By Andrew Feinberg
Some smart commentators said Trump’s acceptance speech read better than it sounded. This is an important, if scary, thought. It suggests that if uttered more conversationally, with smaller dollops of rage and fewer Mussolini head bobs, the message could eventually prove more attractive to voters than it seemed to many of us last night.
Michael Moore said this week that Trump will win and, although I disagree, the acceptance speech suggests why this is very possible. Yes, we know from fact-checkers that violent crime is still close to historic lows, that illegal immigrants are less likely than native-born Americans to commit violent crimes and that police deaths under President Obama have fallen dramatically—but if you talk to any fact-phobic Trump supporters, you know that statistical truth may not count for much in this election. My Manhattan friends don’t think America is on the wrong track, but 69% of Americans do. As Trump would say, there’s something going on.
Despite his ridiculously over-the-top delivery, Trump’s fusion of crime statistics (true, but out of context), illegal immigrant atrocities (true, but designed to distort reality) and real terror threats was powerful. (As I’m watching TV right now at 1:54 p.m. New York time, MSNBC is covering a shooting at a Munich shopping center that seems to be a terror attack. Even if it isn’t, my first thought was terror. Trump knows he profits from this. I fear ISIS wants him to win.) Trump’s ability to stoke fear and to link it to the nation’s economic “decline” makes it seem a little less crazy that his strongman appeal—“I alone can fix it”—could win over millions of undecided voters.
On the surface, his statement that “Crime and violence will soon, and very soon, come to an end” is lunacy, but we shouldn’t ignore its emotional appeal. If people feel that a President Trump will make them safer, Hillary Clinton could be in trouble. Jeff Greenfield in Politico called Trump’s appeal Caesarism, which sounds right. He didn’t say it couldn’t work.
Garry Kasparov tweeted, “I’ve heard this sort of speech a lot in the past 15 years and trust me, it doesn’t sound any better in Russian.” Trump would naturally respond, “So who’s running Russia today?”
But there are reasons for hope. The speech did little to humanize Trump and nothing to connect his concerns with other times in American history. The speech was bizarrely ahistorical. Astoundingly, he reprised Mitt Romney’s mistake of failing to acknowledge our troops in harm’s way. (Boy, does this campaign not get the little things right.) And, of course, he did not utter the words “climate change.” (You know a party’s leaders are in full climate change denial when the only speaker who mentions it is Harold Hamm, the billionaire fracking mogul.)
As I thought of how to combat Trump’s arguments in ads and debates, I remembered the final 2012 presidential debate and how a statement can be true and ridiculous at the same time. Romney kept dwelling on the size of the Navy and President Obama skewered him with the facts.
“You mention the Navy, for example, and that we have fewer ships than we did in 1916,” the president said. “Well governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets. We have these things called aircraft carriers and planes land on them. We have these ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines.
“It’s not a game of battleship where we’re counting ships. It’s ‘What are our capabilities?’”
Can you imagine how enraged Trump might become if treated similarly?
Andrew Feinberg is the author of Four Score and Seven (https://www.amazon.com/Four-Score-Seven-Andrew-Feinberg/dp/0692664009), a novel that imagines that Abe Lincoln comes back to life for two weeks during the 2016 campaign and encounters a candidate who, some say, resembles Donald Trump. He also writes a daily anti-Trump humor page at https://www.facebook.com/MeBabyDonDon.