Trumpocracy Page 3
Hewitt’s perception was quickly corroborated: a week after Charlottesville, a Republican pollster told Greg Sargent of the Washington Post that the president’s defense of Confederate monuments had boosted his approval ratings among his core supporters.3
An even more coldly calculated manipulation of cultural grievance salvaged Donald Trump’s campaign at its single most hazardous moment. In the last month of the election, Christian America heard Donald Trump confess to a lifelong practice of sexual assault.
You know, I’m automatically attracted to beautiful—I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. . . . Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.
Accompanying video revealed Trump behaving just as he said: snaking his arm around an actress’s waist, grasping her hip, and planting an uninvited kiss on her neck. Other women came forward to complain that they too had been grabbed or groped or worse by Trump. How could Trump now deny the testimony of his own words? He did not even try. Instead, his campaign operation saved him by stoking the cultural resentments of white Catholics, exploiting raw material provided by Russian hackers and spies. You may remember the main lines of the story, but full understanding is found in the minute-by-minute timeline of events.
On October 7, 2016, at about four o’clock in the afternoon, David Fahrenthold of the Washington Post published an astounding story confirming a long-circulating rumor:
Donald Trump bragged in vulgar terms about kissing, groping and trying to have sex with women during a 2005 conversation caught on a hot microphone, saying that “when you’re a star, they let you do it,” according to a video obtained by The Washington Post.
The video captures Trump talking with Billy Bush, then of “Access Hollywood,” on a bus with the show’s name written across the side. They were arriving on the set of “Days of Our Lives” to tape a segment about Trump’s cameo on the soap opera.4
Fahrenthold’s story instantly rocketed to be the most concurrently read story in the Post’s history, even briefly crashing the newspaper’s robust servers. For a dizzying hour, it seemed it might even decide the election.
Republican officeholders and candidates stampeded away from Trump. Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, issued a statement on October 8 saying, “No woman should ever be described in these terms or talked about in this manner. Ever.”5 Speaker of the House Paul Ryan said: “Women are to be championed and revered, not objectified” and disinvited Trump from a scheduled rally.6 In an October 10 conference call, Ryan told fellow Republican House members that he would no longer campaign for Trump and would instead work to preserve a House majority that looked suddenly endangered.7 “Totally inappropriate and offensive,” declared Kelly Ayotte, running for reelection to the US Senate from New Hampshire.8 “Repugnant, and unacceptable in any circumstance,” said the Republican Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell.9 “I respectfully ask you with all due respect, to step aside. Step down,” Utah’s junior senator, Mike Lee, urged in a video posted on Facebook.10 “He must step aside,” agreed Alaska’s senior senator, Lisa Murkowski.11 “Donald Trump should withdraw and Mike Pence should be our nominee effective immediately,” tweeted South Dakota’s senior US senator, John Thune.12 Altogether, about one-third of the Republican Senate caucus publicly called for Trump to quit the race. So did some outspoken members of the House caucus. “I’m out. I can no longer in good conscience endorse this person for president. It is some of the most abhorrent and offensive comments that you can possibly imagine,” Representative Jason Chaffetz told a local Utah TV channel.13
Trump himself felt compelled to issue the only apology of his entire campaign, quite possibly of his entire life. He released a ninety-second video to Facebook and Twitter, in which he said the following: “I’ve never said I’m a perfect person, nor pretended to be someone that I’m not. I’ve said some things that I regret, and the words released today on this more-than-a-decade-old video are one of them. . . . I said it. I was wrong. And I apologize.”14
But as Jimmy Stewart learns in It’s a Wonderful Life, “No man is a failure who has friends.” Donald Trump had some very useful friends indeed. Thirty-two minutes after Fahrenthold’s story appeared on the Washington Post’s site, the Russian-backed site WikiLeaks dumped its largest email cache of the campaign: a hack of the personal Gmail account of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair, John Podesta.15
The Trump campaign and its media supporters knew in advance that something was coming. On Saturday, October 1, 2016, Trump’s confidant Roger Stone had tweeted: “Wednesday@HillaryClinton is done. #Wikileaks.”16 On Tuesday, October 4, WikiLeaks’ founder, Julian Assange, posted a video announcement to preview his “October surprise.” The Drudge Report bannered an openmouthed photo of Hillary Clinton headlined “ASSANGE COMES FOR HER WIKILEAKS DANGER.”17 Alex Jones’s Infowars live-streamed the Assange appearance. But Assange spoke only in generalities that day, even assuring the world that he bore no personal animus against Hillary Clinton. Alex Jones fulminated, “Julian Assange is a Hillary butt plug.”18
Instead, and with steely discipline, whoever controlled WikiLeaks awaited the perfect tactical moment. No dump Wednesday. No dump Thursday. Team Trump must have writhed in torment: Through the first week in October Hillary Clinton held a five-point lead among registered voters.19 Then, as Republican leaders panicked and sputtered after the Access Hollywood tape, WikiLeaks detonated the distraction that saved the Trump campaign.
The contents of the October 7 WikiLeaks dump seemed to convict Clinton of dishonesty and two-facedness out of her own mouth. It was in one of the speeches quoted there that she said that a politician needs “both a public position and a private position.”20
Trump’s campaign had excited blue-collar white Americans by nationalist attacks on too-permissive trade and immigration policies. It was in one of the Podesta emails that Clinton was quoted as saying:
My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders, some time in the future with energy that is as green and sustainable as we can get it, powering growth and opportunity for every person in the hemisphere.21
Trump powerfully deployed Clinton’s “open borders” quote in the third and final presidential debate on October 19, 2016. “We have no country if we have no border. Hillary wants to give amnesty. She wants to have open borders.” The moderator, Chris Wallace, invited Clinton to defend herself. Clinton replied, “I was talking about energy. You know, we trade more energy with our neighbors than we trade with the rest of the world combined. And I do want us to have an electric grid, an energy system that crosses borders. I think that will be a great benefit to us.” Trump countered: “She wants open borders. People are going to pour into our country.” 22
The quote about the “public position and private position” was used by the Trump campaign to an even greater effect. Before the WikiLeaks dump, polls showed Trump and Clinton neck and neck when rated for “honesty and trustworthiness.” By Election Day, Trump had pulled eight points ahead as the more honest, according to the Washington Post/ABC News poll.23
No wonder Trump chortled, “I love WikiLeaks,” to a Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, audience on October 10, 2016.24 He repeated his endorsement in Fletcher, North Carolina, eleven days later, and altogether on 164 occasions in the last month of the presidential campaign.25
Surely the greatest gift of the WikiLeaks Podesta hack to the Trump campaign, however, was the accelerant it offered to right-wing cultural grievance—and the escape valve it consequently offered to Catholics and other Christians discomfited by Trump’s confessed sexual misconduct.
The October 7 WikiLeaks dump contained two email exchanges in which people connected with the Clinton campaign talked about the Catholic church. In one of the exchanges, Jennifer Palmieri, a future Clinton communications aide, replied to an email from John Halpin, a then-colleague at the Center for American Progress, a liber
al think tank. The two, both liberal Catholics, were reacting angrily to news that Fox News’ founder, Rupert Murdoch, had baptized as Catholic his children by his third wife, Wendi Deng. In the other exchange, Sandy Newman, a non-Catholic Clinton supporter, emailed to ask John Podesta, then the chairman of the Center for American Progress, about the possibilities for liberal reform within the Catholic church.
It’s worth reading both exchanges in full.
Exchange 1, between Halpin and Palmieri, April 11, 2011:
Halpin: Ken Auletta’s latest piece on Murdoch in the New Yorker starts off with the aside that both Murdoch and Robert Thompson, managing editor of the WSJ, are raising their kids Catholic. Friggin’ Murdoch baptized his kids in Jordan where John the Baptist baptized Jesus. Many of the most powerful elements of the conservative movement are all Catholic (many converts) from the SC and think tanks to the media and social groups. It’s an amazing bastardization of the faith. They must be attracted to the systematic thought and severely backwards gender relations and must be totally unaware of Christian democracy.
Palmieri: I imagine they think it is the most socially acceptable politically conservative religion. Their rich friends wouldn’t understand if they became evangelicals.
Halpin: Excellent point. They can throw around “Thomistic” thought and “subsidiarity” and sound sophisticated because no one knows what the hell they’re talking about.26
That’s it. The whole thing. Here’s the second exchange, dated February 10, 2012, between Sandy Newman of a group called Voices for Progress and John Podesta. Again, I quote the totality.
Newman: This whole controversy with the bishops opposing contraceptive coverage even though 98% of Catholic women (and their conjugal partners) have used contraception has me thinking . . . There needs to be a Catholic Spring, in which Catholics themselves demand the end of a middle ages dictatorship and the beginning of a little democracy and respect for gender equality in the Catholic church. Is contraceptive coverage an issue around which that could happen. The Bishops will undoubtedly continue the fight. Does the Catholic Hospital Association support of the Administration’s new policy, together with “the 98%” create an opportunity?
Of course, this idea may just reveal my total lack of understanding of the Catholic church, the economic power it can bring to bear against nuns and priests who count on it for their maintenance, etc. Even if the idea isn’t crazy, I don’t qualify to be involved and I have not thought at all about how one would “plant the seeds of the revolution,” or who would plant them. Just wondering. Hoping you’re well, and getting to focus your time in the ways you want.
Podesta: We created Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good to organize for a moment like this. But I think it lacks the leadership to do so now. Likewise Catholics United. Like most Spring movements, I think this one will have to be bottom up. I’ll discuss with Tara. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend is the other person to consult.27
The large majority of American Catholics would agree with most of the sentiments in these exchanges. Only about one-third of American Catholics regard it as a sin to remarry without a Catholic annulment; only 17 percent agree with their church that artificial birth control is a sin.28
But quoted selectively and reported polemically, the Podesta exchanges provided just enough material for a counteroffensive to proclaim Donald Trump the true champion of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church.
On a conference call with reporters on October 12—five days (and only three weekdays) after the Access Hollywood recording became public—Trump’s aide Kellyanne Conway seethed with indignation. She called on Clinton to “fire the staff who have engaged in this vicious anti-Catholic bigotry.”29 That same day, vice presidential candidate Mike Pence spoke at Liberty University. He urged Christians to forgive Donald Trump for his words on the Access Hollywood audio. “Last Sunday night, my running mate showed humility. He showed what was in his heart to the American people.” But there must be no such forgiveness for those responsible for the intercepted 2011 and 2012 email exchanges. “If only on behalf of her Catholic running mate, Hillary Clinton should denounce those bigoted, anti-Catholic, anti-evangelical remarks and her campaign staff should apologize to people of faith and do it now.”30 Campaigning that same day in Florida, Trump used the same language as Conway: the email exchange showed that Clinton aides had attacked Catholics and evangelicals “viciously.”31
Outside talkers took up the quickening complaint. Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia called the emails “ugly” and “contemptuously anti-Catholic” in his diocesan newsletter.32 Eric Fehrnstrom, a former top aide to Governor Mitt Romney, complained in the Boston Globe of the “patronizing superiority that Clinton’s team has for faithful Catholics in the conservative movement.”33 The National Catholic Register offered top billing to the Trump campaign’s spin, reporting, “The chief liaison to Republican nominee Donald Trump for Catholic issues said that emails released Tuesday by WikiLeaks ‘reveal the depths of the hostility of Hillary Clinton and her campaign toward Catholics.’”34 A conservative columnist in the Washington Post interpreted the Podesta leaks as confirmation of the “rampant anti-Catholic bigotry that permeates Clinton World.”35
The Podesta emails offered pro-Trump Catholics a welcome comeback after their candidate’s February 2016 personal attacks on Pope Francis. The first Latin American pontiff had toured the US-Mexico border that month. Shortly before the pope’s visit, Trump ripped the pope’s plans in a telephone interview with Stuart Varney of Fox Business:
So I think that the pope is a very political person. I think that he doesn’t understand the problems our country has. I don’t think he understands the danger of the open border that we have with Mexico. . . . Mexico got him to do it because Mexico wants to keep the border just the way it is because they’re making a fortune and we’re losing.36
On his return flight to Rome, the pope was asked about Trump’s comments on the border. He replied, “A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian. This is not the gospel.”37 As ever, criticism enraged Trump. He posted his retort on Facebook:
For a religious leader to question a person’s faith is disgraceful. I am proud to be a Christian and as President I will not allow Christianity to be consistently attacked and weakened, unlike what is happening now, with our current President. No leader, especially a religious leader, should have the right to question another man’s religion or faith. They [the Mexican government] are using the Pope as a pawn.38
This angry exchange would not seem to leave much scope for portraying Trump as the Catholic favorite in the 2016 race. But that underestimates the possibilities of outright fraud.
In June 2016, a previously unknown website designed to look like that of a local TV station—“WTOE 5 News”—began circulating a false story that the pope had endorsed Donald Trump. That first release generated about 100,000 engagements that month. WTOE 5 News vanished from the Internet soon afterward. But in late September, as if carefully timed to enhance the Podesta leaks, another previously unknown site, Ending the Fed, reposted the papal endorsement story. This time the fake story generated more than one million Facebook engagements, winning the honor as the single most circulated fake story of the entire election.39
Trump commands the news cycle like no American leader since Ronald Reagan. Yet he is no political giant. He and his campaign team of C-class talents stumbled from mistake to mistake, and they continue to stumble. It would not have taken a miracle to bar him from the presidency; it took a negative miracle to tumble him into it. Once in office, it was not his own cunning that enabled him to defy long-established standards of decent behavior. It was the complicity of his allies among the conservative and Republican political, media, and financial elite.
The election of 2016 popularized the political science concept of “negative partisanship.”40 The concept’s authors, Alan Abramowitz and Steven Webster, observed that w
hile many Americans do not identify as Republican or Democrat, virtually all Americans dislike one of those parties much more than they dislike the other. Trump cannily exploited negative partisanship to consolidate political support he could never have attracted for his own agenda or his own merits.
Trump campaigned as a nationalist, on the slogan “Make America Great Again.” But he never spoke to or for the whole nation. The nation was too big, and he was too small. He excelled instead at discerning the grievances and angers that set American apart from American—and especially the grievances and angers of those who, like himself, felt entitled to dominate the apex of American society and now found themselves somehow occupying a place beneath their expectations.
Despite his inherited wealth and self-made global fame, the pre-presidential Donald Trump could never overcome the haunting suspicion that people laughed at him. At the time Trump clinched the New Hampshire primary in 2016, the Washington Post counted 103 instances since 1987 when Trump publicly referenced that sound of laughter.41 Many Americans hear that same laughter. Trump mobilized them behind a politician who would silence the laughter if he did nothing else.
“At least he isn’t politically correct.” “He speaks his mind.” “I’m tired of these special snowflakes.” This was the last-ditch defense offered by hard-pressed Trump supporters, never mind that many of them were the most special snowflakes of them all. (Trump’s counselor Kellyanne Conway once bitterly complained of the “silence and sighs” that greeted her inquiries about the admission of her children to the poshest private schools of Washington, DC.42)