Trump is judged too soon, as were Reagan and Nixon before him

He is a man of extreme rhetoric and no policies. That is more reassuring than having no rhetoric and extremist policies

Sean O'Grady
Sunday 13 March 2016 18:34 GMT
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Donald Trump
Donald Trump

Who’s afraid of the big bad Trump? Not me, as it happens.

I fully admit – not to do so would be tantamount to fantasy – that Trump says and does outrageous things. He attacks sacred cattle for sheer sport: disabled journalists, Mexicans, John McCain’s war record, Muslims, Britain, the Pope for Chrissakes. The ugly scenes at the rally in Chicago confirm him as deeply divisive. The world and America would be much better off without his candidature, let alone his (still mercifully only prospective) presidency.

I know all that. And yet I am not afraid. Indeed, I am tempted to ask, has The Donald got a point? Yes – and a very substantial one, too.

When Trump campaigns on the Reaganesque slogan “let’s make America great again” it is meaningless as it was in Ronald Reagan’s time. But it spoke to a feeling of national malaise back in 1980 (and it was the Democrat President Jimmy Carter who counterproductively brought “malaise” into the discourse). That was when the Iranian hostage crisis symbolised the post-Vietnam feeling of loss and even shame about decline in US prestige. Today, America is not the power it was even then, and has the most varied and kaleidoscopic range of enemies ever, from Islamic State to North Korea and the suspicious and uneasy superpowers of China and Russia.

Some of that mess is of America’s own making, but the insecurities about its place and influence in the world are well founded. Trump isn’t the answer, but he is doing so well in what is, after all, a democratic process because he is voicing electors’ fears. They know the US can’t fight so many military, economic and diplomatic wars on so many fronts and still win, and they do not like it.

Then there’s the economy, stupid. It’s still the biggest in the world but it hasn’t been delivering for Americans for a very long time. Some economists say the living standards of working-class and middle-class Americans haven’t improved much since the Reagan era, and that any improvements there were in the 1990s and 2000s were built on the giant Ponzi scheme that started to collapse in 2007.

To the extent there has been a recent recovery, it has been arguably fuelled by more debt and the indulgence of the Chinese in buying America’s IOUs. Americans seem to want someone to tell them that all is not well, and the guy with the funny hairdo is doing precisely that.

Again, Trump doesn’t have much in the way of an answer – apart from the Great Wall of Texas to “stop the immigrants getting in” – but he has skilfully reflected Americans’ fears back at them. No one would call him a statesman, but he is a surprisingly effective and still underestimated politician.

So what is Trump? He is a man of extreme rhetoric and no policies. That is much more reassuring than a man with no rhetoric and extremist policies.

Nor, maybe, is he so far away from some figures from the past, and in particular the two men Trump seeks to emulate above all others – Richard Nixon and Reagan. Both of them built their careers on extreme, sometimes violent, rhetoric as Cold War warriors, and many feared what they might do with power. Would Nixon nuke Hanoi?

Nixon even enjoyed frightening America’s foes with his “mad monk” image, assiduously conveyed by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger for diplomatic gain in negotiation. In the early 1980s, the world genuinely feared nuclear destruction; would Reagan really bomb Russia, as he used to joke? The Spitting Image show ran a sketch known as “The president’s brain is missing”, portraying Reagan as a simpleton who thinks former Hollywood co-star Bonzo the chimp, with whom he shares his bed, is the vice-president. They had a song, too: “I can’t believe Ronald Reagan is president.” Like Trump, we Europeans, in our snooty way, held poor old Ronnie in equal measures of fear and contempt.

And yet both Nixon and Reagan evolved into peacniks – almost – through detente, with Reagan nearly abolishing America’s nuclear arsenal in 1986. Both were more liberal, or at least less reactionary, in economic and social spheres than many expected. Conversely, many in the 1930s feared Franklin Roosevelt as some sort of crazed socialist dictator. He certainly pushed the power of his presidency, but US capitalism survived what was then feared as quite a radical threat to the nation’s traditions and its capitalist economy.

The only exception to this optimistic historical view is George W Bush, who wound up pursuing more extremist policies than he ever dared promise the American people. But maybe they will learn a lesson from that (or Congress will) and prevent any repeat of that disastrous reign.

If he were ever to get into the White House, Trump would eventually also “get real”, hemmed in by the constraints on any dangerous imperial tendencies presented by the US constitution. Right or wrong, Congress wouldn’t let him blow billions on a Great Wall of Texas. The markets wouldn’t allow him to raise the money to do that, or any other crackpot scheme. President Trump would have to deal with powerful foreign governments, friendly and otherwise, and honour US treaty commitments.

The recent death of Nancy Reagan reminds us of how reliant Reagan was on those around him; Trump, bumptious as he is, would also have to listen to his advisers, cabinet and other great estates in the land. He could not just order Janet Yellen, the chair of the Federal Reserve, to do something barmy.

If Nixon was supposed to be mad, and Reagan thought of as stupid, then Trump now is regarded as mad and stupid. He is, of course, neither. He is the product, freely arrived at, of the world’s greatest democratic system of governance.

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