OPINION:
The search continues for the key to chaos. Where’s the catchy description to capture the zeitgeist, to encapsulate the anger, to illuminate the dreary landscape where puzzled voters look and listen to identify the proper leader when the leading Democrat and Republican post the lowest ratings for honesty, character and trustworthiness? This is surely the winter of our discombobulation.
The growing and unruly crowds are mesmerized by slogans wrapped around factoids, repeated so often they assume an aggressive “truthiness” of their own. Maybe we should all take the advice Ted Cruz offered Donald Trump when he had worked himself into a fine lather: “Breathe in, count to 10.” It was ever thus. Insult, ad hominem attack and sexual affront have been tossed around since the snake won that first crucial debate in the Garden of Eden, persuading Eve that Adam wasn’t a man big enough to rule over her, the beasts of the field and their almost-perfect world.
A little closer to our own time in America, the almost-perfect Thomas Jefferson employed the vicious pamphleteer James Callender to publish lies about the policies and personality of John Adams. His wrote that Adams suffered from a “hermaphroditical” character, having neither the toughness of the male nor the sensitivity of the female. The description didn’t stick in the Adams biography, but it did its part to deprive him of a second term.
Donald Trump’s description of Jeb Bush as a “low-energy guy,” a weakling in the employ of the worn-out establishment, hit home because it seemed to accurately portray the man and his demeanor, reflecting his old and distinguished family at a particular moment in history. Their time had come and gone, and so had Jeb’s. He spoke in soft, carefully articulated sentences, prim and proper from a man clearly out of gas in a rowdy season when everybody must raise his voice to be heard (if not necessarily listened to).
By contrast, Donald Trump is his own trumpet, playing rhetoric on a jazz horn, improvising as he goes along. He smacks of authenticity, albeit an unpleasant one, even when he’s boring and repetitive, and maybe especially then. It’s tempting to think what that raw and forceful power would do to the heavily scripted Hillary Clinton, so dependent on her teleprompter.
But none of this inspires watching and listening to the Trump insults, delivered up close and personal, streaming directly into our living rooms. Like it or not, we become participants with a screen of our own. Even when we feel above the rhetoric and the ugly fray, we can hear ourselves joining a condescending laugh.
Mitt Romney, to his courage and credit, spoke up against the Trump phenomenon last week, calling him a “phony and a fraud,” but as the Donald and his friends and supporters quickly remind everyone, his was the voice of a loser who would be running for his second term this year if he had not quailed before Barack Obama. Though Mr. Romney’s speech was eloquent and heartfelt and seemed to have a measurable impact on the public-opinion polls, he barely dented the aura of big Trump victories in Michigan, Mississippi and Hawaii. The most bruising punches were aimed at the considerable Trump business successes and his reputation as a dealmaker. This is no campaign for nice men, old or not so old.
The most stinging criticism is that there’s more than “a whiff of fascism” in the Trump rhetoric. Comparisons to Hitler and Mussolini are always over the top — der Fuehrer and his pathetic sidekick are all but unique in the annals of evil — but Jeffrey Herf, professor of European history at the University of Maryland, makes an illuminating observation about the way the Donald uses gestures from the bad old days to build on resentments of the elites.
“Like the fascists of old, he combines an authoritarian style with a populist bad-boy rebelliousness,” the professor writes in American Interest magazine. “In breaking the taboos of civility and civilization, a Trump speech and rally resembles the rallies of fascist leaders who pantomimed the wishes of their followers and let them fill in the text.”
Americans have never liked the authoritarian style. We love the rebellious bad boy. Think Huckleberry Finn. Mr. Trump is the rebellious bad boy without Huck’s endearing ethical core, and satirizing the Donald would be tempting if he were not doing such a good job of it himself. He says it was “ridiculous” to consider taking an oath anything but “fun” when he got the crowd in Orlando (the home of Mickey Mouse, after all) to raise high their right hands and swear to vote for him in the Florida primary. Some of his overheated critics said he should have asked them to shout “Heil Trump.” That’s more frightening than fun.
• Suzanne Fields is a columnist for The Washington Times and is nationally syndicated.
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