Donald Trump, Chicago, and the Lessons of 1968

THE NEW YORKER

From the outset, Donald Trump’s slogan, “Make America Great Again,” has existed in a gray area of acceptability, carrying a whiff of fascistic appeal but also not so different from the generic “Fix America” sloganeering common to Presidential campaigns. (Jeb Bush went with this—”Jeb Can Fix It,”—which sounds more appropriate for a chain of automotive repair shops.) Nothing offered by Republicans in 2016—”Defeat the Washington Machine” (Rand Paul), “Heal, Inspire, Revive” (Ben Carson), “Taking on the Tough Issues,” (Chris Christie), “A New American Century” (Marco Rubio)—has achieved the brand recognition that Trump’s slogan has. But it’s also clear that this is only Trump’s public slogan. The implicit one, increasingly difficult to avoid as the campaign winds closer to the nomination, is a masterstroke of racial populism: White Lives Matter.

On Friday night, the country was treated to a visage of history, as thousands of demonstrators, a multiracial Coalition of the Offended, streamed out of the University of Illinois at Chicago Pavilion, where the Trump campaign had abruptly cancelled a rally, “for the safety of all the tens of thousands of people that had gathered in and around the arena,” the campaign said in a statement. On CNN, John King opined that many of the demonstrators had come “just to cause trouble,” and Neil Bush, brother to George W. and Jeb, pointed out the similarities between the images coming out of Chicago that evening and those of the chaotic 1968 Democratic Convention. This was a miscasting of history, and yet another demonstration of why the Republican establishment has been so inept in its attempts to contain the Trump phenomenon. It wasn’t the demonstrators who recalled the insurgent fury of Chicago in 1968, it was the masses of Trump supporters, fists clenched in a fervor to reroute the country’s trajectory, to seize it from those who’ve taken us down the path of national shame—to make America great again, even if they have to break a few eggs.

 The Chicago Democratic Convention protests were directed at a political establishment that was responsible for Vietnam, and more broadly for a sense that skewed national priorities had victimized ordinary citizens. Trump’s supporters are not animated by any literal war, but they are fully invested in a rhetorical one, and all the indignation, victimhood, and chaos-brokering of 1968 finds its reactionary equivalent in the current Republican front-runner. Early dismissals of Trump’s (including mine) were rooted in a presumption that the public would see through the billionaire’s cartoonish braggadocio and ostentatious displays of wealth. Yet the image of Trump holding court, his arms outstretched to emphasize some grievance, the yellow pompadour of fury bobbing with metronomic regularity, has been the most indelible feature of the 2016 elections.

Polls conducted during the Obama era have consistently shown that large pluralities of whites believe that they, not blacks, Latinos, or Asian-Americans, are the primary victims of racism in contemporary America. Donald Trump built his reputation as a real-estate developer, but he is primarily a salesman, and it did not take a great deal of market research to know that there was a pool of eager consumers for the product he’s been offering the public for the past eight months. His is not the conservatism of Ronald Reagan or Barry Goldwater, it’s the conservatism of another Queens-born mouthpiece of white grievance, Archie Bunker. Trump is, in a very real sense, presiding over a White Lives Matter movement.

The other irony implicit in comparing Chicago last night to the bedlam in 1968 is that the latter gave birth to the law-and-order Republicanism that, long before Trump, Richard Nixon used to such great political advantage. Republicans brayed that Democrats, who were happy to align themselves with the forces of social change in 1960 and 1964, had by 1968 been subsumed by them. The low-tax, anti-government rhetoric that defines modern Republicanism has its roots in the simmering white resentments that emerged in the late nineteen-sixties, animated by the belief that the federal government had become a tool for redistribution of white wealth into the hands of undeserving black and brown communities. Donald Trump represents the full expression of that belief. It was the truculent cluelessness of white grievance that led Trump’s campaign to plan a rally in a city reeling from the police killing of a seventeen-year-old black boy and a year-long coverup of the crime, a city where nearly half of young black men are out of work.

The image of protesters clashing with Trump supporters in Chicago last night is the logical culmination of what we’ve seen throughout his Presidential campaign. Earlier this week, a Trump supporter punched a black protester in the face. (Police for some reason then scrambled to seize and handcuff the protester, not the punch-thrower, though the punch-thrower was later charged with assault.) Last night, the idea of fighting to take the country back went from figurative to literal, as protesters and Trump supporters clashed inside and outside the arena. The scene was ominous but, luckily for Trump, not necessarily bad for his campaign. In the alternate universe of Trumpism, he looks like the victim of disgruntled blacks and Latinos—a development that makes him even more relatable to his base.

 On CNN last night, Stuart Stevens, a former Romney strategist, said of Trump’s campaign, “There aren’t enough white people who are mad at people who aren’t white to win in a general election.” One hopes that Stevens is right. The Trumpites are motivated by that same idea as sixties activism: if you aren’t enraged, then you haven’t been paying attention.