“The Attitude Is The Thing”: Donald Trump, The Swaggering Blond Supervillain Of The GOP
Back in 1957, when Donald Trump and I were both in middle school, I used to have this running argument with my grandfather, Bill Connors. A retired railroad worker and a drinking man, Pop lived in Elizabethport, New Jersey, a couple of blocks from where the tracks running down Broadway ended at the harbor.
When visiting grandchildren proved too much for the old man, he’d retreat to his linoleum-floored front room and watch pro wrestling on his little black-and-white TV. As long as I’d keep still and fetch his beer, he’d let me stay. Sitting there with a spittoon at his feet and a cold one in his hand, Pop sometimes got agitated at the choreographed antics on the screen.
See, like millions of Republicans seemingly enchanted by Donald Trump’s updated impersonation of Dr. Jerry Graham, the swaggering blonde supervillain of the old World Wide Wrestling Federation, the old man believed the contests were for real.
If I wanted to keep watching—and I was already what Trump would call a HUGE fan of the Graham Brothers, Johnny Valentine, Ludwig von Krupp, and the other posturing bleach-blonde villains of the era—I had to be careful how I acted.
In his day, the old man had been a legendary brawler.
“Grandpa,” I’d say, “you’ve been in fights. A guy gets slammed over the head with a chair, it’s over.”
The old man would growl something about the cheating SOBs and the damn referees, as if my smart-aleck attitude would spoil all the fun. Back home, my pals and I had constructed our own wrestling ring, and actually dyed our hair to impersonate our bombastic heroes. We worked on our Atomic Elbow Smashes, Flying Drop Kicks, and personalized submission holds.
To us, WWWF wrestling was the most vivid thing on TV—totally unreal as an athletic event, but entirely dramatic in what it symbolized.
See, quite like Trump’s presidential campaign, 1950s-style pro-wrestling was all about ethnicity and race. I’d bet anything that young Donald Trump was also a fan of the broadcasts from Sunnyside Gardens in Queens, quite close to his childhood home. He appears to have adopted the entire Dr. Jerry Graham playbook as his signature style: the boasting, the strutting, the insults, and the elaborate blonde pompadour too!
Graham was the WWWF showman of the era, masterful at inciting crowds. He’d enter the ring for a tag-team match in a sequined cape accompanied by a mouthy manager and his “brother” Eddie, another bleached-blonde poser.
“I have the body that men fear and women adore,” Graham would say, posing with flexed biceps and his head thrown back haughtily. Never mind that he also had a watermelon belly and comparatively skinny legs to carry it on. The attitude was the thing. He exuded sheer superiority.
Why losers like “Golden Boy” Arnold Skaaland even showed up was beyond Graham’s power to imagine. Billed on TV as “the Jewish Champ,” who the Golden Boy beat to earn that title was unclear. (Skaaland was apparently of Norwegian descent. So what? “Bobo Brazil” came from Little Rock; Hans Schmidt, “The Teuton Terror,” was really Guy Larose of Quebec.)
Dr. Jerry Graham’s gimmick was that he supposedly had a PhD from the University of Arizona, which back then might as well have been on Saturn. See, also like Donald Trump, he was smarter than you.
What kind of doctorate, an announcer once asked?
“He’s a tree surgeon,” Graham’s manager said.
Often on those Sunnyside Gardens TV cards, some more formidable opponent such as Antonino Rocca, the barefoot “Bull of the Pampas,” would be in the audience. Indignant at the Graham Brothers’ dirty tricks, Rocca would leap into the ring to defend their hapless opponents, whereupon the previously supine referee would spring into action, restraining the hero while the bad guys went to work with beer pitchers, blades concealed in their trunks, whatever.
Theatrical blood flowed freely.
However, if you wanted to see Antonino Rocca get his revenge, you had to buy a ticket to Madison Square Garden. One of the great grudge matches of the era took place there in November 1957, when Dr. Graham and Dick the Bruiser took on Rocca and Édouard “The Flying Frenchman” Carpentier. A riot erupted. Hundreds of fans got arrested. Several cops got hurt by flying chairs. Order was restored only after Rocca stood on the ring ropes saluting the “Star Spangled Banner.” It made the front page of the New York Times.
So you bet I’m looking forward to Thursday’s Fox News debate, featuring Trump versus a bunch of Koch brothers marionettes, as he recently dubbed them. Would anybody be astonished to see The Donald enter wearing a sequined robe?
If he voted at all, my Grandfather Connors certainly never voted Republican. But he’d never have missed the show.
It’s sure to be HUGE!
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, August 5, 2015
“Evoking A Powerful Sense Of Deja Vu”: When Canada Looks At Donald Trump, All We Can See Is Rob Ford
Watching the bizarre Republican nomination race for the presidential nomination leads to a strange realization: it’s even more bizarre than the last one. So far, this one is completely dominated by New York billionaire Donald Trump, who has bombasted his way to the top of the polls. The presidential wannabe has dominated clickbait-driven media with a string of wacky statements, describing Mexicans as rapists, denying John McCain is a war hero and suggesting Sarah Palin would be an effectual cabinet member.
But for many Canadians – especially those who live in its largest city, Toronto – Trump’s loopy campaign is evoking a powerful sense of deja vu. Trump looks, sounds and smells an awful lot like former Toronto Mayor Rob Ford. Trump has the Ford bluster down perfectly.
Both candidates draw from the very basics of that master communicator, late President Ronald Reagan. No publicity is bad publicity, so keep the media firestorms coming. And the facts, they are stupid things (Reagan said this in an erroneous effort to quote John Adams, who said the facts are stubborn things). Ford said he would solve the city’s financial problems, repeating the phrase “gravy train” ad nauseam as a means of trashing wasteful government spending. Trump has stated – in one of the looniest proposed policies ever heard – that the Mexican government would foot the bill for a huge wall along the US-Mexico border.
Ford and Trump both touted their records as successful businessmen, failing to mention that they were born into considerable inherited wealth. Ford repeatedly spoke of the incredible savings he was responsible for while defending his position as mayor. Trump continually speaks of the vast fortune he has amassed (over $8bn, by his count), though the evidence of his financial worth is open to question.
Yet despite their wealth, both Ford and Trump managed to appeal to the protest vote. As Christopher Ingraham noted in the Washington Post, Trump’s remarkable bolt to the top of the polls has to do with one word: anger. Like Trump, Ford played this card remarkably well, consistently pointing to spending waste by a downtown elite as a means of tapping into suburban voter fury. The Ford-Trump axis rests on the notion that each candidate is a take-no-prisoners, Dirty Harry-style crusader, intent on destroying the established order.
And if you’re waiting for an Edward Murrow moment – when a journalist might confront Trump on the utter nonsense he’s spewing, helping an audience to see that the emperor is naked – don’t bother. When each candidate has been called on their buffoonery, they are only made more appealing as candidates who are out of step with the ruling media elite. Witness Trump’s interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, in which Trump bluntly stated: “The people don’t trust you and the media.” They don’t, and as Ford learned, attacks by media pundits and journalists – who cite stupid things, otherwise known as facts – only make the candidate that much more appealing.
As many have noted, the attack-now-think-later approach is borne out of the campaigning techniques of the modern American right. As GOP insiders look on nervously, they also realize they have no one to blame but themselves. As Ford’s time as mayor unraveled in scandal after scandalous video – antics that left even Jon Stewart speechless – Canadian Prime Minister Harper’s connections to Toronto’s leader became points of extreme embarrassment.
Similarly, Trump represents an epic catch-22 for Republicans. If confronted by the facts, consider that the GOP has the loyalty of Fox News, which has created its own ideology-driven reality, also rooted in anger. How can you argue facts when there is no essential truth? The ‘Party of No’ has spawned the candidate of nonsense. Stand by Trumpenstein, as some are now doing, and you risk seeming to endorse his ideas, statements and ludicrous antics. Attack or criticize him and you risk alienating his crucial, populist base.
When Ford was running for mayor, his lengthy history of gaffes and bad behavior as city counselor led many to suggest his victory would never happen. The same is being said of Trump, but as he continues to lead by significant margins in all the polls, many are now acknowledging that if not president, becoming the GOP nominee is in the realm of the possible.
But as delicious as the Trump-brand Kool-Aid is, Republicans might want to think carefully before they guzzle back the empty calories. Consider the Ford factor: despite all his claims to the contrary, Ford’s time as mayor was largely ineffectual. Now that Ford is out of office, Toronto’s problems are far from solved, including deficit spending and a public transit system in dire need of an upgrade.
But boxer Mike Tyson insisted Ford was “the best mayor in Toronto history” (in what has to be one of the most surreal endorsements ever). Under a President Trump, similar fantasies will undoubtedly also be repeated, in the hopes that bluster will win out over truth.
By: Matthew Hays, The Guardian, August 4, 2015
“This Promises To Be Fun”: Christmas Comes Early This Year — The Gift Of A Trump-Fueled GOP Debate
I feel like a kid the week before Christmas. There’s just one present under the tree, but it’s all a columnist could ever hope for: the first Republican debate!
How could Thursday night in Cleveland fail to be one of the most entertaining political spectacles we’ve seen in a long time? There are, far as I can tell, 17 candidates for the GOP nomination. Nobody’s quite sure which 10 will qualify for the prime-time clash, with the rest relegated to an earlier also-rans debate. Fox News, which is organizing the festivities, says it will use an average of national polls to make the cut, but won’t say which polls.
One hopes the poor candidates at least hear the good or bad news before they arrive in Cleveland. Imagine the phone call Rick Perry’s campaign might get: “Um, has the governor’s plane landed yet? Because it turns out we need him on stage quite a bit earlier than we thought.”
That would be a shame because Perry gave arguably the most memorable debate performance of the 2012 campaign, though not in a good way. But if Fox News were to go by the RealClearPolitics polling averages, as of one week before the debate Perry would be bounced out of the main event. A late entrant, Ohio Gov. John Kasich, would take his place.
Mind you, Perry is at 2.2 percent in the polls, on average, while Kasich is at 3.2 percent. In a recent Post poll, Perry actually led Kasich by 4 percent to 2 percent; in other surveys, the difference is within the margin of error. On such small or perhaps nonexistent distinctions may hang political careers.
So for the candidates on the bubble, life must be fraught. But we already know who’s going to be the star of the evening. Are you ready for your close-up, Mr. Trump?
Every recent poll of Republicans has put Donald Trump in first place. The RealClearPolitics average has him at 19.8 percent, trailed by Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker at 13.6 percent, establishment favorite Jeb Bush at 12.6 percent and everyone else in single digits.
When I look at the Trump phenomenon, I can’t help but recall something Gen. David Petraeus said to my Post colleague Rick Atkinson as they surveyed the battlefield during the early days of the Iraq invasion: “Tell me how this ends.”
A gaffe that might have ended a normal campaign — derisively questioning the war record of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who was shot down over Vietnam, held as a POW and tortured — seems only to have made Trump stronger (as, ahem, I had predicted). The lack of any relationship between his wildly slanderous allegations about Mexican immigrants and the factual record seems not to bother his fans one bit. The fact that he supports universal health care, when opposing any such thing is a Republican article of faith, seems a minor detail far outweighed by the loud and irrepressible Trumpness of his being.
Maybe Trump will somehow self-destruct in the debate. But who among his rivals is more skilled at projecting a persona on television? Trump knows how to filibuster and won’t hesitate to turn an inconvenient question back on the questioner. Even if he brings nothing to the lectern but bombast, he might emerge unscathed.
The question becomes whether the others go after him. Perry, if he makes it to the big dance, surely will. But what about the rest? Will they throw proper punches, legal under Marquess of Queensberry rules, against an opponent who kicks, bites and gouges?
And how will the non-Trump candidates seek to present themselves in the most positive light? Will Walker refute Trump’s allegation that Wisconsin is “doing terribly,” or will he just brag about his victories over organized labor? Will Bush break into Spanish? Will Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.), drowned out of late, try to crank up the volume? Will retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson again compare the Affordable Care Act to slavery?
Can Mike Huckabee come up with an even more offensive Holocaust analogy for the Iran nuclear deal? Can Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.) remind voters that, you know, he’s still in the race? Will Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) help Mr. Trump with his jacket and ask if he’d like a glass of water? Will Kasich make himself the flavor of the month? Will New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie punch somebody?
Going out on a limb here: This promises to be fun.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, July 30, 2015
“Only Losers Out-Trump Trump”: Trump’s Supporters Have An Intuition That Something Is Deeply Wrong In Their Party
The Fox News debate this week ought to be an occasion for the Republican Party’s presidential candidates to put new and innovative ideas on display. At the center of the discussion should be Friday’s report about the historically anemic wage growth during this year’s second quarter.
Here’s guessing that the previous paragraph called forth dismissive chuckles among many shrewd readers for its naivete. We all “know” that the only important thing about Thursday’s encounter — other than which 10 candidates get to participate — is how the rest of the Republican field will deal with Donald Trump, and how The Donald will deal with them.
Many would blame this on Trump and also on the nature of journalism these days.
Well, sure. Trump has a lot to answer for. His defense Sunday on ABC News’s “This Week” of his statement that the United States “would not elect another black president for generations” because President Obama had set “a very poor standard” was astonishing in its outrageousness — even by Trump’s standard.
And the media tend to analyze debates by focusing on gaffes and on whether a given candidate “did what he (or she) had to do” in political terms. This conditions how the candidates behave.
I would further concede that the mere inclusion of Trump’s name here likely increased my online page views. The media incentives these days militate against searching discussions of the Earned Income Tax Credit or methods of prompting investors to take a long-term perspective.
But before they take the stage, the Republican candidates who get to confront Trump should ask themselves why a showman who gleefully ignores all the political rules is outshining the rest of the field.
There are many reasons to criticize the far right and what it has done to the GOP, with the complicity of its so-called establishment. But it’s both remarkably elitist and an analytical mistake to write off Trump’s backers as “crazies” while ignoring the source of their frustrations. They tend to be less well-to-do Republicans who are fed up with the political system, dislike the codes and conventions that dictate the way most politicians talk and have lost confidence that politics and government can really do very much for them.
That Trump is quite brilliant at faking authenticity (except for his thoroughly genuine belief that he’s far better than his opponents whom he loves to brand as “losers”) should not be held against his supporters. It’s not hard to see why they get a kick out of the extent to which he is getting under the skin of his many critics.
If Trump’s rivals see their task as proving themselves to be as theatrically gifted as he is, he’ll clobber them. But there’s an unconventional alternative: lifting up politics by embracing the idea that voters, especially those being hammered by the economy, aren’t dunces and would like for their government and their politicians to take concrete steps to improve their situations. This is especially important in a new economy that simply doesn’t deliver to large parts of the middle class, let alone the poor.
As it is, there is a terribly stale quality to the pronouncements even of candidates such as Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio who are bidding to be the “new ideas” guys. While both at least talk about the need to restore paths to upward mobility, their underlying proposals remain rooted in the thinking of the Reagan era. Unwrap their well-packaged agendas and what you have are the same old nostrums: that government can do little about what ails us and that the path to nirvana is still paved with tax cuts and business deregulation.
But as progressive economist Joseph Stiglitz noted to me in a conversation last week, it’s precisely the rules and policies of the past 35 to 40 years that have helped lead the middle class into its current economic impasse. I don’t expect many conservatives to embrace Stiglitz’s views. But it would surely be an improvement if these candidates recognized that they are running in 2015, not 1980.
Is there no Republican engaging in a real — as opposed to superficial — questioning of the party’s old assumptions? Is there not even a glimmer of acknowledgment that if stagnating wages are the problem, further tilting the system toward employers and financiers is unlikely to solve it?
Trump’s supporters have an intuition that something is deeply wrong in their party. Their explanations for its shortcomings may differ from my own, but they are correct that the party is not delivering what they have a right to expect. Most candidates will play along with the disaffection. Those who try instead to reverse the loss of faith by responding to it constructively will deserve to win the debate.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, August 3, 2013
“It’s Not His Politics That Worries Me”: Donald Trump And The Decline Of American Character–A Cautionary Tale
There is no disputing that Donald Trump is having a significant impact on the 2016 presidential sweepstakes—something that many Americans apparently view as a great step forward on the American political scene.
Indeed, to a portion of the electorate, Trump’s current political success is a positive development that represents the rise of a candidate willing to “tell it like it is”—despite the fact that so much of what Mr. Trump tells us is the precise opposite of telling it like it is.
To other Americans, Mr. Trump’s political rise is little more than a sideshow extravaganza—good for making your favorite news broadcast more entertaining but, ultimately, devoid of substance and doomed to failure.
To me, the rise of Donald Trump is an American tragedy serving as a cautionary tale of what we are becoming as a society and the need to rediscover true American values before they are gone forever.
I don’t offer this viewpoint because of my disagreement with The Donald on his politics.
In truth, I really don’t know what Mr. Trump’s politics are—given the extraordinary disparity between his professed liberal politics of just a few years ago and his hard line approach to political issues of today. Trump 1.0 favored a path to citizenship for illegals and a universal health care system. Trump 2.0 takes a far more conservative approach towards immigration and is critical of anything and everything done by the Obama Administration.
Yet, it is not his politics that worries me. It is his character and how Americans are responding to it that I find so disturbing in terms of the very character of the nation.
If you think character doesn’t matter, I would remind you that being the American President is all about character—and character is often best judged by how successfully we take to heart the lessons passed down from parent to child over many generations.
It is certainly true that Trump has succeeded in fulfilling one of the character traits parents work to instill in their children—the drive to be successful.
While I fear that Trump is taking the lazy way out in his presidential campaign, as demonstrated by his refusal to prepare in favor of just “winging” it in his speeches and the policy pronouncements he has provided, his great success in business could not have happened without the willingness to work hard to accomplish great success. This is a trait that would cause most any American parent to glow with pride.
Certainly, it didn’t hurt that Mr. Trump was provided a running, head start by his own father, a successful real estate developer in his own right who turned his business over to his son. Still, you don’t take a successful business and turn it into a mega-empire without a lot of hard work.
But this is where behavior that would make your parents proud comes to an end.
Can you imagine what your mother would say to you were you to grow up to become an obnoxious braggart who constantly rises to remind anyone who will listen that you are very, very rich? Can you imagine what your father would say if you took it upon yourself to constantly intone on your own remarkable greatness and how anyone who disagrees with you is unworthy of respect or worse?
And can you imagine what your parents and grandparents would think of a society where this borderline psychotic self-aggrandizement is actually appreciated and cheered by the populace?
Many of us were taught that if you have nothing nice to say about someone then you should just say nothing at all.
Of course, I realize that this is a rule that doesn’t apply in the world of politics, particularly when it becomes necessary to respond to a charge or an attack from an opposing politician. Yet, even in the brutal world of politics there have long been rules of engagement when doing battle—and The Donald appears more than willing to happily break them all.
Personal attacks on character are nothing new in American politics. However, it is our tradition that when a presidential candidate has something awful to say about another presidential candidate, it is left to a surrogate to do the dirty work. This has always been the case because of the importance that somebody seeking the presidency be viewed as too principled, too decent and, yes, having far too much character to descend into the gutter.
When John Adams, in the first contested presidential battle in our nation’s history, wanted to take a serious character shot at his opponent, Thomas Jefferson, Adams did not take on the job himself as that would have been in exceedingly bad taste and represent conduct unbefitting a president. Instead, he had his surrogate, Alexander Hamilton, write an article in the Gazette of the United States accusing Jefferson of having an affair with one of his slaves. This was a very big deal at that point in history and likely played a role in Jefferson’s defeat.
When John Quincy Adams was campaigning against Andrew Jackson in the 1828 race for the White House, he did not stand up and accuse Jackson’s mother of being a prostitute and Jackson’s wife of being an adulteress. Instead he left it to the Coffin Handbills distributed by supporters of John Quincy to do the dirty work. Why? Because presidential candidates must show the character necessary to run the nation and getting directly involved with such base attacks would not do.
It remains the case in the modern era to leave it to a surrogate to do the dirty work for those who wish to be the leader of the nation—and with good reason. How a president’s character is viewed plays a serious role in that individual’s ability to succeed in the job, both at home and abroad.
When it comes to letting the nation know how amazing a candidate is and how lucky the country is that a particular candidate would bless us with his or her service to the nation, your parents would quickly remind you that it is best to allow other people to sing your praises rather than to sing your own in symphonic measures.
This is the great tragedy of Donald Trump. For all I know, Trump might have the talent to excel in the job. But there is no way that I would bet on his success given the megalomania that exudes from every pore of his body.
Does anyone remember when the key knock on Obama was that he was arrogant? Yet, many who lodged that charged are the very people who support Trump’s behavior, despite it taking arrogance to a new and previously unseen level.
The willingness of many to now accept such behavior is, in my estimation, a great tragedy in the current state of the nation. When so many would take a positive view of character deficiencies that would once not only disqualify one who seeks to lead the nation but further disqualify that individual from meriting an invitation to cocktail party, we’ve got a serious problem.
Think about it. It used to be that nobody likes a braggart and a bore—now, a significant percentage of the public wants one to be the president.
Is this really what and who we want to be?
I sincerely hope not.
By: Rick Ungar, Contributor, The Policy Page, Forbes, July 24, 2015
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