<\/p>\n
The predictions about Trump have been so wrong because none of the normal rules apply to him. <\/span><\/p>\n C<\/span>olumnists assured us that Donald Trump\u2019s campaign would implode after he cheaply besmirched war hero John McCain. They assured us again after he crudely dismissed Fox News\u2019s star anchor and heartthrob, Megyn Kelly. And again after his schoolboy rumor-mongering about Senator Ted Cruz\u2019s wife. And on and on.<\/p>\n Yet such nonstop insults and gaffes have had little effect on the Trump candidacy. Actually, they have had no effect at all. Zero. Zilch.<\/p>\n Political operatives insisted that Trump would fade, given that he had no real organization on the ground. My God, they said, he has no handlers, and not a position paper in sight. Where is his internal polling? Where are the senior Wise Men to advise him on the demographics of state primaries? Yet Trump garnered more free publicity, interviews, and attention from the liberal media than did any well-handled candidate, Democrat or Republican.<\/p>\n The commentators on the weekend talk shows employed adverbs like \u201cfinally\u201d and \u201cat last\u201d to characterize each of the latest outrages likely to end Trump\u2019s campaign. Trump broke his promise about releasing his income-tax returns (was he hiding a whittled-down 13 percent tax rate in Bernie Sanders fashion?). He fibs nonstop about opposing the Iraq war from the beginning. And he continuously exaggerates his net worth, as if the public were a lender that he was conning.<\/p>\n Each of those fudgings earned pronouncements from the experts about a \u201cturning point\u201d in his fate. How many times has someone on a Sunday-morning show pronounced, in somber tones, \u201cTrump has gone too far this time\u201d \u2014 without defining \u201ctoo far\u201d? These periodic Trump obituaries were often instead followed by upticks in Trump\u2019s popularity. A Trump orgasm is to have someone in a suit and makeup, or with a title before his name, pontificate that Trump should be and is through \u2014 a Trump pleasure surpassed only by a shouting young anti-Trump disrupter shown on the news with a placard, \u201cMake America Mexico Again.\u201d<\/p>\n Seasoned pollsters intoned that if only the rest of the Republican field would winnow itself out, thus allowing a direct head-to-head vote between Trump and one solid conservative, Trump would certainly lose. Yet the more candidates dropped out of the Republican primaries, the stronger Trump seemed to become.<\/p>\n Pollsters also insisted that Trump alone of the major Republican candidates \u2014 unlike Ted Cruz, John Kasich, or Marco Rubio \u2014 could not beat Hillary Clinton in the general election. But the more frequently Trump was written off as unviable, the more his polls climbed to near Clinton\u2019s. Was he a Goldwater primary tsunami that would wash out in the general election, or a rare Reagan tidal wave that would bury his skeptics, both now and in November?<\/p>\n Clearly, elite journalists, political advisers, media anchors, and pollsters, for all their analyses, have no idea where, why, and how Trump garners support. He follows no campaign rules. He has no consistent political ideology. He ignores decorum. Scandals do not tar him. The media treat him like a cobra rising from a basket \u2014 terrified that if at any moment they stop their music, the smiling serpent might strike and bite them in the nose.<\/p>\n Tomorrow Trump could declare there to be 57 states, or address vets as Corpse-men or tell his legions to bring a gun to a knife fight \u2014 and none of his supporters would find him clueless, half-educated, or incendiary. If Trump brought one of his wheeler-dealer Manhattan real-estate cronies to a rally and the man\u2019s court-ordered ankle bracelet went off, no one would bat an eye.<\/p>\n In other words, Trump is a postmodern creation, for whom traditional and time-tested rules do not apply. He is neither brilliant nor unhinged, neither ecumenical nor just a polarizer, not a wrecker and not a savior of the Republican party, but something else altogether. He does not defy conventional wisdom. There simply is no convention and no wisdom applicable to Donald J. Trump.\u00a0For years postmodernists have lectured us that there is no truth, no absolutes, no timeless protocols worthy of reverence; Trump is their Nemesis, who reifies their theories that truth is simply a narrative whose veracity is established by the degree of power and persuasion behind it.<\/p>\n A reality-TV star, Trump appeals to those who despise reality-TV celebs like the Kardashians. A billionaire, he is the hero of those who hate billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, or Warren Buffett. A vain narcissist, he earns the loyalty of those who are repelled by the vain narcissism of Barack Obama. A man who dyes and does his hair, tans his skin, and stretches his face, he appeals to those who have neither the money nor the desire to do the same.<\/p>\n A self-described Republican, he attacks Republicans more than Democrats. An elite insider, he blasts elite insiders. He is both to the right and to the left of Cruz, Kasich, and Rubio. Trump rails against dirty campaign fundraising \u2014 and he assures us that no one knows such corruption better than he himself, since as a donor he used to spread cash around precisely to influence. Why else should anyone give?<\/p>\n If the rules of politics do not apply to Trump, how then can Trump break them? For Donald Trump, there is only one third rail: conventionality. If he, as advised, were to stop calling his rivals liars and crooks; if he, as urged, were to read sober and judicious speeches off teleprompters; if he, as counseled, were to talk in politically correct platitudes, Trump would turn doctrinaire and conformist \u2014 and be undone by reviving the very orthodox rules he once strangled, but that otherwise strangle outsider-insiders like himself. If Trump were to listen to a politico and lose 30 pounds, shorten his tie, cut off his comb-over, and wear earth-tone clothes, he would be finished.<\/p>\n His supporters want a reckoning with a system that has not so much failed as infuriated them. What drives their loyalty to Trump \u2014 if not the person, at least the idea of Trump \u2014 is a sort of nihilism. As a close friend put it to me this week, \u201cI don\u2019t care whether Trump wins or not, I just want him to f\u2014 things up as long as he can.\u201d<\/p>\n In his supporters\u2019 eyes, had Trump run in 2008 he might have lost, but he would at least have aired one Obama hit-ad a minute, with Rev. Wright screaming obscenities as a trailer crossed the screen beneath, collating the various quotations of praise from Obama for his personal pastor. If Trump had run in 2012, they believe, he would have cut off Candy Crowley \u2014 the moderator who hijacked the second presidential debate to save Barack Obama \u2014 in a cruder way than he screamed at Rosie O\u2019Donnell.<\/p>\n Trump is the antithesis of his smears of his rivals. He is many things, but at least not \u201clow energy.\u201d He may be fat and pink and orange, but he is not \u201clittle.\u201d He lies and fabricates, but he is not a sober and judicious constitutionalist: So \u201cLyin\u2019 Donald Trump\u201d wouldn\u2019t work as a sound bite. Nor would \u201ccrooked Donald\u201d \u2014 given that he would admit he trims a lot in business, whereas Hillary would deny to her last breath that the Clintons made $100 million by leveraging their name and offices in quid-pro-quo shakedowns.<\/p>\n To get a clearer idea of the feelings of Trump supporters, read the comments section following any mainstream news story that deals with race, class, and gender in politically correct fashion. A stream-of-consciousness litany of his supporters\u2019 peeves, for good or ill, would run like this: The wrong people are in the news. Instead of generals, and small-business owners, and muscular workers, we instead see smarmy smart-asses, the pajama boys and mattress girls of the world of TV, who roll their eyes, wink about a joke only the anointed get, and smirk that what they say could have three different meanings \u2014 the Jon Stewarts, David Lettermans, and Stephen Colberts of Smug, Inc.<\/p>\n On race, Trump supporters are tired of hearing that black lives matter, while no one mentions that all lives matter. They are sick of seeing protestors wave the flag of the country they do not wish illegal aliens to be sent back to and trash the country they under no circumstances want them to leave. They don\u2019t like getting a letter from an IRS that employs Lois Lerner \u2014 a letter that would be ignored with impunity by those who are here illegally, or who run the Clinton Foundation. They are tired of wealthy minorities claiming they are perpetual victims of ill-treatment at the hands of people who are less well off than they. They don\u2019t like hearing from elites that huge trade deficits have little to do with loss of jobs or that cheating by our trade partners is just a passing glitch in free trade. They cannot stand lectures from those who make more money in an hour than they do in a year about their own bad habits or slothfulness. They don\u2019t know what the on-screen savants mean by a leg-tingle or a perfectly pressed pant leg or a first-class temperament or a president as god \u2014 and they don\u2019t care to find out. They do not hate political correctness so much as one-sided political correctness, which gives a pass to some to say things that would get others fired or ruined. They don\u2019t want to be lectured that their own plight is part of a larger, healthy creative destruction or a leaner, meaner competitiveness or an overdue restructuring \u2014 by those who are never destroyed, rendered noncompetitive, or restructured. And they don\u2019t like to be talked down to by the experts who ran up $10 trillion in debt, ruined the health-care system, dismantled the military, and screwed up the Secret Service, the IRS, NASA, and the VA. Trump is their megaphone, not their solution. The Trump supporters have seen plenty of politicians with important agendas, but few with the zeal to push them through; at this late date, they would apparently prefer zeal without agendas to agendas without zeal.<\/p>\n Trump has no loyalty to the Republican establishment or to the conservative movement. The apparent greatest attraction for his supporters is that he drives crazy those who worship Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. And if the Republican establishment implodes with the Obamism it did not stop, well, so goes collateral damage \u2014 and in the process, woe to us all.<\/p>\n Trump is for a brief season our long-haired Samson, and the two pillars of the temple he is yanking down are the Republicans to his right and the Democrats to his left \u2014 and it will all land on top of us, the Philistines beneath.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd he bent with all his might so that the house fell on the lords and all the people who were in it. So the dead whom he killed at his death were more than those whom he killed in his life.\u201d <\/em>Judges 16.30.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The predictions about Trump have been so wrong because none of the normal rules apply to him. By Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review Online Columnists assured us that Donald Trump\u2019s campaign would implode after he cheaply besmirched war hero John McCain. They assured us again after he crudely dismissed Fox News\u2019s star anchor […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[1092,1091,1090,23,31,46,185],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-2pJ","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":9685,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-animal-cunning-and-instinct-of-donald-trump\/","url_meta":{"origin":9283,"position":0},"title":"The Animal Cunning and Instinct of Donald Trump","author":"Megan Ring","date":"December 20, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"\u00a0by Victor Davis Hanson\/\/ National Review \u00a0He grasped that what voters cared about were the very issues politicos were disdainfully ignoring. The American middle classes, the Chinese, and Vladimir Putin have never been convinced that Ivy League degrees, vast Washington experience, and cultural sophistication necessarily translate into national wisdom. Trump\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "The Clintons"","block_context":{"text":"The Clintons","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-clintons\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10394,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/russia-didnt-interfere-in-u-s-election-to-help-trump-but-to-destabilize-america\/","url_meta":{"origin":9283,"position":1},"title":"Russia Didn’t Interfere In U.S. Election To Help Trump, But To Destabilize America","author":"victorhanson","date":"July 17, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"\u00a0By Paul Gregory \/\/ Forbes.com \u00a0(Photo credit should read SAUL LOEB\/AFP\/Getty Images) A still unidentified Democratic Party donor paid for the factually challenged\u00a0dossier that almost sunk the Donald Trump campaign. The dossier was created (and perhaps written) with the support and assistance of unregistered foreign agents of the Russian government,\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/specials-images.forbesimg.com\/imageserve\/810247190\/960x0.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":12059,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/trump-russia-investigation-rested-on-a-house-of-cards\/","url_meta":{"origin":9283,"position":2},"title":"Trump Russia investigation rested on a house of cards","author":"victorhanson","date":"November 14, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"Please\u00a0read\u00a0the\u00a0following\u00a0article\u00a0by\u00a0my\u00a0colleague\u00a0Paul\u00a0Gregory\u00a0in\u00a0The\u00a0Washington\u00a0Times A review of the public record demonstrates that the Russia investigation rested on a house of cards assembled by high-level officials to prevent\u00a0Donald Trump\u2019s election or to ensure that his administration would fail. This conclusion rests on mainstream media accounts, primarily of The New York Times. The Russia probe\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10909,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/trumps-midterm-known-unknowns\/","url_meta":{"origin":9283,"position":3},"title":"Trump\u2019s Midterm Known Unknowns","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 24, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson\/\/ National Review \u00a0 \u2018Shy\u2019 Trump voters, a booming economy, consumer confidence, looming investigations, anti-Trump frenzy \u2014 all add up to uncertainty in the 2018 elections. \u00a0 Conventional wisdom and media hopes are now combining to warn us of what is shaping up as a Trump wipeout\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "DOJ"","block_context":{"text":"DOJ","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/doj\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":12741,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/trump-faces-a-critical-choice-about-his-political-future\/","url_meta":{"origin":9283,"position":4},"title":"Trump Faces a Critical Choice About His Political Future","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 1, 2020","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review Donald Trump\u00a0is nearing a crossroads. Those who allege that he has endangered the tradition of smooth presidential transitions by not conceding immediately after the media declared him the loser suffer amnesia. When Trump was elected in 2016, the Washington establishment lost its collective mind.\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":9353,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/politics-not-personalities-will-likely-determine-the-presidential-election\/","url_meta":{"origin":9283,"position":5},"title":"Politics, Not Personalities, Will Likely Determine the Presidential Election","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 16, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"The candidates may be unconventional, but their political agendas fall along a conventional divide. By Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review Online At first glance, 2016 sizes up as no other election year in American history. For more than 30 years, both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have been high-profile\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Trump"","block_context":{"text":"Trump","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/trump\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9283"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9283"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9283\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9286,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9283\/revisions\/9286"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9283"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9283"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9283"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n<\/p>\n