June 12, 2016

One needn’t read much of War and Peace — I confess that I didn’t — to come across the author’s description of a character "who, like a wound-up clock, by force of habit said things he did not even wish to be believed." Tolstoy might have been thinking of Donald Trump. His campaign has been an act, one designed to stir up the audience: unhappy people who think that the system is rigged against them, and that conditions only will get worse unless something drastic is done. What Trump says, often retracted (sort of), is less important than the impression of anti-establishment power.

In his recent book, Mike Lofgren, in describing "the characters who run the Deep State," also has inadvertently captured the Trump persona: "Actual competence is often less important than boundless self-confidence and a startling lack of reflectiveness about what one is actually doing" - or proposing to do. "An overweening sense of self-importance and a capacity for self-satisfied assertion seem to be all that are required." This has been described as "hubristic incompetence," or "the narcissistic habit of seeing the world as an arena for achieving power and glory rather than as a place for pragmatic problem solving."[42]  If those are the inhabitants of the deep state, how much worse would it be if the man in charge were of the same type?

That such a person probably will become a nominee for the presidency and might be elected, is depressing, to say the least. If the country were in better shape, fewer people would have bought the snake oil, and if the Republican Party were in better shape, it might have started out with a more impressive and appealing group of alternative choices and could, now, produce one to rally around.

The GOP may yet realize that it must do the latter, and may have an opportunity to. Trump is dropping in polls, which may be due to his attack on a "Mexican" judge; that episode certainly has made him even more toxic to the Republican elite. However, fear of alienating the base, too many of whom follow Trump, makes dumping him difficult and risky, and also underscores what that base has become.

Perhaps the recent story, in The New York Times, about the failure of Trump’s Atlantic City projects, will make the faithful wonder about his "success." However, they may buy his line that he was a winner because he milked the ventures for millions. Who cares about casinos or Atlantic City? His followers may not care about the government, either, but what about the country? There has to be a limit to the attraction of this con job, even to the randomly angry. His appeal supposedly is that he would make their lives better, but if he has never thought of anyone but The Donald, what are the odds?

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42. Lofgren, The Deep State (2016), pp. 179-81.