How on Earth can Trump be viable?

There are a bunch of reasons. And there is still time for reason.

Photo by Marco Zuppone via Unsplash

On one of his recent shows, Bill Maher seemed to lose patience with his guests — Andrew Sullivan and Seth McFarlane — for expressing stupefaction at the very idea that Donald Trump still had voters. The host, who is not suspected of Trump tolerance in the least, seemed convinced that the issue was spent and dull.

I normally agree with Maher, a sardonic and pugilistic liberal after my own heart. But on this matter, I think, he’s wrong. He’s wrong in a way that afflicts democracies everywhere these days, a mulish era when many have been radicalized by social media.

The implied assumption is that persuasion is impossible. If that were true, it bodes ill for societies where (unlike in the US) the voter turnout is high and so bringing out the vote is irrelevant. And in all cases it's bad: We'd be replacing a discourse of ideas with something not unlike a census.

Luckily, though, we need not completely succumb to unreason. I am here to argue that one can still persuade! There are no “deplorables” (or at least not that many) — there are just people making deplorable decisions. So with all due respect to Maher, normally as wise as he is crusty. it is still worth the effort to deconstruct the shocking viability of the obviously unworthy Trump.

It is more than just an American problem. Trump’s election as president in 2016 was a shock to the world. The presence of such a malicious narcissist at the helm in the United States was a thing to be endured, like a terrible disease. Living abroad as I do, I had a front-row seat to the damage it did to the country’s brand; America, many concluded, was not right in the head.

Now he has chances of being returned to office, this time despite a record of infamy to match his persona. People will knowingly back an ex-president who was twice impeached, tried to overturn the 2020 election, incited the deadly Jan. 6 invasion of the Capitol, mishandled the pandemic, and now faces almost 100 felony charges.

It’s clear that in a second Trump term the United States would move pretty far toward authoritarianism and its freedom ranking would plummet. He’d purge the military and government, install loyalists and hound enemies, as in Turkey and Hungary, following Russian President Vladimir Putin’s model, within the rickety bounds of the US Constitution. He would try to pull out of NATO and let Russia roll over Ukraine. 

So people around the world are mostly horrified, but not in quite the way that some Americans might think. They’re not fearful that Trump will be making America great again at their expense in some global zero-some game of greatness. Rather they think he doesn’t understand basic things (like that exiting the Iran nuclear deal left it closer to a bomb) and fear he might blow up the world by mistake—or on purpose. 

They pity America as well as themselves and ask how Trump could possibly be electable, given that this outcome would immediately trigger a global emergency and risk economic and military catastrophe. I think the explanations might be useful for voters: Ask yourselves if these reasons—which I’m pretty sure are the reasons—are good enough to risk destroying America as a force for good in the world.

THE CULTURE WARS

If millennials and Gen Z were the majority right now, America’s absurd cultural wars would favor the left. As things stand, they’re a gift for the Republicans.