Readers of this blog will remember that one of the best insights I ever had about politics came to me in a dream many years ago. One of the characters in the dream told me that the voters didn’t really expect candidates to solve their problems, but they had to know that their hearts were in the right place. It occurred to me a few days ago that this is the central concept of Trump’s campaign.
Trump is, above all things, a salesman. His book apparently references “truthful hyperbole” as a useful sales technique. My best guess is that the positions he has taken that make him the GOP frontrunner are a great example of that technique.
Trump isn’t stupid, so he can’t possibly believe that he can deport eleven million illegal immigrants, or that Mexico will pay for a border wall, or that the Chinese will sit idly by as he imposes a 45 percent tariff on their goods. I don’t think his supporters actually believe that, either. What matters to them is that he understands their grievances against the system, and expresses them in the most pungent way imaginable; everything else is a detail.
In other words, he feels the pain of the white working class, and he wants everyone else to feel it, too, even if he has no plausible answers to their problems.