in the spiritual life of the parishioners, is to capture the shallowness of Trump’s performance. It did not last long.

  Equally hollow was his recitation of “policy speeches” meant to dress him up in substance.

  His prescriptions for the economy combined the worst of two worlds. First, he caved in completely to the GOP’s hoary economic dogma: a budget-busting combination of tax cuts for the rich and corporations, with a special tip for the donor class—a total repeal of the estate tax that would benefit the wealthiest .02 percent of Americans. Reversing course, he then doubled down on his potentially ruinous economic populism, pledging to kill trade deals and slap tariffs on the Chinese. One cringes to think what this schizoid Donald would do to our economy.

  Never did Trump concede that he cannot exhume jobs killed by automation and the global economy. Nowhere did he promise struggling Americans the one thing that could help—retraining, education, and help in relocation for those displaced by the new economy. Instead of substance, the whole thing smacked of fraud.

  Similarly, his speech on fighting ISIS interspersed new absurdities among the old ones. He would bar immigration from countries that breed terrorism. Who? Germany, France, Belgium—or all three? He promised “extreme vetting” of immigrants—including probing inquiries as to whether the applicant believed in things like honor killings, presumably prompting a wave of confessions from guilt-stricken would-be terrorists. He pledged to evaluate other countries based solely on their help against ISIS, ignoring a host of areas—such as global warming and nuclear proliferation—where we need the assistance of governments with interests of their own.

  To this he added a few incendiary old favorites—like approving of torture and seizing oil fields in the Middle East. All in all, Trump succeeded only in reducing counterterrorism to a video game, proving that nonsense is not improved merely by reading it from a teleprompter.

  But nothing captured Trump’s intellectual and emotional twitchiness better than his multiple feints on his core issue, immigration.

  In the primaries, that was how he made his bones—as a wall-building, Mexican-deporting, America First hardliner. And he loved it—so much that he conjured a “deportation force” to perform the impossible task of kicking out all 11 million undocumented immigrants. And anytime a rally became too decorous to sate his need for adoration, he would put up the wall again and demand to know who would pay for it, provoking his rapturous fans to feed the beast by shouting “Mexico!”

  But that, sadly for Tru
mp, was then. In recent weeks his new campaign team broke the news that a lot of voters thought his policies more than a bit inhumane—not simply Latinos and other minorities, but the suburban whites he would need to have a prayer of becoming president. Maybe, just maybe, he ought to soft-pedal the stuff about shipping out every last grandmother, wife, and kid.

  For Trump, this must have been hard to take. He’d only been having fun, after all—and it was lots of fun! Still, the idea of getting slaughtered was surely painful. So what was an egotist to do?

  No one seemed to know—not Trump, not his team. In one semi-incoherent day Trump suggested that he was “softening” on mass deportations, then appeared to reverse himself. At length it was announced that Trump would clarify all in a speech to be given in Phoenix.

  For the next few days, his surrogates implied that he would focus on expelling criminals instead of the entire undocumented population. The TV commentariat exhausted itself—and the rest of us—in wondering whether this newly empathetic Trump would mollify white suburbanites or alienate his hard-core base. Breathlessly, we awaited his debut.

  Abruptly, on the day of his speech Trump flew to Mexico to meet with President Enrique Peña Nieto who, to the mystification of all, had agreed to serve as a prop for Trump’s campaign. In the joint appearance that followed, Trump excited awe and wonder by reading his speech in a normal tone of voice. Even more striking, in the view of many, was his diplomatic avoidance—at least by his own account—of raising with Peña Nieto the subject of who would pay for his wall. And so for the next several hours, cable news proclaimed the advent of a statesmanlike Donald on the world stage, authoring a masterstroke of geopolitical theater.

  As often, the effect was tarnished by a Twitter war—precipitated, in this case, by the Mexican president’s insistence that he had told Trump that his country would never pay for the wall. This was accompanied by bitter tweets from all quarters of Mexico, condemning the hapless Peña Nieto for meeting with Trump at all. By the time Trump landed in Phoenix, theater was descending into farce, and the diplomat had morphed into a demagogue hungry to whip up a crowd.

  And so the red meat flew. Trump was building that wall, and Mexico was paying for it. Mexican immigrants were murdering Americans and taking their jobs. His deportation force was going after the hordes of Mexican criminals first, but no one was safe from deportation, and any hope of legal status was out the window. The only nuance, if it was one, was his failure to address the subject of purposeful mass deportations—in the hope that voters for or against would see Trump as their champion.

  Thus, after all of the confusion, obfuscation, and hints of a new direction, nothing much had changed—not the tone, nor the appeals to racial resentment, nor the insatiable craving to foment mass anger and frenzy. The GOP’s die was cast: their candidate was unwilling, or unable, to kick the hard line that had won him the primaries and that, in all likelihood, would precipitate his defeat in November—killing off other Republicans in the bargain.276

  Their conundrum grows ever more excruciating—and embarrassing. Party leaders like Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan remain determined to ride out the hurricane by patching up Trump’s leaky boat, hoping to reach dry land after he drowned in November. The price has been a series of verbal contortions in which they distance themselves from his most offensive effusions, while invoking Clinton as a reason to support him. They might look small now, the reasoning went, but their party would be grateful to those who steered the boat to safety.

  This, too, is the plight of Reince Priebus. And so Priebus struggles to save his House and Senate candidates by buttressing the man who threatens to bring them down, all the while pretending that Trump is fit to be president—at least until it becomes exigent to ditch him in all but name.

  Such are the burdens of collective responsibility. Sustained by the rationale that preserving their fractious party served the larger good, these men have put political courage and even decency on hold. This has earned them widespread scorn. But perhaps more should have noticed that many Republicans who disowned Trump, however sincerely, had little but their own interests to think of, and even less to lose.

  Take the Republican senators who have disowned or explicitly distanced themselves from Trump. Susan Collins, Ben Sasse, Jeff Flake, Lindsey Graham, and the inimitable Ted Cruz are not up for reelection. Still, their collective critique is a telling reminder to white-collar Republican voters that Trump is not a normal nominee.

  The same is true of the fifty Republican national security experts who declared that Trump “would put at risk our country’s national security and well-being.” Or the 100 past or present GOP officials who implored Priebus to stop supporting Trump. Or the conservative intellectuals who, by rejecting Trump, hope to advance a new agenda that addresses the struggling middle class and poor. Together, these voices become part of the background noise of the campaign, helping to leach support where Trump needs it most—his own party.277

  Another problem is that Trump’s serial sackings of his campaign team further undermined his managerial pretensions. The aversion of Republican pros left him dependent on a scurvy sequence of deputies. Corey Lewandowski proved thuggish and abrasive. Paul Manafort, it transpired, had raked in millions from a pro-Russian ex-president of the Ukraine, casting a dubious light on Trump’s passion for Vladimir Putin.

  Not to mention Trump’s disinterest in character and indifference to vetting. Fresh from departing Fox News after multiple charges of sexual harassment, Roger Ailes signed on as an adviser. Trump’s new campaign CEO, Steve Bannon, comes trailing charges of domestic violence and falsely claiming residence in Florida. Only his latest campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, is capable and experienced, evoking rapture from the media desperate for a familiar face.

  For those delving the murky recesses of Trump’s mind, Bannon rewards particular attention.

  His website, Breitbart.com, is financed by another dubious character, Robert Mercer. Mercer is not exactly a man of the people: an ultraconservative billionaire and alleged tax cheat, he was last seen conducting his war against the IRS by supporting Ted Cruz. Now a fanatic Trump supporter—a fact no doubt related to Trump’s tax cuts for the rich—Mercer commended Bannon as just the man to sharpen the candidate’s message.

  Indeed. Breitbart.com is home to what a writer for the conservative National Review called “the racist, moral rot at the heart of the alt-right,” including white supremacist rhetoric and articles like those recently cited by Hillary Clinton: “Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy”; “Would You Rather Your Child Had Feminism or Cancer?”; and “Hoist It High and Proud: The Confederate Flag Proclaims a Glorious Heritage.” Not to mention this gem—“Gabby Giffords: The Gun Control Movement’s Human Shield.” For Bannon, as for Trump, words don’t matter—venom does.

  Which makes Bannon the perfect enabler. Under his auspices, we can safely expect Donald Trump to achieve new lows in what is already the most vile campaign in modern history.

  Hillary Clinton will not simply be untrustworthy, unwise, ethically challenged, and wrong on the issues—she will be traitorous, corrupt, immoral, criminal, bigoted, sickly, and brain damaged. There resides Trump’s sole hope of victory—turning out his base in a low turn out election so repugnant that millions of potential voters will recoil in disgust, thereby degrading the country he proposes to lead.278

  Here’s the only good news—it’s too late for anything else.

  If anything, the demographic fundamentals for Trump have gotten a bit worse. Except for white males, where his support is eroding, Trump is losing in virtually every key demographic.

  Clinton is slaughtering him by potentially historic margins among nonwhites, whose loathing he has so richly earned. She is beating Trump among women as a whole, and gaining ground with Republican women. Unlike Romney, Trump is losing the Catholic vote decisively—suggesting, perhaps, that feuding with the Pope was not a brilliant notion.

  Among college graduates, t
raditionally helpful to the GOP, Clinton has opened a lead. Her margin among young voters is close to three to one. And the bulk of Sanders voters are now Clinton voters. For all the talk that Trump would change the demographic map, it seems more likely that Clinton can challenge him in states like Georgia and Arizona.

  Trump’s dilemma is that his base—modestly educated whites—is shrinking, the groups he repels expanding. And Republicans are losing their fight to defend the voter suppression laws through which they hoped to diminish nonwhite turnout.279

  Unlike Trump, Clinton is running a steady campaign, and she has largely succeeded in making him the issue. Most voters harbor deep-seated doubts about his temperament, not to mention his fitness to be commander in chief. What keeps him in the game is that roughly as many voters doubt that Clinton has been transparent or even candid in addressing her personal conduct—a serious weakness reinforced by the constant drip of emails that, if nothing else, resurrect her bad decision to use a private server.

  Still, Trump has the bigger weakness—himself. Whatever her problems with trust, a great many voters trust Clinton to be competent and prepared. For many voters, this is the ultimate test—who can they imagine as president—and only Clinton passes it. In this environment, a greater proportion of Republicans than Democrats may cross over or simply stay home.

  Nor is the vaunted black swan event—some transformational occurrence—likely.280 Terrorism? Voters question Trump’s judgment. Some terrible email? We haven’t seen one yet, nor do we have a reason to believe that such a phantasm exists. Trump trouncing Clinton in debate? Really? Obama couldn’t do it in 2008, and he actually knows his stuff.

  I don’t foresee a rout. Chances are that dislike for Clinton will combine with political polarization to close the margin in the popular vote. But if anyone will be redrawing the electoral map, it’s Hillary Clinton—leaving Trump with the dregs.281