We have a big pop culture-related question about Donald Trump. (No, not if he is "fired." We're mostly past "reality" TV and well into appalling reality.) Is Trump a political zombie? Or a political vampire?
Dan Balz, who has been playing the same lead correspondent role on presidential campaigns for the Washington Post since I was a very young operative, i.e., back before anyone had heard of Madonna, writes that Trump couldn't be doing any worse if he tried. He really is close to finished, Balz opines, as does much if not most of the media.
Yeah, well, maybe. But why then does Trump still have a significant chance of becoming president so long as the scenario I've been warning about for the last year -- economic trouble, terrorist attacks, geopolitical humiliation -- crystallizes? Add to that scenario the apparent reality that Russian intelligence has developed, weaponized, and begun to deploy damaging intelligence on top Democrats and Trump's woes in the polls look quite surmountable.
Yes, Donald Trump is the undead politician of American politics. Forget about the double-digit deficits that a few polls showed after a rather successful Democratic convention and several more Trump incidents. Despite non-stop ignorant gaffes and vicious idiocy, he is still only a half-dozen points behind Hillary Clinton in the latest Reuters/Ipsos and Bloomberg national polls. The former poll has frequently shown some of Hillary's biggest leads, the latter is associated with the former New York mayor who blasted Trump at the Democratic convention.
How in the heck is this possible? This clown is so clearly intellectually and psychologically unqualified to be president that he should be much further behind. As he seemed to be at one point not so long ago.
One should never forget that upwards of 40 percent of Americans choose to believe in fundamentalist religionist creationism over the science of evolution. In effect, they imagine that humans were running around at the same time as dinosaurs just a few thousand years ago.
By an odd coincidence, the baseline vote for the most reactionary conservative party in the advanced industrial world -- yes, our very own Republicans -- is just about the same. (It's not a perfect overlap, since a sliver of these cavemen-and-dinosaurs folks vote for Democrats on economic and racial lines, while there is a significant chunk of science-oriented authoritarians and radical capitalists who make up for the slippage.)
Imagine how well Donald Trump, who is still not finished as a candidate despite his non-stop preposterousness, would be doing if he stopped shooting himself in the, er, foot with the likes of claiming that Isis "honors President Obama" as the "founder" of the jihadist terror network. He later flipped and claimed that the media had failed to note his sarcasm, then flopped back to his initial, oh, what is a polite term for it?
So the potential baseline vote for an aggressively know-nothing neo-fascist who masters the dominant media culture and plays incessantly to festering resentments has always been alarmingly huge.
Because Trump really is not finished, no matter the increasingly overwhelming tone in the non-right media, much of which only belatedly understood that it was playing into Trump's hands by giving him round-the-clock, largely undiluted coverage.
In fact, the national poll margins have slowly drifted back down with the election still nearly three months off.
Hillary Clinton is a deeply flawed candidate, though, fortunately, she also has capabilities which few have. Her problems would be front and center right now were Trump not acting like a deranged person.
Trump has a cunning capability to manipulate the present media culture, which is practically tailor-made for someone like him. (Imagine a Trump who was every bit as ignorant, unscrupulous and neo-fascist, but did not make such amazingly erratic mistakes. That man would likely roll into the White House.)
Trump's mastery of the shallow immediacy of social media, his literal creation of dominant "reality" TV tropes, his convenient quirky celebrity providing free programming for empty-headed or cynical cable TV chiefs, his deft takeover of the vast reactionary constituency aggregated and constantly stimulated by Fox News, his gut instinct for heat-not-light 'Crossfire'-style hyper-partisan argumentation, all these things have given him unique media superpowers.
Now his fundraising has ramped up to match Hillary's. And, while she is capably employing her resources with big media buys into sizable leads in several critical battleground states, Trump hasn't run one TV ad.
Then there are the underlying political and economic dynamics, the ones which created the context in which Trump was able to blow away a very over-rated Republican field of mostly empty suits and slick liars and emerge as a supposedly populist tribune.
Barack Obama will end up as the only president since Herbert Hoover never to have achieved at least three percent economic growth for any year of his presidency. This is especially striking, given the depths of the recession Obama and Joe Biden inherited from George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. While incessant Republican obstructionism is a major factor, and Obama showed good will and tried pretty hard, the situation is what it is and most Americans are quite unhappy about it.
Add to the legitimate anger this has caused the ongoing threat of terrorist spectaculars and geopolitical situations gone sour and getting more sour.
And then there is the KGB factor, which could potentially devastate the Clintons and the Dems. I suspect the Russians, who resent the Clintons for not doing enough to revitalize post-Soviet Russia and for initiating the expansion of NATO toward their borders in the 1990s, have politically dangerous intel on them. The question is what they do with it. And when.
I wrote about this two weeks ago and evidently looked a little alarmist to some.
But not so alarmist now, with Politico reporting that a wave of fear is gripping national Democrats about what would essentially be a KGB-engineered "October surprise." That fear can only be increasing after the hacking of Nancy Pelosi's computer system and the highly disruptive release in the last few days of private mobile phone numbers and other contact information for many top politicians and their aides.
Of course, our intelligence services spy on the Russians and many others around the world. And the Kremlin would say that our government has meddled in Russian politics.
Probably so. But we aren't meddling with a democracy. The Russian democratic reformers I tried to help in the '90s were squashed as a result of Vladimir Putin's ascendance. In any event, nothing we do along these lines is likely to be disruptive of Putin's grip on power. He actually is rather popular across Russia. The Saudi-sanctioned drop in the price of oil is far more damaging than anything we've done, including sanctions. But here Putin is playing with fire, and, though he's someone a sophisticated American administration can work with in some areas, his actions may require a proverbial horse's head in the bed sort of response.
So even if Trump is essentially a shambolic zombie rather than a truly calculating vampire, the confluence of forces in this situation may make him a de facto vampire after all. If a number of things which can go wrong for the highly capable Clinton do go wrong. And if he can finally manage to rein in most of his nonsense long enough to make him look vaguely acceptable enough to the rather small slice of the electorate which must swing in his direction.
Facebook comments are closed on this article.
William Bradley Archive
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-bradley/