Most weeks, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich speaks with contributor Alex Carp about the biggest stories in politics and culture. This week: Donald Trump's ban on
Muslims entering the U.S., Obama's national address, and Spotlight and the state of investigative journalism.
Donald Trump's call for a Muslim exclusion act (which drew cheers at the rally where Trump proposed it) has drawn an almost-universal backlash nationwide, yet Trump is sticking to his guns. Is there any way this helps him?
Doesn’t it seem a century ago when Trump committed what was supposed to be a cardinal sin, particularly to Republicans, and insulted the war hero John McCain? Trump was pronounced politically dead back then — this was in July — and we needn’t catalogue all of the times he’s risen like Lazarus since, after each racist, xenophobic, misogynist, or just plain lunatic pronouncement theoretically ended his campaign. So when people talk now, as you put it, of “an almost-universal backlash” to his latest and perhaps most outrageous thunderbolt of bigotry, it depends on how you define universal. That universe does not include Trump’s fans. In a USA Today/Suffolk University poll released yesterday, some 68 percent of respondents said they would bolt the GOP if their hero decided to run as an independent. In other words, this latest episode, which took place just after that survey, should help Trump as all of his other outrages have: He’ll remain at or near the top of Republican polls because he is telling his audience what it wants to hear in ever louder tones. And the “universal backlash” of the elites will only make him more of a hero with his supporters, who revel in the disdain of the Establishments of both parties and the press.
Doesn’t it seem a century ago when Trump committed what was supposed to be a cardinal sin, particularly to Republicans, and insulted the war hero John McCain? Trump was pronounced politically dead back then — this was in July — and we needn’t catalogue all of the times he’s risen like Lazarus since, after each racist, xenophobic, misogynist, or just plain lunatic pronouncement theoretically ended his campaign. So when people talk now, as you put it, of “an almost-universal backlash” to his latest and perhaps most outrageous thunderbolt of bigotry, it depends on how you define universal. That universe does not include Trump’s fans. In a USA Today/Suffolk University poll released yesterday, some 68 percent of respondents said they would bolt the GOP if their hero decided to run as an independent. In other words, this latest episode, which took place just after that survey, should help Trump as all of his other outrages have: He’ll remain at or near the top of Republican polls because he is telling his audience what it wants to hear in ever louder tones. And the “universal backlash” of the elites will only make him more of a hero with his supporters, who revel in the disdain of the Establishments of both parties and the press.
There are not enough Trump partisans to capture the presidency, no matter how much some liberals liken his rise to those of Hitler and Mussolini. There may well not be enough Trump supporters to win him the GOP nomination (though it cannot be ruled out). But there are certainly enough to destroy his party for the foreseeable future by branding it as a haven for bigots at a time when America is on its inexorable path to be a white-minority nation. So you’d think that those now at the top of the GOP would try to banish Trump by any and all available means, if only out of self-interest. That’s still not happening. Those who wield the strongest anti-Trump language among his primary opponents are those with rock-bottom poll numbers (e.g., Lindsey Graham, who told him to “go to hell”) and no clout. Jeb (!) Bush, whose poll numbers are also near rock bottom, has also pumped up his anti-Trump rhetoric, but he’s still too low-energy and too late, and he has no moral standing to attack Trump’s Islamophobia since he only recently (like Ted Cruz) proposed banning Syrian refugees who aren’t Christians. Party titans like Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell have condemned Trump’s latest jeremiad, but they are wusses, too fearful of both him and his fans to say they would disown him if he got the party’s nomination. (Jeb has alsorecently reaffirmed that he’d support Trump over Hillary.) Cruz and Marco Rubio, besides indulging in their own Muslim-bashing, have been pointedly mild in their criticisms of Trump and his views because they hope to annex his crazies should he flame out.
So who can stop Trump? Not the fat-cat GOP donors whose doomed anti-Trump strategies keep being floated to the press. Not the earnest members of the reality-based community who diligently write articles explaining that, yes, Trump’s latest proposal is unconstitutional, impossible to implement, racist, and a boost to the very ISIS ideologues Trump wants to destroy. Not the fact-checkers who show that almost every bit of evidence Trump cites, from nonexistent crowds of Muslims cheering 9/11 in New Jersey to junk polls of Muslim-American sentiment, is a lie. Trump’s adherents are going to accept Trump’s facts, just as they have accepted such “facts” from the other conservative leaders who have claimed Barack Obama was born in Africa and that climate change is a hoax.
No, the only people who can stop Trump are the obvious ones: those who actually vote or caucus in Republican primary states. Their verdict will be decisive, and come February we will start to hear from them directly in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina (where Trump’s ban-Muslims oration played to a standing ovation last weekend). It’s been a standard refrain of Establishment Republicans since the summer that Trump’s toxic views don’t represent their party — and, indeed, if Republicans don’t actually vote for Trump, he’s done, and probably as an independent as
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