So much has and will be said about the enigma that is the 2016 Presidential Election. In years to come, and with fathomless and progressive audacity, our politics will likely begin to mimic the sort of populist grandstanding we see so prominently exuded in the campaigns of Donald Trump and, to a lesser extent, Ted Cruz and Bernie Sanders. Either that, or the backlash will make politicking all but a gentlemen’s club in which the Donald Trumps and Bernie Sanders are eradicated from political exigency altogether. At the root of the problem is a general lack of manners.
Donald Trump, who was long ago presciently called by Spy magazine a “short-fingered vulgarian,” is running a campaign limitlessly unfettered by social conventions or, as he would call it, “political correctness.” What he actually lacks is manners. Indeed, as shrouded in rhetoric as you’d like to make the point, what supporters see as the mogul’s most positive quality is really just Trump’s gross neglect of the characteristics that — collectively defined — make a person good. What Trump touts as his not succumbing to the pressure of political correctness is no more than a thinly-veiled excuse to be rude.
For example — Trump’s propensity for insulting his opposite-sex colleagues on the basis of their looks. At one of the early Republican debates Trump came under fire for having said of Carly Fiorina, “Look at that face! Would anyone vote for that? Can you imagine that, the face of our next president?” Likewise, having apparently learned no remorse, he later critiqued Hillary Clinton’s new hairdo for being too large and speculated that it must be a wig. Rather than approach these women about their policy positions, his attacks often center around looks — a commodity he narcissistically ostensibly believes he has in large proportion.
And yet when his looks (or anatomical proportions) are attacked, Trump hilariously counters. When Marco Rubio made the mistake of mentioning the small nub-like quality of Trump’s hands (with accompanying phallic innuendo), Trump defended the size of his penis at the next Republican Debate. This, however, came as little shock in a race full of similarly outrageous indiscretions.
Nor can we forget Trump’s singular ability to elide all compassion or logic in his many public denunciations. He started a campaign that would later make headlines for its unmitigated attack on members of the world’s second-largest religion. Indeed, on banning Muslims from the United States, Trump qualified his position: “Until we are able to determine and understand this problem and the dangerous threat it poses, our country cannot be the victims of horrendous attacks by people that believe only in Jihad.” While this is but one occasion — unabashedly conflating Islam with Jihad, while those who are even barely informed know this to be a patently false lack of distinction — Trump, time and again, unlatches a Pandora’s box of ugly, inane and often deeply misguiding thoughts that then are perpetuated by an either grossly uninformed or else highly impressionable electorate.
What I wonder is how this lack of basic decency is publicly appealing. John Kasich seems to be the only Republican candidate left who has any sense of the moral obligation of politicians to act at all in a way that’s not genuinely reprehensible — and his path to the nomination is all but impossible. As an article in The New Yorker so poignantly states, “This is the line that Republicans have been left with, to mark the territory between themselves and the Trump faction: not a line of ideology but of manners.”
But what place do manners have in an election that seems as enigmatic as it is bleak? It does seem as if Donald Trump has tapped into a wellspring of public discontent far deeper than anyone was likely to have imagined. I just hope we don’t get swindled along the way to think indignation is any excuse for the destructive and blatantly unhelpful rhetoric spewed by Trump and his supporters. Or have we become cynical enough as a nation to honestly believe indecency is a solution to any problem? I sure hope not.