Donald Trump’s jingoistic tribalism marks him as a dangerous buffoon

By David McElroy · August 3, 2015

When people tell me they admire Donald Trump, I tend to ask them which of his four bankruptcies they admire most.

The Donald has been a sick narcissistic joke to me for years. The fact that some people took him halfway seriously as a presidential candidate four years ago was disturbing. The fact that some people see him as a frontrunner today is appalling — because he’s potentially dangerous.

As a 2016 presidential candidate, I don’t find Trump especially interesting. I don’t believe he has the remotest chance of winning, partly because I have a naive belief that people will come to their senses before enough of them could support him and partly because I think he’s objectively a terrible candidate, completely apart from whatever insanity he believes.

But nations have a way of elevating insane people to positions of absolute power every now and then. Things like that tend to happen during periods of economic and political turmoil when most people don’t know what to do. In times such as those, scared people turn to blowhards who confidently claim they know what to do.

The uneasy state of the economy and the fear millions of people feel about the future of this country combine to create a situation in which an unstable and unpredictable man could come to power. I honestly don’t expect Trump to be elected — but I can see how it could happen.

That scares me.

I take some comfort from the fact that Trump is just the latest possible addition to a very long line of egotistical buffoons who come to power in their nations or tribes. The fact that people such as Trump can sometimes appeal to vast numbers of people is one of the darker sides of the human race, but it’s far more scary today — because the last thing we need is someone eager to prove how macho he is by launching nuclear missiles at some country.

I call Trump scary because he’s the ultimate version of the xenophobe who thinks there’s some magical difference between the people who live on different sides of imaginary lines that politicians have drawn on maps.

I’m not going to closely analyze Trump’s insane economic pronouncements because anyone who understands economics is already horrified by what he says. And anyone who finds what he says attractive is a populist who doesn’t understand economics in the first place.

Trump is eager to drum up fears about people who happen to have been born in places which the U.S. government doesn’t yet rule. He’s willing to make inflammatory statements about “rapists” in order to pander to the fears of ignorant people. He wants to slap a 25 percent import tax on everything made in China. Despite the fact that economists going all the way back to Adam Smith have patiently explained why free trade is good for everybody, he sticks to the irrational — but popular — idea that trade is bad because it “steals our jobs.”

Trump is egotistical enough and shameless enough that he’s not even bothered by having used the bankruptcy laws to rip off investors and those who’ve lent money to his companies. What he’s done is legal, but his tactics count on using the power of big government to magically erase his business debts when he makes promises that he can’t keep. The miracle is that anyone continue to invest in his schemes.

In a more honest world, we would call him a con man.

Trump bears a little resemblance to another blowhard who was seen as a buffoon when he first came onto his political scene. In post-World War I Germany, Adolph Hitler was an angry nobody. He even looked like a laughable buffoon when he first started in politics, as this comical picture from 1923 makes clear.

But this comical blowhard quickly started becoming popular with a certain group of ignorant German voters. They were the people who didn’t understand economics or history or politics, much less morality. They were people who were tired and angry about their country falling apart. They were eager to turn to a man who promised them that he knew how to fix things. And Hitler knew who to blame for their problems.

Hitler said he knew how to make Germany great again.

When we look back at how Hitler came to power, it’s easy to naively blame Germans and think Americans would never do such a foolish thing. But that’s wishful thinking. Americans are no different from anyone else. When human beings are scared about the future and don’t see answers, they listen to demagogues who promise to fix everything. They’re not too concerned with the fine print. They just want a leader who is certain — someone who they can trust to take care of problems they don’t bother to understand.

Anytime you make comparisons between anybody and Hitler, you risk having Godwin’s Law invoked, because comparing someone to Nazis has become such a cliche. But I think the historical and social parallels are worth noting. The same conditions that brought Hitler to power in Germany can create the same type of situation anywhere — including 21st century America.

I really don’t expect that to happen in 2016, even though there’s a substantial minority for whom Trump will have strong appeal. (As a side note, those people would call themselves conservatives, but I think it’s more accurate to call them populists.) The majority of the country will almost certainly end up holding their collective nose and electing some establishment toady who will continue right down the path of the last few presidents. Sadly, we’ve reached the place where a continuation of the disgusting status quo is a best-case scenario.

I’m not especially interested in the presidential race of 2016. My life is a lot more peaceful since I don’t especially care who’s elected (because I don’t think it matters). But I expect a social and economic collapse at some point in the future — and there’s a good chance that some jingoistic tribal buffoon such as Trump will be at the front of the parade when that happens.

People piously tell us that government should reflect “the will of the people.” As more and more people are drawn to ignorant populists such as Trump, remind yourself that this is the ultimate bug in the practical concept of democracy, not a feature to be celebrated.

If we’re lucky, Trump will be nothing but another entertaining political sideshow for the next year. If we’re not so lucky, it will mean things have taken a scary turn for the worse.

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When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

For four years, Donald Trump’s supporters screamed that everything that went wrong was the fault of Joe Biden. They were sometimes right and they were sometimes delusional. (Anybody who knows me understands that I can’t stand Biden any more than I can stand Trump, just for different reasons.) But for two months, Trump has rampaged through U.S. political life — vandalizing pretty much everything in sight — and the vast majority of his supporters are silent at best. Many watch as he blows up the world economy and they make excuses for him. They’re in absolute denial, even about things that Trump is doing very intentionally. Anybody who understands economics and history knows that tariffs are a terrible idea from a pragmatic point of view. Anybody who values individual freedom knows that tariffs are massive taxes on individuals — and they’re a tool of political control over the ability of people to trade freely. Trump is the antithesis of everything which political conservatives stood for just a few years ago. It’s far past time for people who claim to be conservatives to reclaim the principles and values which they used to claim — and stop this mad man before he can accelerate the day when we experience economic and social collapse. Open your eyes to reality and reject this lying narcissist.

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