As natural as sending Hunter S. Thompson to a Hell’s Angels biker rally or David Foster Wallace to the AVN porn awards is dispatching Dave Eggers to a Donald Trump stump speech, which like the other lurid, all-American aforementioned spectacles, is attended by the threat of something unsavory if not unspeakable happening, a titillating incident that might distract from difficult problems with no easy solutions in this new less-caucasian, less-worker-friendly American epoch.
Despite Trump’s Bull Connor-as-a-carnival-barker character who presides over a medicine show that can make you sick, Eggers found a reasonably mellow vibe among the conspiracists and cranks and others gathered in a Sacramento airplane hangar to hear the hideous hotelier speak. The writer believes the crowd wasn’t really concerned with what the candidate was saying but just wanted to be entertained by an irreverent celebrity. There’s no doubt some element of that in Trump’s appeal, but I believe a good number of his supporters have fully digested his MAKE AMERICA WHITE AGAIN message. He wouldn’t be the first “fascinating character” who was also truly appealing to darkness.
An excerpt:
For a year now, pollsters, the media and the world at large have been baffled by the fact that no incendiary or asinine thing Trump says or tweets seems to make any dent in his appeal. He has broadcast countless statements that would sink any other candidate. (In his Sacramento speech, he repeatedly called the US a “third world country”, which would be the end of any other campaign in American history.) And for a year we’ve all assumed that when Trump said something xenophobic or sexist or offensive to the world’s billion Muslims, or the world’s billion Catholics (remember when he took on the pope?), or to the world’s 3.5 billion women, it must mean that his supporters agree with his newest outrageous statement.
But this is not true. Something very different is happening. His supporters are not really listening to anything he says. They cheer when he says he’ll help the veterans, they cheer when he says he’ll build a wall, but ultimately they do not care what he says. They don’t care if he actually will build a wall. If Trump decided, tomorrow, to reverse himself on the idea of building a wall, his supporters would shrug and their support would not waver. He has been for gun control and against gun control. He has stated his support for Planned Parenthood and for the idea of criminal punishment for women who seek abortions. He has called the Iraq war, and most of our adventures in the Middle East, mistakes, but has said he would carpet bomb Isis. He has reversed himself on nearly every major issue, often in the same week, and has offered scant specifics on anything in particular – though in Sacramento, about infrastructure, he did say, “We’re gonna have new roads, bridges, all that stuff”.
His supporters do not care. Nothing in Trump’s platform matters. There is no policy that matters. There is no promise that matters. There is no villain, no scapegoat, that matters. If, tomorrow, he said that Canadians, not Mexicans, were rapists and drug dealers, and the wall should be built on that border, no one would blink. His poll numbers would not waver. Because there are no positions and no statements that matter to them. There is only the man, the name, the brand, the personality they have seen on television.
Believing that Trump’s supporters are all fascists or racists is a grave mistake.•